Resilience in the Transition Landscapes of the Peri-urban: From ‘Where’ with ‘Whom’ to ‘What’

1. Introduction

Australia is often portrayed as a nation of urban coastal dwellers, having largely turned our backs on the interior of the nation, to sit on the front verandah and face the sea (Drew, 1994). However, this is changing and in this paper we focus on the demographic of city dwellers moving to the peri-urban interior regions of Australia. We conceptualise the peri-urban as a territory in order to analyse the tensions associated with governments managing this ‘hydra’ for their various strategic agendas. In fact, these spaces were never empty and governments need to understand that there is the reality of local, individual and collective landscape practices, both established and emerging. From two recently completed projects, we draw together two peri-urban vignettes (excerpted from larger case studies) about these new migrants to the territory and how they imagine their landscapes and conceive of their identities as natural resource managers. In keeping with Buxton et al. (2006, p. 68), we select these vignettes because they represent different but characteristic peri-urban settings, including: adjacent to a metropolitan centre and along a growth corridor, transit route or in an amenity landscape setting. Taylor’s (2004) conception of a social imaginary assists us both to recognise the conundrum for government planners and policy-makers, and to support the narratives about the social and ecological meaning of what in-migrants are doing in the landscape. In this way, we can explore the peri-urban as not ‘one thing’ but a social imaginary that is understood, inhabited or imagined differently both at different scales of engagement and within the same locale. As Willis (2005) so eloquently writes, this conceptual difference surrounding the meaning of the peri-urban is not an issue that can be dealt with just as a spatial problem, through zoning or lot sizes.

Low Choy (2006), planner and academic, writes that the complexity of structure and function in the peri-urban complicates planning and local government in Australia. The poor ‘fit’ between existing boundaries for natural resource management (NRM) governance and biophysical systems in the landscape reflects both the history of government jurisdiction and the provision of infrastructure. This creates tension with regard to both the protection of ecosystems and the protection of agriculturally productive lands in the peri-urban (Land and Water Australia, 2007, p. 6).

Applying a resilience framework can assist in clarifying system boundaries—what is in the territory, and whether the territory is ‘resilient’—and the relationships between subjects and objects across these multiple scales. As well, we use the concept of social-ecological memory within resilience thinking to interrogate how these located practices emerge within the various social imaginaries. We ask the questions: what do in-migrants to the peri-urban do with this landscape (in terms of practices); does social-ecological memory as understood by the in-migrants create the social imaginary that backgrounds their practices as land managers; and what sorts of landscapes do they ‘make’ as a consequence—and for what ends?

These ‘transitional landscapes’ (Gallent et al., 2006) of the peri-urban, framed as a territory for the purpose of understanding their collective labelling and the discourse around these areas, seem amorphous. They aggregate attention but this does not assist with the management or understanding of what is included or what needs to be done to reconcile the diverse array of activities and people caught up in the designation. In applying resilience thinking to this territory, we can identify the basic structure and function of the social and ecological systems involved and their response to disturbances (Adger, 2000, p. 347). Resilience is not a neutral concept in the sense that, while some aspects of a system may benefit from change, others may not. In social and ecological systems research, we identify resilience “from what, for whom, and ‘where’ to account for changes in power, agency, technologies and governance” (Lebel et al., 2006, p. 1). The ‘peri-urban’ is produced by the ‘making’ of the very cross-border spaces that Sassen notes. As a social imaginary, the peri-urban is potentially multiple territories inadvertently constituted within a national system that is imagined and reformed by multiple, mostly non-aligned everyday practices on the ground. It is this complexity of intent and lack of intent in the construction of the peri-urban, and its imposition on existing places and spaces, that we pursue here.

Resilience thinking is useful because it offers us a way of identifying and connecting system components while recognising the complexity and dynamism of the whole. We can observe and construct a conceptual framework of relationships, acknowledging the reality of constant change and cross-scale interactions. Further, because this paper is concerned with spaces, territories and ultimately imaginaries and realities associated with ‘place’, it is important to distinguish not just the resilience of ‘what to what’, or ‘who is doing what’, but also ‘where’.

2. Locating the Peri-urban

The case studies discussed in this paper reflect an Australian context. Within Australia, as also noted in the international literature (see Ford, 1999; Gallent et al., 2006; Goddard, 2009), the peri-urban is located more easily than it can be defined by planning codes. A nation-wide study reflecting key peri-urban growth areas in the 20th century, identified areas surrounding metropolises, following the rainfall distribution curve along our east and south-west coastlines, including some resort and retirement areas and some regional centres, and following either side of the Hume Highway between Melbourne and Sydney (Haberkorn et al., 1999).

The peri-urban can be described as multifunctional and this attribute contributes to the tension for planners in managing landscape values such as those conventionally associated with agriculture, conservation and the amenity expectations for recreation and tourism (Buxton et al., 2006). The planning difficulties associated with managing what can or should legally occur within the peri-urban is exacerbated by multiple levels of jurisdiction. The Peri-urban Group of Rural Councils was established in 2007 to advocate for regional policies that would better integrate an overall vision for these territories (Buxton et al., 2008). The peri-urban is complex, neither clearly ‘rural’ nor definitely ‘urban’, but as Goddard (2009, p. 413) notes “penurbia looks like country but often thinks like the city”.

It is with this quotation acknowledging the possible aspirations of those living in these regions, that we turn to who inhabits these regions; and while there is a complexity of socioeconomic strata and demographics, we focus on in-migrants associated with NRM. Descriptions of who they are include: “conservationists, … urban economic refugees, … minimalisers and … sprawlers” (Bunker et al., 2003 in Willis, 2005, p. 6). Moss (2006) lists them as: lifestylers, tree changers, amenity migrants, hobby farmers. Gurran (2008) says some are ‘downshifters’, emphasising that these migrants move for lifestyle (perhaps associated with ‘simpler values’) or the scenic views that van Auken (2010) emphasises. In Australian parlance, these people are also collectively known as ‘tree changers’, meaning that they exchange the concrete of the cities for the trees of the countryside. Ragusa’s (2010, p. 76) study of ‘tree changers’ in regional Australia categorises their movements as domestic ‘in-migration’ and ‘out-migration’ (to distinguish them from international) population shifts. Such migration across and within state and territory boundaries continues the historical non-Indigenous Australian settler propensity for high turnover across these landscapes. While immigration and domestic migration have always been the source of regional population change, this has been associated previously with economic incentives; whereas now, amenity is a factor (Nelson, 2006). It would be erroneous to assume that those moving to the peri-urban are an elite. On the contrary, the amorphous reality of its inherited planning zones attracts a diverse population. There are large properties and smallholdings, new and old houses, active businesses and remnants from previous entrepreneurs. This melange of infrastructure and no structure entices those with money and those without to imagine living in these spaces. It is individual mobility in this demographic that is a significant factor in their in-migration patterns (Ragusa 2010, p. 78), and ‘individuals’ are key to understanding this migration rather than ‘place’. Ragusa perceives (2010, p. 79) these ‘tree changers’ as individual consumers, consuming space/place because they have some real or imagined connection to what they want to do there—how to ‘use’ that space. This is the consumptive reality that van Auken (2010, p. 522) foresees as ignoring the social relations that underwrite the occupation, leading to a commodification of these non-urban landscapes.

While we accept this desire to occupy a certain kind of landscape, we explore these issues of identity not as alienated from place, and not as outside the objectified consumption of a view. On the contrary, for the in-migrants in our cases there is a determined engagement with constructing both new and inherited meanings for landscape. It is what Gallent et al. (2006, p. 28), referencing Hoskins’ seminal work The Making of the English Landscape (1955), refers to as “the making of the [urban] fringe”. However, there is a bureaucratic territorialism that bundles assumptions (Sassen, 2007) of who and what is located within their spheres of influence; and it is our ‘unbundling’ that assists us to conceptualise how recent planning for the peri-urban has been at a scale designed to strategically encompass their regions—but a scale that neglects local practices visibly altering the landscape. This is a kind of colonial clash where new territories are discovered, claimed and then ordered as if they are uninhabited. Further, as it gets more complicated to know who is managing the small acreages and moving into the local townships, the bureaucratic ability to target specific actors becomes more difficult. Darbas et al. in their south-east Queensland study, argue that

fundamentally, the scales at which landscape ecological processes work are more discordant with the scale of land parcel management in a peri-urbanising landscape than in an agricultural landscape [and so] increased social heterogeneity is structurally coupled with increased ecological simplification (Darbas et al., 2010, p. 17 and 20).

The assumption here is that despite the evidence of little ecological diversity on most agriculturally productive landscapes in southeastern Australia, the size of holdings protects what is there. We return to this argument later in the paper.

Finally, we note that while attention is on the growth of population in the peri-urban, the silent minority (in some cases) are the longer-term residents who also have a special interest in how the peri-urban is conceived and managed. The landscapes of the peri-urban are still predominantly associated with production and tourism. The pastoral landscape appears scenic and has passive recreational values which are an obvious attractant for the in-migrants. The long-term resident landscapes form the backdrop to place and identity for the in-migrants and, as noted by Gieryn (2000), place has agency. The construction of what a place ‘should look like’ is the most obvious connection between new migrants and the long-term residents. That it can be contested is evidenced by some of the generic names that long term residents give to new migrants—such as ‘hobby farmers’—and these contribute to the tensions (Darbas et al., 2010) between new and old formulations of place and identity.

3. The Social Imaginary of the Peri-urban and its Social-ecological Memory

The peri-urban is both a bureaucratic social imaginary (Taylor, 2004) conceived as a whole in order to effect the larger ambitions of ecological or production outcomes and, at a local scale, a social imaginary comprised of social and ecological memories shared among the new migrants. Within the nation-state, broad bureaucratic territories are conceived for the purpose of policy and planning and strategic management, whereas at local government level managers interpret those policies. In this way the territory inevitably has multiple representations as there are, for example, multiple local governments interpreting the same code book. A social imaginary is also constructed in a general way, but is frequently described in careful detail. Taylor (2004) notes how this becomes the background to our thoughts and beliefs

The social imaginary is that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy … It incorporates the normal expectations we have of each other, the kind of common understanding that enables us to carry out the kind of collective practices that make up our social life. This incorporates some sense of how we all fit together in carrying out the common practice … we have a sense of how things usually go but this is interwoven with an idea of how they ought to go, of what missteps would invalidate the practice (Taylor, 2004, pp. 23–24).

Verran (1998) in a study of the pastoralist and Aboriginal land ownership negotiations in Australia, argues that recognising ‘imaginaries’ is part of knowledge assembly and that various ways of knowing exist outside those legitimated in scientific or discipline discourses. She too emphasises the importance of practice in locating the meaning and meaningfulness of an individual’s or a group’s imaginary. We come back to these ideas in more detail in our case studies.

Therefore, we conceptualise the peri-urban as a social imaginary that has recently emerged within various bureaucratic and academic discourses (such as planning, conservation, agriculture). It is territorialised and is a contested site for management and/or commodification. As a social imaginary, it provides and locates ideas about territories, agency and identity. Perhaps in anticipation of the moment that the population of cities officially dominated the planet (July 2007), attention inside bureaucracies, the structures of governments and within the hearts and minds of local developers, residents, conservationists, agriculturalists and myriad others, turned to the edge of cities and their adjacent landscapes. Each of these landscape ‘readers’ has contributed to the complex assembling of the peri-urban. These connected and disconnected people and their objects associated with the territory of the peri-urban construct the idea of the peri-urban as places to be managed as they are realised and become tangible (for example, through zoning changes).

On the ground, however, there is little reality to the concept of the peri-urban and it is that noteworthy absence that we come back to later in this paper. No one refers to it as ‘our’ peri-urban. For central planners and government, it is ‘the’ peri-urban. Yet in this paper we can inform what is going on in a particular aspect of the peri-urban—that is associated with NRM on private land—because it is ‘constructed’ of practices and ‘made’ out of ideas and imaginings that background the local endeavours to create new landscapes. To understand the generation of these practices, we consider how social-ecological memory contributes to the making of the peri-urban. To explain social-ecological memory, we return to the idea of resilience.

Resilience thinking defines ecological memory as connecting the biophysical and ecological environment through species, their networks and the characteristics associated with the interactions and relationships within and between these elements (Bengtsson et al., 2003). These relationships form the legacy for reorganisation after disturbance. The innate ability to reorganise is dependent on the previous history of the system. Conceptualising ecological memory in this way suggests boundary flexibility because species can depend on aspects of the wider system that may or may not be implicated in the disturbance—that is, species from outside the immediate area of disturbance can move into ecological openings so the inside and outside of the area in focus are sources of future hybridity. This deterministic hybridity relates to maintaining structure and function, a key idea in arguing whether a system is resilient. Social memory is described by McIntosh as

the accumulation of experiences concerning management practices and rules-in-use that ensure the capacity of social systems to monitor change and to build institutions (formal and informal norms and rules) that enable appropriate responses to signals from the environment (McIntosh, 2000; in Folke et al., 2002, p. 72).

Barthel et al. (2010) combine these two in social-ecological memory, linking knowledge and practices about local ecosystems with the way communities maintain or modify that knowledge.

Social-ecological memory is actively negotiated in response to place, its vegetation, topography, social and cultural meanings. The landscape unites social and ecological thinking. Social memory can be invoked to say what belongs in the landscape and the rules on how to manage the landscape or what to expect from likely disturbances such as fire or flood. This is the ‘what’ you can expect to be able to do in a particular place. Yet people move to these landscapes because they are engaged with a specific place, the ‘where’—accepting the existing or creating the new landscapes according to the social imaginary of the peri-urban that they hold. They are occupying the spaces of the new peri-urban territories, but there is not necessarily an alignment of purpose in their reasons for being there or in the imaginaries they hold. In Australia, community-based NRM (CBNRM) groups such as Landcare (LC) have been federally and regionally funded to assist with conservation on private agricultural land. These CBNRM groups can exist across the landscape, including in the territory of the ‘peri-urban’.

Knowing where you live in an ecological sense may not be accurately interpreted if the new migrant is unaware of the history of the ecological landscape. ‘Knowing’ in this case may mean arriving at some familiarity or interpretation of place. This interpretation of place, as Pred (1984, p. 282) notes, is not established as a universal law but is subject to historical circumstances. There is an intuitive expectation, however, that in moving to this place the in-migrant will negotiate a relationship to nature, whatever they imagine that to be. Cadieux’s (2011, p. 344) description of multiple natures—indigenous flora and fauna or nature as a mowed lawn—captures the spectrum of diversity that might be involved.

Social-ecological memory contributes to the decisions of how to manage place: how to achieve the desired landscapes because they become part of the beliefs and assumptions in the social imaginary of that person or community. Memory is constructed, affirmed and modified through existing narratives. Cadieux (2011) describes these in relation to nature and we argue it is about how to manage the landscape of that place to achieve that nature.

The final point we make in this section follows Gupta (1997), that “relations between places are continuously shifting as a result of the political and economic reorganization of space in the world system” (Gupta and Ferguson, 1997, p. 17). The space that is abstracted and territorialised as the bureaucratic peri-urban social imaginary is here, by default, contrasted with the complexity of local landscape engagement in the case studies in section 4.

Our questions in section 4 evolve from this discussion

4. The ‘Places’ and ‘Spaces’ of the Local: Engaging Ecological-social Systems

The case study material originates in two separate projects in peri-urban territories, undertaken between 2008 and 2010 using ethnographic methods in both; plus stakeholder mapping, and mental models in one (Gilmour et al., 2010) and social network analysis in the other (Beilin et al., 2013). Mansley is in the peri-urban territory that is within commuting distance of Greater Melbourne and the data reflects the ideas of a ‘tree changer’ community-based CBNRM group. This case was part of a project funded by the state government conservation department. We set out to determine what in-migrants practised in relation to NRM.

The Valley is in New South Wales, a one-hour drive north from Canberra. The Valley study was part of a bio-security project funded by the federal department of agriculture, with the aim of establishing what NRM newcomers knew about bio-security risk in peri-urban regions and what management practices they undertook. The bio-security emphasis was triggered by fairly recent episodes of Johnes disease among cows and sheep, and equine influenza. It was expected by national NRM agencies that smaller landholders would pose a greater threat to biosecurity than those on larger landholdings.

The case studies analysed social-ecological data and mapped these across social networks in the landscape and the findings are variously excerpted here as vignettes.

5. The Space of Place through Social-ecological Knowing

These vignettes demonstrate the active ‘making’ of land management practices at different scales. The outbreak of Johne’s disease and then equine influenza in The Valley, the fires around Canberra in 2003 and, by implication, those near Melbourne in 2009, all reinforce the significance of in-migration diversity. A consequence of this diversity is found in the associations that form, including shadow networks (for example, members of a CBNRM group talk with members of the Country Fire Authority at the general store, annexing connections and information). These social networks like the CBNRM groups in Mansley or the Pony Club in The Valley can be important sources of information and meaningful arbiters of knowledge, creating social connections and identity; just as they can be short-term and ephemeral supporting, by contrast, little institutional memory. The quality of these connections depends on the ability of the groups to maintain the structure and function of the networks. The importance of these connections is demonstrated in The Valley, where emergency information regarding an outbreak of equine influenza in 2007 was received by the majority of people through the town pony club, not the government agricultural department charged with the responsibility (Gilmour et al., 2010). And although the residents of The Valley may have very different ideas of the ‘place’ they inhabit, this shadow network provided a connection across the landscape. These groups are also central to building social-ecological memory. This establishes the practices that develop from the social imaginaries. These various practices ‘make’ the new landscapes through their imaginaries that are about stewardship or small-area production or ecological restoration and larger-area landscape impacts. This finding counters some of Ragusa’s (2010) and van Auken’s (2010) concerns that individuals in the peri-urban are primarily consumers of landscape amenity rather than contributors to the management of those landscapes. Similarly Darbas et al.’s (2010) perception that ecological diversity would be lost appears, at this scale, to be unfounded. As evidenced in the vignettes, these inhabitants are actively making the landscape through both inherited and co-constructed social-ecological memories.

While the literature emphasised amenity landscape as a reason for in-migration (Cadieux, 2011; Ragusa, 2010; Willis, 2005), most of our respondents discussed their locales in wider terms than just environmental, emphasising their desired integration with the people in the place; and this included residents in Mansley bemoaning the lack of farmers, the conventional landscape managers, in their NRM networks. (Farmers were present in the shadow networks such as the RFS and CFA.)

The question is whether understanding the social imaginary as peri-urban territories, facilitates understanding the dynamic character of the landscape and its potential for resilience. The peri-urban as a social imaginary is a social object in itself, contributing to the formulation of landscape policy and planning below the radar of the nation-state. Therefore, we have looked for the practices that are associated with the peri-urban territory, to explore how social-ecological knowledge informs local residents’ engagement with their landscapes. These are indicated by the narratives they tell about where they came from (‘from where’), ‘with whom’ they connect and why they live in these places (‘for what’). The places of the peri-urban reflect relations among strangers—seeking an ecological meaning to landscape in the first instance and, through it, literally creating a relationship with each other and place: the social-ecological knowledge assembly interaction that becomes the social-ecological practices.

The official discourse on the peri-urban as evidenced in strategic documents about conservation overlays and flora and fauna guarantees are not discussed here because our focus is the social imaginary and peri-urban of the inhabitants. Yet this does not mean that ecological knowledge is absent because it is not official. As the voices of the interviewees indicate, they construct both meaning and identity from living in these peri-urban landscapes through thinking about place in ecological terms. They describe the aesthetic, or the soil or the vegetation, as well as their aspirations for improved habitat, preservation of particular species or the creation of new vegetation corridors in what Verran (1998) would recognise as practices that create knowledge assemblages. Expert ecologists in local and state governments recognise the importance of local knowledge as contributing to local practices—for example, in the management of indigenous flora seedbanks or reintroduction of marsupials such as bettongs in NSW (Williams, 2004). However, as Verran (1998 ) and others (Latour, 1993; Turnbull, 2012) would note, there is no room for imagination or negotiation of different knowledge assemblages in the planning codes, or the overlays and regulations that emphatically, and confusingly criss-cross the boundaries of the peri-urban. The expert knowledge that of itself must become generic rather than particular to be enacted effectively in these legislative command and control responses cannot absorb the plethora of social imaginaries, because there is no capacity to do so. There is no prescribed and only ad hoc convergence (Williams, 2004). This again suggests the importance of the local networks in disseminating knowledge and meaning. Yet to leave the discussion here would also limit the potential of connecting the social imaginary as a concept with resilience thinking; and strand legislators and government departments to conclude that there is no possibility of integrating acting or thinking for ecological and other outcomes that reflect experiential knowing.

This is where we return to the idea of ‘unbundling’ the new territory of the peri-urban to recognise the social-ecological interconnectedness from the ground up. We have argued that the territory is currently a colonising force because of the apparent insensitivity to difference, relationships and interscalar connections. ‘The’ peri-urban is useful to the bureaucrats for auditing or evaluation, strategic funding and government referencing; and while there may be various social imaginaries among the in-migrants, what we have shown here is that no-one is envisaging a peri-urban existence, but rather they are busy creating place. They are re-imagining their new (to them) places alongside their neighbours’ established properties in palpably different ways to the territorial ambiguity inherent in the social imaginary at the government centres. At ground level, there is no public sphere associated with the territory of the peri-urban (Barry, 2002); but, by contrast, collective and individual identity creates new/old places in common, as evidenced in the naming of their associations. Place names which link with local creeks or townships, create the bridge to new identities, reinforcing ideas and others’ memories even when the landscape enterprise or plantings have radically changed.

Finally, there is a level at which strategic decision-making is required. In The Valley, salinity is a major problem for the area with a rise of more than 7 per cent per year (approximately double the State’s average) affecting production and water quality. Increasing population into The Valley faces the longer-term reality of not having potable water supplies. The uncertainty associated with these harsh realities of potential crises suggests that the ‘cross-border spaces’ that Sassen refers to in the opening quotation, must be dealt with as transparently as possible so that developers and agriculturalists, for example, understand the implications of the expanding population and both factor this into their land management practices. This would create a commons of intention where negotiation actually creates a social-ecological practice that is a wider, regional good. Such a process could assist the Peri-urban Group of Rural Councils and similar bodies to invigorate the meaning of ‘peri-urban’ from the ground up.

6. Conclusion: From ‘What’ with ‘Whom’, for ‘Where’?

Identity and place, purpose and landscape are both physically apparent and imaginatively known at multiple scales. The social imaginary is fragmented and whole, crossing scale, including both individual and collective; and Gupta’s continuous change aligns with the dynamism found in social-ecological systems, the metaphor of resilience and in the idea of transition landscapes. This contrasts with legislation and programme funding, and what inevitably or unintentionally may become the vague and static containment of the peri-urban as a series of overlays, zones and disconnected jurisdictions. This complexity of purpose and intention is undoubtedly a reason why planners, for example, find this territory so fraught for planning outcomes (Buxton et al., 2008; Low Choy, 2006).

The Sassen (2007) quote that began this paper demands we rethink the ‘where’, as in the resilience of this territory as a system. It is locatable, rather than a generic territory ‘somewhere else’; and if the nation-state or government departments and academics can engage more directly with those identifying with place—rather than labelling them in ways that ultimately are not so helpful—the negotiations about the social imaginary at these different scales can become more transparent. Government’s strategic intent, based on a public good, can be shared just as the local change agents can affirm or debate their part in that strategy, so as Verran (1998) indicates, meaning is jointly made. The resilience of the ecological system depends on the ‘whom’ and so the strategic and on-ground importance of individuals and their places is affirmed. The ecological requires that the social system value and maintain it. Developing more resilient networks and relationships within the described system as demonstrated by the actions of CBNRM groups in their interactions with other organisations all contributes to improving landscape management in this space of the peri-urban.

In this paper, we have focused on the social imaginaries of the new in-migrants. Our paper has evolved as a process of observing and analysing who is moving to and creating the new landscapes in these regions and thinking about the disconnect between how these spaces are written about and conceptualised in government meetings.

Territory, writes Sassen (2007), is ‘thick and highly formalised’, but social systems are negotiated, their boundaries can be porous and their interactions depend on relationships at various scales. If mutually agreed to, and jointly ‘made’, systems may be more powerful ways of conceptualising the interconnectivity of a social-ecolgical landscape mosaic—for example, interweaving coastal overlays and farm zones to interact with property boundaries, rather than conceptualising them as over-riding such boundaries. Conversely, as has been demonstrated already with the early catchment and whole farm planning schemes in Victoria, property boundaries can become invisible in the landscape as a consequence of connecting vegetation zones across property lines when strategic goals are negotiated locally. The difference is that the peri-urban as a territory does not as yet facilitate integrating existing planning into more ‘whole of landscape’ approaches. Instead, as a territory, the space of the peri-urban can seem ‘true’ on the map but colonising on the ground.

The social imaginary, fed by the social-ecological memory of a landscape imagined as an interconnected system, can itself, through local resident negotiation of expectations and values, feed the design and management of new, extended or anticipated ecological or other NRM activities within the landscape. The in-migrants enter these landscapes with their ‘baggage’, from somewhere else or from these landscapes and places. They encounter the social-ecological memory of what has become, is now, both the previous physical use and the newly emerging landscape. They realise that their daily practices are active in co-constructing place and identity. This activity underwrites the legitimacy of evoking social memory because memory is mutable. Some actively memorialise the agricultural landscape but in their re-creation of it, it is markedly different not the least in size, content and purpose. The ecological landscape of memory is also variable. While images of ancient landscapes are transmitted in tales of Indigenous Australians management and early non-Indigenous Australians settler occupation, from the moment the colonisers arrived, the landscape is a story of inclusions, exclusions and movement of species (McNiven, 2008). Ecological memory on its own may not be that meaningful, but in conjunction with the social, provides imagery and impetus for changing and managing the landscape where the history of what came before contributes to imagining the future.

The ethnographic case studies in this paper have pointed to a different way of ordering ideas about landscape based on resilience thinking. As complexity is irreducible, but the bureaucratic inclination is to reduce elements to something that can be monitored or written on paper, the resilience framing assists in putting dyads (like social and ecological) back together. We have deconstructed the peri-urban social imaginary by arguing that it is not homogeneous, not static; but, rather, is expansionary and in that process has many knowledge assemblages. We have deconstructed the idea of social-ecological memory, arguing that its variability can be both a bonus and a limiting factor in how we manage in the landscape, what practices we choose to create in these new social mosaics and transition landscapes. These investigations indicate the complexity of local conditions and point to the usefulness of planning that includes, for example, interscalar mediation of zone controls. In seeing the peri-urban as an imaginary, we can be empowered to overcome its bureaucratic origins to argue for the opportunity it might provide to better imagine a connected social and ecological landscape rather than one ruled by disconnected local governments. Unbundling policy and planning from within particular government boundaries to support the multiple narratives of landscape re-imagining is required to transform the ‘where we have been’ to a resilient ‘where we are going’ in the 21st century.