The Suburban Idea and Its Enemies

Abstract

Late in the twentieth century public opinion began to turn against the Australian suburb, as its enemies began to outnumber its friends. For more than 150 years, Australia was itself a mental suburb of England, taking many of its ideas ready-made from the world’s metropolis, London. This article identifies the main ideological strands of the suburban idea as it first appeared in England—Evangelicalism, Romanticism, Sanitarianism, and Class Prejudice—and examines how they were reproduced, with occasional variations, in the colonial city. Critics of the suburban idea, it is argued, shared many of the tacit assumptions of its friends, differing only in the value they assigned to each component. Anti-suburbanism, even in its contemporary forms, continues to reproduce many features of its nineteenth-century antecedents.