Emerging post-Fordism : deindustrialisation and transition in the suburbs

Deindustrialisation and the shift to post-Fordism is changing Australian cities and shaping not just the trajectory of suburban (re)development but what the suburbs mean in contemporary Australian life. Suburban places and spaces reflect the prevailing logics of their development. Australian suburbs, for instance, were predominantly established during the industrial period and many retain an emphasis on cars and a structure that supports an industrial workforce. Deindustrialisation is a process of change that prompts placemaking themes of renewal, one of which is gentrification. Central to gentrification in the context of deindustrialisation is the negotiation of a range of contested images, aesthetics, values and understandings of place. This is the starting point for this thesis, which examines the repositioning of an Australian suburb in the context of such contradictory processes. Through case study research in Mayfield, a deindustrialising suburb of the Australian city of Newcastle, and utilising complementary qualitative methods, including participant observation, this thesis examines and analyses official and unofficial discourses of place. The thesis argues that in Mayfield, a discourse of gentrification explicitly oriented around regeneration and change was mobilised through the efforts of local interests who positioned themselves as gatekeepers over images of the suburb and its future. Central to this discourse is the concept of heritage, which is used as a key frame of reference for shaping ideas about Mayfield as undergoing gentrification. An analysis of the dynamics of heritage-gentrification in Mayfield reveals subtle meta-themes of transitionality that resonate with broader tropes of placemaking in a post-industrial, post-Fordist context. Where the privileging of gentrification seeks to ‘improve’ or capitalise on elements of Mayfield's physical, social and symbolic environment, it also seeks to control and sanitise others and a tension is evident between the dominant discourse of gentrification and other, less intentional elements of the suburb’s identity. These other ‘placemaking’ activities reflect the pre-existing logics of the suburb that are firmly rooted in its industrial, stigmatised past. Two activities emerged as significant in this context: skateboarding and loitering. An analysis of these activities again reveals the key theme of transitionality as important but played out and realised in very different ways. Drawing on the theories of Lefebvre and Baudrillard in particular, the thesis probes the tensions that emerge at the intersection of Fordist and post-Fordist imaginings and uses of suburban space. It argues that deindustrialisation cannot be understood in terms of a dichotomy between the spaces shaped by a Fordist past and those imagined in a post-Fordist future. Rather, Fordism and post-Fordism, and the real and imagined spaces that they create, coexist in tension in the context of transitionality which frames and orders notions of place in the deindustrialising suburb. Transitionality is a dynamic space within which images of a suburb's future are negotiated and contested in the context of its everyday present and stigmatised past.