Reshaping Australia: Urban problems and policies
By Frank Stilwell. Pluto Press. $24.95 (pb)
Reviewed by Paul Walker
Science fiction has long theorised the never-ending city. Clifford Simak's The City and the Stars and the Ridley Scott cult movie Blade Runner are typical of the genre. The city goes upwards and outwards forever; no-one knows where it ends.
Typically, the never-ending city is a picture of infrastructural decay, environmental catastrophe, gross inequality and violence. It is a picture of what could happen; Los Angeles is well on the way.
Frank Stilwell's new book shows that this is not just a US problem. For, outside of city-states like Singapore and Hong Kong, Australia is the most urbanised country in the world.
Foreigners don't generally picture Australia that way, but the decline of extractive industries and agriculture in the national economy has shifted the population to the major metropolises.
Australia's urban sprawl, because of space availability, is low density: suburbia is the norm. Stilwell analyses the problems of the city from a class viewpoint. His is one of a growing body of work which makes geography a political question. As he puts it, "Cities and regions are landscapes of capital, class and state".
Central to Stilwell's argument is the idea that financial deregulation and the restructuring of capital in the 1980s have made urban problems worse. As manufacturing industry has declined, service industries have mushroomed. Only Melbourne has more than 15% of workers employed in manufacturing; its 81% of workers employed in services is the lowest figure for any major urban centre.
The growth of services has greatly increased the percentage of low wage, low-skill and part-time working. Unemployment has passed 10%. Inequality and class divisions have deepened. This all affects the geography — the spatial segmentation — of the city, with rich and poor areas more sharply defined, and with all the problems of poverty and unemployment concentrated in the poorer areas. The deepening division in income and lifestyles between Sydney's rich North Shore population and working-class "westies" is a case in point.
To these problems are added those which simply come with endless growth of the city — problems of housing, transport and environmental damage. In Australia a higher proportion of daily travellers are the sole occupant of a car than in any other advanced capitalist country. Public transport use in some major Australian cities is only one-fifth that of western Europe. The car culture is all-pervading, with the consequent pollution problems.
Despite the low density of urbanisation and the low percentage of the work force in manufacturing industries, Australia has a higher rate of atmospheric pollution than most other industrial countries.
In tracing deepening class divisions in the city, Stilwell notes that these are progressively overlaid with divisions on the basis of gender, age and ethnic origin, the last two being key factors in the geographical incidence of unemployment.
The crisis of the city reflects the stage of capitalist development, the period of economic restructuring and deregulation. What is happening to jobs, transport and housing is the consequence of leaving things to the "free market". The free market never creates growing equality, adequate public services and employment and housing for all.
The inadequacy of the market in dealing with urban problems is most clearly shown on the very issue of urban growth. Is it rational that the bulk of Australia's population should be clustered around half a dozen urban centres? If not, then a more widely spread population implies dramatically better public transport, state planning of industrial development and society-wide action to defend the environment.
It is on the question of solutions that Stilwell's argument is weakest. He simply counterposes the free market to "radical interventionism" to soften the blow.
But the structure of the city is implied in the structure of capital. It will take more than radical interventionism to generate the society-wide planning of housing, transport, industrial location and employment needed to reshape Australia.