On the 20th June 2008, Andrew MacKenzie led a discussion at the Forum on ‘Re-imagining suburbia’. Andrew took us through his ongoing PhD research on discovering what a wide variety of people thought about changes to suburbia resulting from re-development. Andrew’s end aim is to see if he can draw out (and support) a more nuanced view from residents and stakeholders about how the suburban landscape can be holistically conceptualised, looking at culture, time and memory, space, power and perceptions of place attachment.

Using the Canberra suburb of Duffy as a major case study, Andrew invited us into the complex spaces that exist between the ideal of what a suburb ‘should be’ and the often difficult reality of what a suburb actually ‘is’ (and, as pointed out from the forum floor, that there is often far more to suburbs than meets the eye). This is exemplified by Duffy, which suffered so horribly in the 2003 Canberra fires (200+ houses/structures destroyed and three lives lost) and which has been subject to considerable re-development. Andrew pointed out that in Duffy, a fairly typical Australian suburb, around 1/3 of destroyed but now rebuilt houses had a significantly bigger floor area (from 264m2 up to 309m2) and nearly half of all rebuilt houses saw a transfer of title (new owners). Andrew posed questions about why this was occurring, how people have engaged with re-building, what residents make of the changes and how this all impacts on their understanding of the suburban landscape and how planning authorities and other stakeholders have dealt with the situation. He then went onto discuss what such a scale of rebuilding can then reveal about previous, older conceptions of the suburban ideal, planning practices and the existing built environment against often pressured and substantially different ideals of suburbia, planning and practical actions that inform the immediate re-building process (exemplified in Canberra by ‘densification’ – the amount of built space is increasing but the number of people for the total built space is falling).

Andrews’ contextualisation of the changing nature of suburbia, its historical and theoretical flows and his efforts to piece together a study that does justice to the significant and diverse thinking on the subject next to the need to allow residents/stakeholders a capacity to speak their lives out in an open and participatory manner meant that our two hour discussion time disappeared very quickly indeed. Hopefully we can get Andrew back at some later stage to hear what this most interesting PhD has developed into!