Early Gentrification and the Public Realm: A Case Study of West End in Brisbane,Australia

Introduction

The inner city in Australia, like its counterparts in many other Western cities, has undergone several quiet revolutions in the past half-century. From the site of original settler working-class settlement, to first abode of European and Asian migrants, to the seedy and crumbling haunts of students, bohemians and the political fringe, many inner-city neighbourhoods have developed hybrid personalities in the past three decades. Like elsewhere in the world, it is the fate of these inner-city neighbourhoods, through the processes of gentrification, urban consolidation and other market and cultural pressures, for earlier working-class and less affluent inner-city populations to be displaced, eradicating much of this hybrid character. The outcome of these processes means that there remain fewer vestiges of the earlier cultural and ethnic diversity and ‘authenticity’ that make these areas appealing to early-stage gentrifiers at the outset of the inner-city transformation (Bounds and Morris, 2006; Brown-Saracino, 2009; Zukin, 2010).

In this paper, we examine the case of West End in Brisbane, Australia—an inner-city neighbourhood in the early stages of gentrification. West End will experience a trebling of its population in the next two decades as a result of local and state policies of brownfield urban infill and consolidation (Brisbane City Council, 2011; Searle, 2010). As one of the outcomes of the familiar process of displacement that accompanies rapid gentrification, our argument centres on the effects that this level of population increase is likely to have on the strong and vibrant public realm that now exists in West End. This public realm is not the preserved artefact of a pre-gentrification incarnation, but a hybrid of the past and present. The purpose of the paper is to highlight the circumstances that have led to this strong public realm and whether it might be worth preserving. We will argue that, although there are differing voices, the current level of tolerance and the strength of the public realm in West End are actually a product of early gentrification, and a corresponding search for authenticity (Brown-Saracino, 2009), rather than a fundamental threat to it. However, it is what Bounds and Morris (2006) refer to as ‘second-stage’ gentrification, which is top–down, led by capital and the state planning policies, which threatens this public realm through the commodification of the ‘West End experience’, the lack of provision for an expansion of public space and the gradual displacement of alternative and marginal groups who currently use public space in West End.

Using resident accounts, planning documents and the theoretical framework of the public realm, this paper argues that early gentrification creates a fragile balance expressed as a strong public realm, unlikely to withstand the effects of mass second-stage development unless more sensitive planning regimes are adopted.

The Public and Parochial Realms

The public realm has several related meanings in the social and political sciences. In political terms, it implies government that “belongs to the governed” (Oakeshott and O’Sullivan, 2008, p. 93); or at its most fundamental, the existence of a public realm implies the availability of space for free expression. The public realm is a place where one moves beyond family, friends and acquaintances, if one so chooses, to where public identities and norms of behaviour are formed, and where justice is cultivated as a manifestation of these public norms (Arendt, 1958; Lofland, 1998).

In this paper, the public realm is a social territory tied more firmly to place; one that belongs, however imperfectly, to all who use it. However, the public realm describes a slightly different concept than standard understandings of public space in urban sociology and geography. The idea of public space describes a geography that should be open to all which is problematised for the boundaries which are imposed upon those who should have access to it, highlighting issues such as class, gender and racial barriers (for example, Davis, 1992; Mitchell, 1996; Ruddick, 1996). The public realm as it will be addressed in this paper approaches the idea from a contrasting perspective. It aims to describe spaces that approach a particular ideal of inclusiveness and then interrogates the circumstances that allow this happen, and the threats to this ideal (Lofland, 1998). For the public realm to be truly public, there must be very few barriers to participation, including the more obvious barriers of class, race and gender, and symbolic barriers to entry such as a particular level of affluence, cultural or lifestyle homogeneity, or a particular implied habitus. Although the public realm is more often an ideal than an empirical reality, examples of areas that might approach this ideal of a public realm in the modern city could include city parks, mixed-use open retail precincts, public transport, cinemas and theatres—provided that entry is open to all both physically and symbolically. The public realm is a creature of industrial modernity, of the modern city, a place where we engage with Simmel’s (1964) cultural stranger and where our norms of behaviour towards the stranger are formed. Thus, the public realm is where civic norms that allow people the freedom to co-exist in cities can be formed and practised.

Lofland contrasts the public realm with the private and parochial realms. The private realm is that realm, such as the household, where kin and the closest of social relationships, our private selves, are nurtured and maintained. In her conceptualisation of the public realm, Lofland (1998) does not create a binary distinction between the public and the private realms. Of relevance to this paper is the parochial realm which exists between the private and the public realms, characterised by a “sense of commonality among acquaintances and neighbours who are involved in interpersonal networks that are located within “communities’’ (Lofland, 1998, p. 10).

This parochial realm conforms to the ideal of communitarian community where the self is a priori a member of a community and identity is bestowed by membership. The normative ideal that people should belong to a community has gained political traction in Australia and the developed West in the past two decades and is implicit in terms such as ‘social capital’, ‘community resilience’, ‘community capacity building’ and ‘cohesive communities’ (Adams and Hess, 2001). Communitarianism as a political ideology emphasises social responsibility and the promotion of policies to strengthen local communities and to slow the erosion of community-based social institutions (Etzioni, 1995). It is the discourse favoured by many policy-makers and other opinion-shapers when they refer to the (often mythical) urban ‘local community’ using imagery and romantic visions of a pre-modern co-existence of shared outlook and purpose.

However, as Bauman (1997) observes, communitarianism is also an invention of modernity, under circumstances where choice rather than fate is the basis for community. Its proponents use pre-modern tropes, such as the ‘village’ in its utopian form (Walters and Rosenblatt, 2008) which attempt to encourage citizens to reconstruct their identities in the midst of “the collapse of frames in which identities were habitually inscribed” (Bauman, 1997, p. 191). Rather than being inclusive, this romantic and often mythical form of community, manifest in the parochial realm, is restrictive in that it foregrounds sameness and the comfort of the socially known and the socially knowable. It is the conservative community of Robert Putnam and the dense webs of social capital that this implies. Yet as Putnam himself has acknowledged (Putnam, 2000; Wills, 2000), it can only exist in terms of an ‘other’; it is not the easy companion of diversity. So in many senses, the public realm and the space it provides for co-existence of the ‘other’ is the antithesis of the communitarianism which has become increasingly prevalent in an ideological and political sense in the developed West.

In this context, preserving public places which function as something approaching a public realm, is increasingly important. Although Lofland’s public realm may come across as less than intimate, with everyday familiar interactions served by the private and parochial realms, the public realm performs a very important function. It is a place where people not only do not need to know each other in the biographical sense, but also not in the cultural sense (Lofland, 1998, p. 8). In the cosmopolitan vision of Iris Marion Young, the “urban relationship” is the natural form of the city, providing a “welcome anonymity and some measure of freedom” (Young, 1990, p. 317). Supporters of Young’s cosmopolitanism would argue that the communitarian model is potentially less accommodating of the ‘other’ than a metropolis with strong generalised norms facilitating the “being together of strangers” (Young, 1990, p. 318), respecting difference and accommodating it. The exclusive community implied by communitarians creates group identities “blotted by racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, suspicion, and mockery” (Young, 1990, p. 319). Young’s normative call for a ‘politics of difference’ speaks of a type of community and public realm that transcends social boundaries, leading to a more civil general society (Young, 1990).

Context: West End

The inner-city ¹ neighbourhood of West End is part of Brisbane, Australia’s third-largest city. Brisbane has a population of just over 1 million and is located within the South East Queensland conurbation, with a population of approximately 2.5 million people (ABS, 2011). West End, along with South Brisbane, is located on the southern edge of Brisbane’s central business district, enclosed on three sides by the Brisbane River, forming a rough peninsula (see Figures 1 and 2).

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Figure 1.

The Greater Brisbane planning area.

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Figure 2.

West End, Brisbane.

The original indigenous inhabitants called the area Kurilpa. The early settlement of West End in the mid to late 1800s was by labourers and dockworkers. These were joined by other migrants, including a large number of Greeks beginning in the early part of the 20th Century, followed by significant numbers of Vietnamese migrants in the 1970s. Until gentrification commenced in West End in the early 1990s, the neighbourhood remained largely working class with one of the lowest socioeconomic rankings in Brisbane (ABS, 1984, 1989, 1993).

Like similar inner neighbourhoods in other Australian cities, West End has changed rapidly over the past 25 years. If there was a watershed in the fortunes of West End, it was the 1988 World Expo, hosted in Brisbane, which transformed the adjacent South Brisbane area from dilapidated wharves, adult cinemas and boarding houses to a cultural, culinary and increasingly expensive residential precinct. South Brisbane’s newfound respectability also began to transform neighbouring West End. Property prices steadily rose over the next two decades, taking it from one of Brisbane’s cheapest neighbourhoods to one of the city’s more expensive (Knowlton, 2012).

Although prices have increased, West End’s housing stock consists predominantly of small timber workers’ cottages on small blocks. There remain a significant (but decreasing) number of low-rent boarding houses and a visible presence of homeless White and indigenous people, who use the parks and riverside areas and congregate around the central retail precinct. There is also a high proportion of students taking advantage of the proximity to university campuses and the cultural attractions of the area, as well as artists, musicians and other performers who either live in West End or make use of its spaces (Gall, 2009). The proportion of rental dwellings in West End is the highest in Brisbane at 59 per cent, almost twice that of greater Brisbane (ABS, 2012).

There is ample evidence of early gentrification in West End. Bounds and Morris (2006) refer to this stage as a ‘bottom–up’ process where people look to revitalise existing period housing stock, retaining its perceived authenticity by remaining sensitive to time and place (Brown-Saracino, 2007, 2009). Architecturally sympathetic home renovations have become commonplace in West End in the past decade. In the main retail precinct, Boundary Street, there are still original small businesses such as key cutters, greengrocers and an unrenovated pub; however, these businesses now sit alongside independent coffee shops and book stores, a fixed-wheel bike shop, a boutique beer outlet and a growing number of vintage clothing outlets.

To date, this process of early gentrification has added to West End’s hybrid character. Each historical influx of residents has retained a particular stake in the neighbourhood, from the original indigenous occupants, a few representatives of the early Anglo-Celtic working-class settlers; a significant but ageing remaining population of Greek and Vietnamese migrants; the homeless, artists, students and more recent affluent gentrifiers. While West End still has the highest proportion of Greek Orthodox adherents in Brisbane, it also has the highest proportion of those who subscribe to no religion (ABS, 2012). West End has the highest proportion of households in Brisbane where English is a second language, as well as one of the highest proportions of people educated to postgraduate level (ABS, 2012).

In this current early stage of gentrification, we will argue that West End is in a precarious position as one of the last ethnically and culturally diverse inner-city neighbourhoods in Brisbane, and perhaps Australia. However, the future for West End foretells a different story and involves rapid and unprecedented change, imposed by the state and the market, described next.

Method

This paper explores and questions the threat to diversity and the resultant threat to the public realm in inner-city neighbourhoods as part of urban consolidation and top–down gentrification. West End was selected for the study because it is one of the few diverse inner-city areas left in Australia that is nearer to the beginning of the gentrification process than the end. We interviewed 50 residents and representatives of community groups in West End in the second half of 2010 and early in 2011 as part of a study on ‘Threats to Liveability from Urban Consolidation’. The research was an internally funded [university] project and was designed to capture subjective constructions of urban consolidation from existing residents in different affected areas in Brisbane. However, this paper concentrates only on West End.

The residents we interviewed in West End were part of a sample based on a letterbox drop and further referral sampling, asking for volunteers to talk about the impact of higher-density development in West End, including high-rise developments, as set out in the South Brisbane Neighbourhood Plan. The nature of this original question attracted a sample which was both conversant with the Neighbourhood Plan and had sufficient confidence to articulate their views to a university researcher. We achieved a diverse sample from this recruitment strategy, including students, professionals, retirees, recent arrivals and lifetime residents, although the sample was biased in favour of those with a higher education and those in managerial or professional occupations. We augmented this sample by using referral techniques to access some other harder-to-reach community members, particularly older people in the neighbourhood. ² Participants were asked a range of questions about their biographies, residential histories, how they used space in West End and their engagement with West End as part of their everyday lives. They were then provided with an aide memoire about the Neighbourhood Plan, depending on their level of prior knowledge, and asked about their views on the plan and the various impacts that it might have on them and their subjective social environment in West End.

We interviewed participants in their homes or in cafes around West End. Interviews were digitally recorded and professionally transcribed. Transcripts were analysed using an inductive categorical approach, with coding themes based on articulation of threats from rapid urban densification to amenity, lifestyle, aesthetics and community in its broadest sense. The following results are organised according to the themes of: subjective understandings and value placed on diversity in West End; competition over authenticity between residents and the forces of gentrification; and, finally, a discussion of some alternative visions to inevitable change in West End.

Diversity in West End

In West End, there is evidence that the public realm is, for the moment, alive and well. Spatially, the main commercial precincts, Boundary Street and Hardgrave Road, retain the look and feel of urban main streets from the past with strips of largely independent retailers, bars, cafes and restaurants. Notably absent, with a few exceptions, are franchised retail outlets, parking stations and the strict climate-controlled barriers between interior and exterior characteristic of so many other newer retail and recreation precincts in Australian cities. Wide footpaths (sidewalks) provide space for a range of actors, including the homeless, alcoholics and the mentally ill. Although behaviour can sometimes be confronting, it is largely tolerated. It is difficult to categorise the passing procession of young and old, migrant and indigenous, student and professional into any one parochial demographic or cultural category. The area changes character by day and by night and by weekday and weekend, when people from beyond West End congregate in its coffee shops, books stores and bars. There are few barriers to entry for reasonably law abiding citizens. It is an example of a space, largely confined to the inner city, that was more widespread in Australian cities before shopping malls and more regulated, homogeneous and corporate-owned urban precincts became the norm (Kapferer, 2006).

The public realm in West End leaves space for diversity and idiosyncrasy, and there was a consistent theme in our interviews around the value placed on this by residents. This participant, a long-time resident who worked in the performing arts, noted the growing difference between West End and other inner-city neighbourhoods, most of which were at a much more advanced stage of gentrification

West End has a significant population of homeless (Parsell, 2011). The value placed on the existence of the homeless was a common response from participants. While some took an active role in caring for the homeless through voluntary work with various charities and NGOs, there was also a degree of more ‘arm’s length’ cultural capital that people appeared to derive from living in a neighbourhood where homelessness, alcoholism and other forms of marginality were not hidden from view as they might be in more homogeneous and affluent places. Although there has been some displacement of the homeless and marginalised through the redevelopment of boarding houses, this has not yet been accompanied by the ‘entrapment’ that can come with the relocation of essential services for the marginalised during later stages of gentrification (DeVerteuil, 2011). West End still retains a range of services providing support and advocacy for the homeless and other low-income groups (for example, QCOSS, 2012; Micah Projects, 2012; West End Community House, 2011).

This resident reflected the view that the production of space in more contemporary urban settings might contribute to a certain cultural homogeneity

This allusion to what Lofland (1998) described as the ‘parochialisation’ of other neighbourhoods, where gentrification and capital have produced spaces that provide a sense a commonality, is at odds with the needs of those who require a backdrop of diversity in which to find expression for their own particular form of cultural or sexual expression. For example, West End has a high concentration of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) residents, particularly women (Thomson, 2007). Echoing Young’s (1990) ‘politics of difference’, this participant valued the possibility of choice and a norm of difference

In addition to its commercial precincts, West End also includes a long string of public green space along the Brisbane River, largely undeveloped except for some children’s playgrounds, council barbeque areas and a large produce market held on Saturday mornings. This strip of public land provides democratic access to the river, one of the few long stretches of riverfront in Brisbane that is not developed with private residential property

The range of actors who regularly occupy the public realm in West End was a singular defining feature of West End for research participants. The South Brisbane Riverside Neighbourhood Plan and the magnitude of the associated population increase were considered a looming threat to this diversity. The neighbourhood plan can be seen as the commencement of ‘top–down’ or ‘second-wave’ gentrification (Bounds and Morris, 2006) in West End, where the state has provided the planning framework for corporate-led large development in the neighbourhood. In the next section, residents use this threat to depict themselves as custodians of a fast disappearing public realm not just for West Enders, but also for Brisbane.

Custodians of the Last of the ‘Authentic’ Public Realms

Authenticity is a contested term, and perhaps no more so than in studies of gentrification and inner urban development (Zukin, 2009). In the case of West End, authenticity is subject to a ‘tug of war’ between activist residents, embodied in local activist organisations like the West End Community Association ⁴ and property developers who have appropriated this authenticity for their own marketing purposes with campaigns such as this one, by the private developer of a large luxury riverfront apartment complex in West End

Developers offer their affluent prospective residents the dual benefit of a secure private realm behind locked gates, but with the opportunity to

That research participants had strong views about the rapid increase in residential density was implicit in their agreement to be interviewed for our research project. There were certainly more individualised responses to the increase in population, expressed as threats to amenity; however, more socially focused responses were in relation to the retention and protection of the ‘authentic’ expressed as the public realm in West End. For many of the participants, the main concern was the threat to the character of West End expressed as its tolerance of difference or, in other words, its access to a vibrant and accessible public realm. This participant, a woman with small children, articulated the process by which West End might be rationalised according to the more parochial needs of affluent newcomers as they began to arrive in greater numbers

Brown-Saracino describes the social preservation of authenticity as

This element of preserving West End’s sedimentary layers of culture was certainly evident. West End was seen as the ‘last of its kind’ in Brisbane and there was a strong desire for it to remain a place that continued to display the various manifestations of its history. This participant spoke of a set of unique values that were worthy of preservation

This elderly woman, who had lived in West End since the 1950s, could also see that once the neighbourhood was ‘lost’ to development, a unique heritage, of value to those lived beyond West End, would go with it

A recurring comparison made by participants was with the nearby inner-city riverside neighbourhood of Kangaroo Point, where indulgent planning approvals since the 1980s had resulted in a transformation of the area from its working-class origins, similar to West End, to a succession of riverfront luxury high-rise apartment developments, robbing the area of much of its street life and diversity. This was seen as the possible fate of West End, expressed as a loss in wider terms than just for those living in the area

This reflexive awareness from participants about what was at stake extended to an awareness of the counter-factual; many of our participants articulated an alternate vision for the future of West End, including environmentally sustainable building design, human-scale development and a strong public realm consisting of green space, food production and provision for cultural spaces.

Different Perspectives

It should be stressed that not all of our participants shared the views we have outlined so far. While these selected accounts have highlighted the value of a strong public realm, there were also viewpoints that did not share this emphasis. We interviewed a number of older residents of West End, both Anglo and Greek people who had been living in the area for 50 years or more. While some of them lamented the threat to the public realm that a massive increase in population might bring, others—particularly older Greek residents—did not express these views. For these residents, their view of West End was centred on family ties, history and geographical convenience. In the cultural and historical context of their lives, and in West End, for many Greeks, their experience of West End was one of close communitarian community and their perspectives were quite parochial, consisting of strong and supportive networks of relatives and old friends. For these people the more ‘bohemian’ nature of West End and the public realm that this supported were of little consequence, although not resented. This woman, who had lived in West End since 1960 recalled a life deeply embedded in her extended Greek family, the Greek community, its church and social organisations. She, like other older Greeks, saw the changes in West End more as a spectator than as a participant

For older people, Boundary St was less the site of a public realm and more of a place where it was now impossible to park a car. Older residents tended to see places like Boundary St with little sentimentality. This man, who had lived in West End since 1962, reflected this view by commenting on the evolving retail mix in West End

There was also a very strong sense of inevitability about development, a less reflexive view of the abstract concepts such as community, authenticity and the public realm. However, even with this more communitarian and parochial perspective, there was still an acceptance that diversity in the public realm is what has made West End unique.

Many Greek families also retain a strong commercial interest in West End, with numerous Greek retail businesses and many other commercial properties still in Greek hands. This commercial interest creates a counter-discourse from that of the preservationists

Although many Greek and Vietnamese migrants moved away from West End as they became wealthier, they retain two fundamental influences on the story of gentrification in West End. The first is the cultural capital that their presence has brought to the neighbourhood in terms of ethnic diversity and cuisine. The second is more instrumental. As significant commercial and residential property owners in West End, in many respects their commercial decisions in the next decade will have important consequences for the spatial character of the neighbourhood. As we have already described, their preferences are not guaranteed to align with those who wish to preserve the character of West End.

Conclusion

West End’s existing population of 6500 people supports a remarkable diversity of cultures, ethnicities, occupations, lifestyles and sexual orientations. This diversity and tolerance of difference was seen by most of our research participants as the defining characteristic of the neighbourhood. The value placed on this diversity by research participants was not necessarily a by-product of the original or ‘authentic’ West End but rather a product of early gentrification and the type of people who are attracted to places like West End in this first wave of gentrification. The cross-section of humanity that comprises this diversity is a product of the past and the present, although as we saw in the previous section, those who represented the ‘past’ of West End were more ambivalent about this.

The gentrification story is now a familiar one, as is the desire by early gentrifiers to preserve the social and architectural authenticity that first attracted them to the area (Brown-Saracino, 2009). West End perhaps has a particular claim on the imagination as it is the last of its type in a large city and one of the last in the country to retain a significant remnant of its pre-gentrification character. The particular nature of space in West End has much to do with the retention of its character. Its main streets with their variety of independently owned shops, cafes and eating establishments, the tolerance of the homeless, the substance-dependent and the vagrant provide an increasingly stark contrast with the homogenised and regulated spaces in the rest of the city (Dovey, 2008). West End is yet to see the confrontational character of old vs new that has been experienced in other neighbourhoods and cities (for example, Slater, 2004). Confrontation tends to be directed more at institutional actors represented by property developers and government planning authorities. Although early gentrification in West End has brought change and created inevitable displacement as property prices increase, it has changed the social landscape and public space so that value is placed on this diversity. Public space remains as accessible to difference for those who live in the neighbourhood as well as for those from farther afield who use West End’s spaces.

The particular threat posed by top–down state-sanctioned and developer-led gentrification and the sheer weight of numbers that will soon occupy the expensive high-rise developments along the Brisbane River can only lead to what Lofland (1998) termed parochialisation, transforming West End into a replica of neighbourhoods that already exist elsewhere in the city. Given there are no plans to cater for this increase with new social, cultural and educational infrastructure, the logical outcome of this parochialisation is an effective filtering of residents between those able or willing to conform to a new spatial and social order and those who no longer fit. The subsequent loss of diversity and difference leads to further intolerance for any diversity that remains, weakening the neighbourhood’s strong public realm. What this means for Brisbane is that the city will have erased from its collective consciousness both the form and function of a well-established and valued example of a public realm, where people learn and practise the norms required to deal with the stranger. The fact that so many participants saw the erosion of this public realm as not just an issue for West End, but one for the city as a whole bears testament to this. It is only through the efforts of grassroots activist organisations such as the West End Community Association (WECA, 2011), ⁷ that the rest of the city might be reminded of what it stands to lose and bring some pressure to bear on local authorities.

West End is a contemporary example of what is possible as a counter-discourse to the utopian communitarianism that pervades much contemporary policy and popular discourse. There is no doubt that many communities co-exist in West End among its various ethnic groups, sub-cultures, and socioeconomic strata, however, they are allowed to co-exist in an urban environment without the need to pay tribute to any single ideal of a commons. Such a public realm provides a welcoming and much needed space for diversity, not only for local residents but also for others beyond West End who use its spaces. It also provides a credible and achievable model upon which urban planning can take place. There is a need to not only retain and protect such public realms from insensitive urban developments, but also a need to foster and better incorporate the values of the public realm into urban planning for the future consolidation of inner-city neighbourhoods.