Age columnist Shaun Carney attracted a bit of ridicule recently in some quarters when he wrote a column making the rather tenuous and certainly debatable claim that the Rudd government faced a delicate balancing act between inner city and suburban voters on climate change.

The article itself was entitled “Leftists who sneer at suburbs betray Labor”.

Carney mentioned that he’d been spending time recently in Carrum Downs “for family reasons”. Writing as if he were an anthropologist in unfamilar territory, he informed his readers:

You cannot get to the suburb by train. There are connecting buses from Frankston that snake their way through the suburbs in between, making it a very long journey. It would be very difficult to get around if you lived in Carrum Downs and did not have a car.

Now, the funny thing about this whole “latte left v. suburban real Australians” thing is that I’ve never met any “leftists who sneer at suburbs” and I’ve met a lot of lefties in my life. Having read a really silly column – whose author I’ve fortunately forgotten – in the SMH earlier this year where the writer really did manage to convey the idea that no Fairfax reader had ever stepped foot west of some imaginary line running through, say, Marrickville, I am willing to believe that there are some very urbane snobs around the shop. But I’m not sure they’re actually lefties in any meaningful sense. Small l liberal toffs who vote Labor, perhaps. It might also be the case that I have a different view on all this because I grew up in the northern suburbs of Brisbane, and though I now live in the “inner city”, there really hasn’t been any such thing in this town in the same sense as in Sydney or Melbourne.

That’s got a lot to do with the city’s history, topology and climate and social forms that have grown out of them. The climate certainly didn’t encourage terraced housing, and the hills hugging the snake like turns of the Brisbane River led to a very heterogenous patterning of the built environment – with workers cottages in the valleys very close to grander homes on the cooler hill tops. Even post gentrification, you can still see distinct differences in the humility and grandeur of old houses on the same street as it rises and falls. All this led to both a much less closely settled and therefore more verdant urban landscape, and a much more fluid social pattern – where the rich and the poor lived – over a lot though not all of the city – in the same suburbs. The fact that the city’s economic history meant that heavy industry never established itself, and Brisbane remained an administrative and distributional hub rather than a manufacturing town also meant a far less fixed class structure. In a way, we were pioneers of the postmodern service industry centred civic economy.

So, even though housing prices are through the roof here in New Farm, it’s still a heterogenous sort of place, and although I can walk to town in 20 minutes, and there’s stacks of galleries, bistros and all that sort of pizazz, it’s a suburb. It’s just urban enough really – in terms of people on the streets and a critical mass for bars and shops and restaurants, that it’s effectively the best of both worlds. And I find that really attractive, particularly living on a big block surrounded by georgeous fig trees and this city’s fairly unique urban fauna.

Nor, when I was in High School at Kedron in the 80s, in a much newer suburb (combining older areas with the start of 50s sprawl and outside the 5km radius), did I ever notice an absence of community and all the other supposed alienating features of suburban life. Quite the contrary.

Of course, Brisbane is changing, and quite rapidly at that. Intensive apartment development in some areas is creating something resembling an “inner city” outside the CBD. And the culture is shifting, though that’s a topic for another post, perhaps. But, anyway, while I was searching earlier tonight for something only tangentially related to this theme, I came across this post from Linda Carroli, a progressive urban planning consultant. I actually knew Linda a little in the late 80s, when she had a continuing association with 4zzz-fm and I knew her sister through student politics.

Anyway, I thought this piece on her blog was a fantastic reflection on some of what remains distinctive and beautiful about Brisbane, but also a timely and impassioned call for us to rethink the dumbness of automatic antagonism and judgement between inner city and suburban cultures (if indeed there are such things). The whole post is really worth reading, but I thought I’d excerpt this snippet:

In any western city most of us live in the suburbs and it’s the suburbs that decide governments. We, as a city, might like to learn to deal with our suburbs more constructively rather than over-investing in every square centimetre of the central business district.

The consolidation-sprawl binary is tired and worn out. The discourse simply produces more of the same. Inner city living is not a virtue just because government has invested in infrastructure there or opportunistic developers build highrise residential towers hugging the riverbanks. There’s a pressing need to think about the city’s structure and shape more complexly than a binarism affords, and there’s more important things to say and do than slag off suburbs and the people who live in them. A binarism closes thought.

There’s more to a city than the five or so kilometres surrounding the CDB. A city is its people and the suburbs are the city, not just the central towers of elite business and residences that dominate the street life below. In the suburbs, there is a hum of life – different kinds of life – sounded in a different key.

What she has to say is also interesting from the point of view of the whole Creative Cities agenda. We, for instance, have a “Creative Brisbane” policy, and as I’ve pointed out before, there has been a genuine attempt to take festival culture outside its normal redoubts of SouthBank and the Valley. But I wonder how much in reality the cultural policy of a city takes in the ‘burbs. As Carroli suggests, something is happening to the city’s north. Some of my colleagues at QUT have an ARC project on Creative Suburbia. I’ll be watching its outcomes with interest.

Carroli concludes:

I tend to think it’s how we live that matters so much more than where we live. If we really seek an imaginary that serves the city, that values its people and that provides a hook for its identity, we might want to think more critically about what and who we omit from the picture and story of our city and its citizenry.