Mundane Multiculture: Belonging as Spatial Practice in Suburban Sydney

Abstract

Global cities are being reconfigured through multiple transformations. Cities are places of increasing heterogeneity as a result of heightened flows of human mobility, setting the stage for negotiations of strangerhood and intercultural encounter. They are epicentres for new registers of belonging, allegiance and citizenship arising in the context of these broader transitions. Drawing on relational theories of the city and critical readings of urban diversity, this thesis interrogates how multi-ethnic neighbourhoods shape experiences of belonging for migrant inhabitants. It argues that pluralist policies largely attempt to coordinate and contain urban diversity, often leaving yawning fissures between politicised rhetoric and the lived socio-materialities of the city. These processes are particularly evident in the city of Sydney, the preeminent global city in Australia, a ‘nation of immigration’. This study and its analysis offers an alternative to conventional migration studies that privilege the ethnic lens, by applying a place-based approach and a Lefebvrian frame of analysis to residents’ place making practices in a highly diverse, transitional suburb. The research uses urban ethnographic methods, including observation and interviews with migrant residents and local ‘space managers’, to analyse the interactional and sociospatial orders of three suburban public spaces. Drawing on this rich empirical data, the study not only argues that local space is produced at the intersection of spatial practices, regimes of urban governance, and multicultural discourses, but that it is fundamental to understanding migrants’ subjective experience of ‘being at home’ in both local and national space. This approach provides critical insight into the uneven integration of arrivals into collective urban culture, as well as possibilities for generating urban civilities in a unique study of Campsie, New South Wales. If new processes of exclusion are regulating human flows at sovereign borders, it is critically important to also understand how spatial marginalisation unfolds in the intimate spaces of the increasingly diverse and mobile city.