Built on the land of the Bidjigal and Caramaragal peoples
I approach with caution a contribution to an issue of Architecture Australia whose theme is the suburbs. I grew up in the western suburbs of Sydney and carry with me a significant amount of unresolved rage about the inequality that they exploit and have now come to symbolize. I used to despair when architects ignored and dismissed the suburbs, but I despised it when they began to fetishize them as an exotic “other.”
Of course, suburbs have always existed. Ildefons Cerdà devoted a chapter to them in his book General Theory of Urbanization (1867). He understood them as a complement to the “urbs” – his conception of urbanization, derived from the term urbum, the plow used by the Romans to mark the line of enclosure when a city was being founded. He described the suburbs’ relationship to the urbs as “… an indispensable accessory, an unavoidable appendage, a necessary complement.”
The co-dependency that Cerdà described has never seemed to be a
