Bildung in the ’burbs: Education for the suburban nation

Abstract

Urban policy makers are increasingly interested in fostering a more polycentric vision of metropolitan regions, bringing increasing attention to ‘place-making’ in the suburbs. Yet cultural and educational policy for the suburbs has often lacked the imagination that this would seem to require. On the conservative side of politics, particularly in North America and Australia, the suburbs have been cast as a site of resolute utilitarianism. The animating impulse has been a largely negative one of defending the suburbs from the clutches of cosmopolitan urban ‘elites’. On the progressive side, the dominant policy rhetoric has been one of addressing suburban ‘disadvantage’. This perspective has been shadowed by the risk of condescension and cultural elitism, resulting in an anaemic ‘equity’ agenda with little interest beyond external indicators of redistribution. The article suggests that one route out of this impasse might be to revisit some ideas from classical liberal theory about the relation between culture, education and place. Drawing from interviews with suburban creative practitioners in Australia, it argues that there is some truth to the idea that the suburbs are defined by an autonomy from urban taste, but that this should not be equated with an absence of creative aspiration. Rather than setting these terms against each other, we might do better to look again at ideas of ‘self-formation’ or Bildung, in the tradition from Wilhelm von Humboldt, in which the role of government is conceived as a supporting and enabling one.