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Despite the fact that the Australian psyche is imbued with a sense of spaciousness, we are among the most urbanised countries in the world. 15 Today about 50 per cent of humans live in urban environments, with this figure tipped to reach 60 per cent or more by 2025 16. These urban agglomerations consume 75 per cent of the planet’s resources and produce most of its waste 17. The treatment of cities within environmentalism despite these dominant roles, is perplexing. Much popular ‘green’ political rhetoric and practice within Australia reflects a bias towards non-urban areas and issues 18, such that ‘the environment’ is seen as somewhere largely other than where city-dwellers are. As a result, much Australian environmental effort focuses on activities such as wilderness and fauna preservation, and the redress of rural land and river degradation 19. Even when in the urban realm, drives for recycling or ‘green’ consumer product choices are largely marketed through images of endangered species and wilderness areas, implying that while our action may be local or urban, what we are ‘saving’ is elsewhere and involves trees or dolphins. Concurrently, drives for urban sustainability largely focus on industrial processes such as energy production and consumption, transport and waste management. Such portrayals reflect the perception of the city as an ‘industrial’, ‘denatured’ space standing in contrast to ‘pristine’, ‘natural’ spaces. Historically, the city/rural divide gained impetus during the Industrial Revolution, when cities changed from "... a place for living and experiencing the unquantifiables of life – culture, intellectual stimulation, community, spirituality – to a place to work" 20. The rising pollution, crime and poverty associated with industrial cities led many to the conclusion that sanctity could be found in ‘natural’ environments. This fostered a romanticism of the countryside, the prairie or the bush as wild, pristine, unpeopled places 21. Concurrently, cities became perceived as polluted, crowded, corrupt spaces; a perception reinforced by the transportation of many of the first European Australians from crowded, squalid British prisons to a vast, ‘new’ land 22. Such romanticism in Australia may have been further compounded by the reaction of European settlers to the Australian landscape and its inhabitants; early records, for example, refer to the bush as reminiscent of manicured English parkland 23. This is problematic, given that within an English context such landscapes were maintained by the aristocracy as deliberately unused or leisure spaces, as an indication that the landholder was of such wealth to not have to work the land 24. Further, settlers were either unable or unwilling to detect Aboriginal infrastructure or land management practices, leading to the legacy of terra nullius 25. In the absence of any recognisable land use, the landscape was subsequently perceived as a non-productive space for recreation and renewal, an idyllic wilderness, complete with a peppering of Noble Savages 26. This mentality still largely informs much of our behaviour towards the Australian landscape and can be seen as generating problematic caricatures of what our varying places can be. Historically, much management of areas such as National Parks, for example, has reinforced the idea that nature is where we are not, calling for the removal of human occupants from areas for ‘preservation’ 27. This denies that the landscapes to be ‘preserved’ are a human construct, the result of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal practices and beliefs 28. Further, the desire to ‘preserve’ a site implies a kind of stasis which is simply not evident in ecology 29 and asserts that human creations such as the enhanced greenhouse effect and pollution of various kinds do not affect these spaces, that there somehow exist landscapes which our existence is not affecting. Australia’s urban areas also suffer from their portrayal as hectic, unnatural places, as ‘that where nature is not’. Such portrayals reduce urban sustainability efforts as mentioned previously, to issues such as those regarding our toxic by-products or energy demands. This notion of the city also denies any questioning of what a city is and may function; hence, any interpretations of sustainability along the lines of the deeper green definitions discussed previously are further silenced, as a hectic, unnatural place is no place for activities such as food production 30. Further, such definitions delineate and restrict how a city’s inhabitants can function. As Cronon states:
Further, as Engwicht claims:
This would imply that such unfavourable perceptions of cities deny them as spaces for the elaboration of what being human involves, or for locally determined social, economic or political structures. To free ourselves from such restrictive interpretations and start repairing our physical, social, cultural and political realms, we need to move beyond city/nature binaries to understand that both are relative, human constructs relying heavily upon each other for their definition and existence, and containing elements of each other. Any real attempts to delineate ‘city’ from ‘rural’ or ‘natural’ are always problematic 33; the closer one looks, the more blurred and arbitrary the distinction. Also implicated in simplistic representations of urban spaces, is the relegation of much activity such as food production to ‘private’ spaces, which effectively invisibilises such activity. Dissolving such binaries opens up spaces for urban ‘sustainability’ by allowing the potential for cities to be other than what they are, to be ‘the environment’ and, for the purpose of this study, to incorporate green, growing spaces. |
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