Hipsters

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GUEST OBSERVATION
The independent owner-operated businesses that bring life to run-down neighbourhoods often have a hipster ethos. 
One of the stark differences between neighbourhoods in the inner city and outer suburbs in Australia is the quality and type of retail offerings. Gentrifying inner-city suburbs – places like West End in Brisbane, Fitzroy in Melbourne and Newtown in Sydney – are characterised by independent owner-operated retail businesses. Busy “<a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2016/09/14/third-places-as-community-builders/" target="_blank">third places</a>” such as cafes, bars and restaurants – where people spend time between home (“first” place) and work (“second” place) – are common.
These are the favoured haunts of the hipster. Hipsters have an uneasy place in our cultural landscape, not least of which is their role in gentrification. However, their role in the inner city is important in showing the rest of the city how to create contemporary, accessible and successful third places with low, non-gendered barriers to entry.
Third places provide residents and visitors with a variety of what <a href="https://www.propertyobserver.com.au/https://www.amazon.com/Great-Good-Place-Bookstores-Community/dp/1569246815" target="_blank">Ray Oldenburg</a> calls “the core settings of informal public life”. Cafes, bars, pubs, clubs or chess rooms (in some places) are places where people can meet informally or be “together alone”. They allow for planned and accidental encounters across different times of the day and are essential for a healthy neighbourhood social life or “sense” of community.
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256225/original/file-20190130-108355-1dzcaub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256225/original/file-20190130-108355-1dzcaub.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt=""></a>
(Source: Author provided)
Cafes and bars provide a ‘third place’ where people can meet informally or be ‘together alone’, as seen here in St Kilda, Melbourne.
What’s missing from outer suburbs?
As we travel out of the inner city towards the outer suburbs, residents become increasingly deprived of these places. Suburban retail centres become less “local” – shopping centres are isolated from the surrounding neighbourhood, controlled by a single corporate landlord, marooned in a sea of parking and offer a predictable range of franchised outlets and national brands, often anchored by a large supermarket. At the district level are huge impersonal shopping malls.
None of this enables residents to take advantage of local third places or feel any sense of authorship over them, which is so important for creating place and community.
History has an obvious role to play. Inner-city suburbs were planned and built before widespread car ownership. Streets are laid out in grids, which make for easy and direct pedestrian or bicycle travel.
These areas were built before the introduction of strict “single use” zoning regimes, so have a good mix of land uses. Retail, residential and even industrial properties exist side by side. Property ownership has evolved so one landlord rarely controls an entire retail strip.
Businesses open on to wide, protected footpaths which are thoroughfares for more than just the businesses located there. The built form is varied, interesting and vernacular and suited to small independent businesses.
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256228/original/file-20190130-39344-ooqmjp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256228/original/file-20190130-39344-ooqmjp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt=""></a>
(Source: Author provided)
Buildings are varied, interesting and vernacular and suited to small independent businesses in West End, Brisbane. <a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/coffeesgonecold/34858238476/in/album-72157704622068821/"> </a>
Gentrification and the hipster
Inner-city neighbourhoods in recent decades have been gentrified as more affluent residents and businesses colonise formerly working class, migrant or Indigenous areas of inner cities. <a href="https://www.propertyobserver.com.au/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0042098013489748" target="_blank">Gentrification</a> takes place over a long time and in particular phases.
The first to colonise an area are “renter gentrifiers”. They are responsible for making the place hip or edgy through alternative music and art, underground fashion and an embryonic start-up business culture.
Despite the mockery they inspire, the hipsters’ pursuits create ‘third places’ that foster a sense of community. 
This in turn attracts better-resourced gentrifiers who share the same cultural tastes as the renter gentrifiers but have money. This creates demand for a range of retail outlets, such as artisanal bakers, micro-breweries, tattoo artists, vintage fashions, vinyl record stores, independent bookstores and, most importantly, abundant bars, cafes and coffee shops.
These businesses are stereotypically run by hipsters, a subculture easily recognisable by their carefully curated full beards (male), artistic or ironic tattoos, skinny jeans and other vintage accessories. Hipsters are often disparaged for their lack of originality, for championing a look that mimics a historical period they never experienced. As <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=PolRLfWavjAC&amp;pg=PA41&amp;lpg=PA41&amp;dq=%E2%80%9Ccreativity,+genius,+eternal+value+and+mystery+are+inseparable+from+the+hipster%E2%80%9D&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=HQ-zgs5qVz&amp;sig=ACfU3U3DVpH8zOCFV65Nacxi0HX_AlkGvw&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=2ahUKEwihzcXwgpTgAhWHM48KHZm2BagQ6AEwAHoECAAQAQ#v=onepage&amp;q=%E2%80%9Ccreativity%2C%20genius%2C%20eternal%20value%20and%20mystery%20are%20inseparable%20from%20the%20hipster%E2%80%9D&amp;f=false" target="_blank">Jake Kinsey writes</a> sarcastically in a whole book that derides hipsters: "… creativity, genius, eternal value and mystery are inseparable from the hipster."
The quest for authenticity
Authenticity is a contested word, but if we think in terms of “authorship”, the independently owned and operated third place where both owner and customer feel a sense of ownership and reciprocal obligation provides much more authenticity than just another outlet in a chain of franchises.
While some hipster businesses that work in the gentrified inner city might not work so well in the outer suburbs, people who live in these suburbs are not a different species. The desire to get out of your house, to socialise, to see your neighbours out in the community or to be “together alone” is <a href="https://www.propertyobserver.com.au/https://academic.oup.com/heapro/article/17/4/351/607018" target="_blank">not limited</a> to the inner city. There is no reason people in the suburbs would not respond to independently owned businesses, rather than the remotely controlled, rationalised franchises – see “<a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781405165518.wbeosm001.pub2" target="_blank">McDonaldization</a>” – that populate so many suburban shopping centres.
Quality third places are just as important in the outer suburbs, which are becoming increasingly diverse in terms of life stage, ethnicity, culture and employment type.
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256227/original/file-20190130-108355-1hsx8w4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=1000&amp;fit=clip"><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/256227/original/file-20190130-108355-1hsx8w4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&amp;q=45&amp;auto=format&amp;w=754&amp;fit=clip" alt=""></a>
(Source: Author provided)
Keeping ‘McDonaldization’ at bay in Fitzroy, Melbourne.
So what’s the solution?
Property developers are often quick to point out that local retail is not economically viable in new suburbs unless it consists of supermarkets and fast-food outlets and is surrounded by tarmac. Local (walkable) retail is invariably compared on price to the large impersonal shopping malls that draw shoppers in from the suburbs. However, the lure of a small local shopping precinct, where “third place” businesses such bars, cafes and restaurants and community hubs can operate at survivable rents, is a different proposition.
This is not a new suggestion. Various models have been <a href="https://www.propertyobserver.com.au/https://academic.oup.com/heapro/article/17/4/351/607018" target="_blank">proposed</a> to subsidise retail rents, provide independent freehold of individual retail premises, or rent control.
Developers have been reluctant to help with this as it not profitable (for them). Local authorities have also been reluctant to engage developers on this front.
There are, however, some encouraging exceptions to this. Some more enlightened developers see the sustained benefit of creating <a href="http://www.yourneighbourhood.com.au/diningprecinct-evertonplaza-791staffordroad-evertonpark/" target="_blank">community hubs</a>. The argument is for a social good rather than a purely economic one.
The outer suburbs are spatially different to the inner city – history and late capitalism have taken care of that. Local authorities need to think about current inflexible zoning regimes and about how small socially beneficial businesses can be encouraged.
Suburbs do not empty out during the day. In a post-work and ageing society, suburbs will become socially barren places to live unless there are lively hubs where people can leave the private realm of the home and see each other in a welcoming environment in which they feel some authorship. <img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/110177/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" style="border: none !important; box-shadow: none !important; margin: 0 !important; max-height: 1px !important; max-width: 1px !important; min-height: 1px !important; min-width: 1px !important; opacity: 0 !important; outline: none !important; padding: 0 !important; text-shadow: none !important;">
There’s more to the experience than just savouring the coffee in Fitzroy, Melbourne.
<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/peter-walters-170156" target="_blank">Peter Walters</a>, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, <a href="http://theconversation.com/institutions/the-university-of-queensland-805" target="_blank">The University of Queensland</a>
This article is republished from <a href="http://theconversation.com" target="_blank">The Conversation</a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-outer-suburbs-lack-inner-citys-third-places-a-partial-defence-of-the-hipster-110177" target="_blank">original article</a>.
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j.ballantyne1990-6AQqhLzZaK

Why outer suburbs miss out? A partial defence of the hipster: Peter Walters

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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/66515/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-basic" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1">
GUEST OBSERVER
The Australian Ugliness, architect and critic Robin Boyd wrote in 1960, incorporated the “background ugliness” of Australia’s cities: a suburbia of:
"… unloved veneer villas and wanton little shops, and big worried factories."
These are the kinds of suburban places that in 2016 sell at weekend real estate auctions for six or seven figures. Despite the frequent outcries of today’s residents of “Trendyville”, these buildings are readily converted to fashionable heritage homes, or demolished to make way for new apartment blocks.
Heritage has a history. The kinds of things and places that Australians have preserved and the ways they have gone about preserving them have expanded in recent decades.
This heritage exists not only in museums and galleries or at historic properties and CBD buildings. It also forms part of our everyday urban experiences: located in suburbs and neighbourhoods, along and between streets, among current and former factories, stores, pubs and homes.
<h2>Finding Trendyville</h2>
A place where this heritage history has played out dramatically has been in the inner suburbs of the Australian city.
Why call this place Trendyville? Without a conventional gentry, the term gentrification is arguably historically inappropriate for Australia. So we might instead consider gentrification as trendification, the inner suburbs as Trendyville, and the residents as trendies.
The trendies arrived in the late 1960s. Like hipsters today, few people considered themselves a trendy, except perhaps ironically. More commonly, a trendy was identified by another person based on dress, clothing and shopping bags. 
For urban historians Renate Howe, David Nichols and Graeme Davison, Trendyville evokes:
"… the junction between geography, culture and politics, on the road between memory and history."
The city of memory is a productive way of thinking about urban heritage. It is also a powerful way of tackling the relationship between cities, people and history.
<h2>Before Trendyville</h2>
Until the mid-to-late 20th century, the Australian inner suburbs – New Farm and Subiaco, Carlton and Glebe – were not the desirable places of today. 
The houses, terraces, villas, cottages and other buildings that lined the streets of Trendyville had been built in the 19th and early 20th century. By the post-war period, many of these buildings had become run down, perceived as both unsustainable and contrary to social progress: in need of urban renewal. 
Those people able to do so moved to the then-outer suburbs, and so the inner suburbs experienced population decline. Drawing on North American sociological thinking, Australian urbanists imposed similar “rings” on the nation’s cities. 
These rings included a CBD core for commercial activities, an underdeveloped inner circle, and an aspirational outer suburban circle. Post-war urban planners thought the emptying out of the inner-city – “the doughnut effect” – was inevitable. 
The residential suburbs of the inner circle were identified as transitional zones, assuming that aspiring residents would eventually seek out the outer suburbs. Urbanists designated these seemingly dilapidated areas as slums, to be cleared for comprehensive modern redevelopment
High-rise social housing schemes were built, inspired by French architect Le Corbusier. The results of these policies include the Brutalist Sirius Apartments in Sydney and the 1960s high-rise housing that circles inner Melbourne.
<h2>Heritage in Trendyville</h2>
From the 1960s, the backlash against these inner-suburban clearances was led by the trendies. Not everyone was enraptured by the “white-picket fence” suburban ideal. Following southern and eastern European migrants, students and middle-class professionals moved to the inner suburbs. Other people had never left, witnessing the demolitions around them.
With the assistance of the National Trusts and other sympathetic organisations, the trendies formed resident action groups to advocate for their urban heritage. Their efforts prevented further clearances, whether for modern housing or often freeways.
The union-imposed “green bans” – at places like the Rocks and Woolloomooloo, South Melbourne and Collingwood, Highbury Park, and Fremantle – was another powerful way to intensify this heritage advocacy. 
A particular achievement of the trendies was to redefine the boundaries of heritage. No longer were the things worth preserving limited to, say, grand 19th-century public and commercial CBD buildings or stately suburban mansions.
The trendies transformed Boyd’s “background ugliness” into heritage that warranted preservation. Australia’s residential vernacular, its neighbourhoods, streets and homes, were looked upon with increasing fondness. This occurred amid a shifting mentality toward community building, the environment, sustainability and local amenity.
Drawing on urbanists such as North American Jane Jacobs, heritage preservation became an aspect of community-making. The resident action groups brought people together, and the green bans helped people to claim their right to the city.
<h2>Trendyville’s troubles</h2>
From the 1970s, Trendyville became subject to new heritage laws, which sought to preserve its “historic character”. 
Although these heritage protections were in part intended to give residents a greater say, those responsible for making the assessments were nevertheless heritage experts, often distanced from the communities.
The trendies had arrived at a time when the inner suburbs were still perceived as in decline. The heritage protections had been implemented in response to their aesthetic and historical sensibilities. 
Today, those heritage protections envelope large and sought-after areas of the inner city. With Australia’s population booming, urbanists advocate for greater density. More people will need to live in existing suburbsto make our cities sustainable.
How heritage places are preserved and new places constructed amid living historic environments must be reconciled with these urban and social realities. Striking a balance between heritage, development and the desires of local communities is key. 
What it means to meaningfully preserve Trendyville’s heritage, Australian inner-suburbia, must be rethought for the 21st century. 
After all, as illustrated by recent calls to preserve Sydney’s Sirius Apartments (which were once opposed by heritage advocates) our understandings of heritage are always shifting.
James Lesh is PhD candidate, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies and Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne and author for The Conversation. He can be contacted <a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/james-lesh-257650" target="_blank">here</a>.
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