Topic 10A: Heritage and Gentrification

Heritage and gentrification: a recent history of Melbourne

By Nathan Macfie

How do you define gentrification and heritage? Before reaching for a dictionary it’s important to note that definitions- dictionary or otherwise- are not neutral. First and foremost, gentrification and heritage are ideas: notions of urban value and are thus subjective. Our perception of “physical and ethical borders” (Licari, 2011) shapes our sense of belonging. Urban ‘value’ is a construct, a product of our relationship with the urban environment. Change can therefore be a threat to our identity, something illuminated in the following description of gentrification in the London borough of Hackney by British author Iain Sinclair.

"I can see the end of Hackney as I know it... A different Hackney, younger, brasher, will emerge and wipe the old one away, and wipe me away…." (Cooke, 2009).

The process of urban change is ongoing, a perpetual contest between self and Other. Heritage is the property of hegemony,  but it waxes and wanes with the tides of history. Perhaps socio-spatial polarization is a better term for gentrification; as it is emblematic of the contest not only over built-form, but spatial and cultural heritage        

Melbourne’s inner-north is a case in point. The decline of the manufacturing industry has seen a growth in apartment blocks and with it a significant increase in young urban professionals. However, far from usurping low-income residents, the new ‘gentrifiers’ are living along-side a significant number of long-term post-war migrants, students and underemployed residents. (ABS, 2013). For some long-term residents there is palpable sense of socio-urban fracture, a loss of familiar faces and places in the “increasing urban anonymity” (Colic-Peisker and Robertson, 2014).

Yet ethnicity and religion play a substantial role in social division too. There is a two-fold and strangely symbiotic process of cultural preservation (self-segregation) and integration: one necessary for the conservation of cultural identity and the other for social cohesion (ABS, 2000; Colic-Peisker and Robertson, 2014). Such feelings of loss are not new. Significant division lay within 18th Century White Australian communities in Melbourne, with virulent outbursts of sectarian conflict occurring among various in 19^th and 20^th Century Melbourne (Cole, 1971; Hogan, 1984).

Today, the omnipotent global socio-economic paradigm is challenging our ability to maintain coherent social narratives, however middle-class residents are not the villains however.  Inner-urban Melbourne has seen a recent surge in residential property development with approximately 20,000 new apartments built in the ten years from 2004. Unofficial government estimates reveal owner-occupancy rates may be as low as ten per cent with many being unoccupied (Shaw, 2014). Generous tax concessions for housing investment “contribute to falling rates of home-ownership” (Daley and Wood, 2015). Wealthy investors are using negative gearing to minimise tax, placing burdens on government expenditure (Daley and Wood, 2015). More than ninety per cent of housing investment loans are for existing, rather than new properties in Australia (Daley et al., 2013) pricing out first-homebuyers and driving them to outer suburbs, where there is less work and greater living expenses (Daley, 2015).

Another result is an increase in temporary residents, with quarterly residential lease turnovers of around ten per cent (Department of Human Services, 2015). Impermanence is the new trend. In the post World War Two era, migration was largely permanent, however circulation is fast becoming the dominant migratory model, locally and worldwide (Hugo, 2004). New inner-city homebuyers are not the principle issue; new the ‘housing bubble’ seems to be driven by absentee investor-owners.

Regulation plays a key role in maintaining heritage, but it seems heritage is all too often confined to the built form and not to the cultures and spaces around them. Rapid inner city high-rise CBD developments may soon overshadow public spaces and cultural landmarks in Melbourne, including Queen Victoria Market and Southbank (Lucas, 2014; Dow, 2015). In Brunswick, some high-rise developments have bypassed council approval and the right of residents to appeal planning decisions has been removed (Cooke, 2010). But while some cultures and landmarks have ‘value’, others don’t.

For marginalised and low-income groups, regulation can have such negative consequences. Street-drinking bans, now in place in all local government jurisdictions in Melbourne, marginalise people without tackling underlying issues. However such restrictions also conflate public alcohol consumption with substance abuse (Pennay, Manton and Savic, 2014). Yet there is socio-urban polarisation in residential as well as public spaces.

Anglicare Australia (2015) recently identified as little as one per cent of Melbourne’s rental properties are accessible for the city’s most vulnerable people.  For indigenous people, culture is devalued or expressed in a neo-liberal language; vis-a-vis William Barak’s campaign against dispossession being celebrated through a high-rise building (Griffiths, 2015; Hansen; 2015). For marginalised populations it is not simply residential but retail ‘gentrification’ which restricts their ability to participate socially (Robertson and Colic-Peisker, 2015). Even some within the middle-classes, have become marginalised “urban refugees” (Howe, Nichols and Davison, 2014) who, unable to stem the tides of change, seek new means of self-expression.

Neolocalism is a socio-urban response to globalisation. From farmers markets to microbreweries and beyond, neolocalism is a conscious communal effort to restore and foster local connections and identities (Aleti, 2013; Schnell, 2013). The motivations of such movements are easy to misconstrue. The  locally-celebrated closure of coffee chain Starbuck’s Lygon Street Store has been called “petty” (Howe, Nichols and Davison 2014),  but such arguments overlook that this response is represents a broader rejection of socio-cultural homogeneity in the heart of important cultural precincts (Frost, Laing and Reeves, 2010; Schnell, 2013). Consumption-cultures are not simply an indication of affluence, but expressions of socio-ethical preferences (Cherrier, 2007). Likewise the Save Live Music (SLAM) movement, which resulted in large protests in Melbourne’s CBD, was a rejection of noise restrictions imposed on live music venues in inner-northern Melbourne as high rise apartments surrounded them (Mathieson, 2012). Such acts attempt to subvert impositions on cultural expression.

The urban environment is a menagerie of socio-political territories inhabited by disparate and fluid groups, and as a consequence recurring cultural struggles arise . (Pennay, Manton and Savic, 2014). Here and abroad, culinary expressions of cultural heritage - far from being superficial- are in fact potent sociopolitical symbols, especially during times of change (Leitch, 2003; Anderson and Benbow, 2014), but these narratives aren’t stable  Today, urban visual and cultural coherence is giving way to an urban mutability, eroding the boundaries between design, culture, commerce, politics, public and private (Dovey, 2005). It is this fluidity which defines heritage and socio-urban polarisation for good or ill.

Questions

1.   Examine the image of the café in Carlton. Is this gentrification in action, or the practice of cultural heritage?

2.   When an apartment goes up next to a music venue or bar, whose rights matter most and what can be done to minimise conflict?

3.   How do you define heritage?

References

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