Modernity’s paradox: Fatter, sicker and sadder - Part 2

The other side of the suburban divide

In the new spaces of affluence, the relative absence of a public domain impoverishes the young in a different way to the poor (see Part I), excluding them from the principal civic resources and social experiences that nourish the development of strong citizenship values.

The deserving: Too much dessert

Let’s imagine the situation of the children and youth who might live in the master planned estate that might eventually replace Lansdowne Caravan Park. It is also likely to look very crowded, in a middle class way. Lots of large houses, many of them two stories, packed into small lots, separated by narrow streets and pocket parks – it may or may not have footpaths.

Some commentators have derisively called such estates “McMansion Land”; perhaps because their supersized contents seem steroid “enhanced”. In truth, the observation is condescending and rather unfair. The large structures reflect a growth in the national appetite for more housing space that has been a feature of Australian life for much of the 20th century and now beyond. At the same time, the plots on which they are set have been dramatically compacted as the "urban consolidation diktat" has been applied in various ways to new subdivisions by state and local governments.

Hawley, resorting to mild hyperbole, describes contemporary project homes on the newer Sydney master planned estates:

Four bedroom, spiral staircase, open-plan, kitchen-family-dining-lounge, multiple bathrooms, rumpus room, big-screen media room, barbecue, spa, multi-garage bigger-is-beautiful-is-better houses.

Whilst condescension is unwise, there are growing reasons for disquiet about McMansion Land. The growth in housing girth is an environmental concern - the suburban palazzos are energy guzzlers - and also, perhaps, a health concern. Evidence on the national epidemic in childhood obesity points to a relationship between the expanding girth of dwellings and the growing waistlines of their inhabitants.

The contemporary suburban mega house internalises activity, allocating large amounts of space to passive recreation: home theatres, lounges, rumpus and computer rooms, courtyards, and monster garages for the storage of adults’ toys.

Gwyther explains: “They love cocooning inside their McMansions, which are like castles, fun factories and mini resorts in one”. These relatively sedentary residential landscapes contrast with older suburban forms that were premised on far greater levels of outdoor activity, especially for children.

The traditional backyard has gone, along with its trees, garden veggie patch, often pool, washing line and shed, where children could let their bodies and imaginations run free and build tree houses, cubbyhouses, billycarts, dig in the dirt and invent games. Now, it’s indoor computer games, and, given there’s no room for a decent run-up in most McMansion courtyards, children are driven to sport and formally organised activities most days of the week.

Those “McKids” who actually do participate in organised sport - a chore for parents working long hours on the mortgage treadmill - will experience at least some level of physical activity. But missing from these new suburban landscapes are the opportunities for spontaneous, constant free play available to children of previous generations, and those lucky enough still to have backyards. As Hawley observes, many parents cite space as the principal reason for rejecting “inner city shoe boxes” in favour of the new master planned estates. And yet free, permeable space seems to be almost absent from the new residential landscapes.

The freedom and permeability of activity space is further reduced by the highly routinised and supervised lives imposed on contemporary middle class urban children. The Geographer, Paul Tranter, believes that Australian children are subjected to unprecedented levels of surveillance and control, driven by an epidemic of parental and institutional concern about environmental risk and crime. Many now live highly scripted lives, marked by pervasive anxiety and the absence of free and independent play. Cadzow (Sydney Morning Herald, January 17, 2004) writes of the "bubble wrap generation":

So reluctant are we to let our offspring out of our sight that we drive them to the playground and everywhere else rather than allow them to walk or ride their bikes. Strapped into the backseat of the family sedan, chauffeured to and from school, soccer practice and piano lessons, middle-class Australian boys and girls are like pampered prisoners - cosseted, constrained and constantly nagged.

Children need autonomy from adults for their psychic and social development: little wonder then that the “pampered prisoners” flee the bounds of their suburban cells for the horizonless expanses of computer generated worlds where freeplay is always possible. They may not be permitted to climb trees, ride their bikes to the shops or go unaccompanied to parks, but here they can wage global, even intergalactic, wars, build cities and even design the perfect family.

The problem with simulated worlds, however, is that they are pretty poor training grounds for real life. A tour of duty in SimCity can never emulate the sensuous complexity of urban life; life with the Sims is unlikely to help a child to cope with any family dysfunctionality or prepare them for the joys and strains of adult life. The “ordinary maladies” of life come, then, as insurmountable shocks to bubble wrap kids. Melbourne clinical psychologist, Andrew Fuller, tells Cadzow, “when bad things do happen, they’re just thrown for six. They end up in my bloody therapy room and I’m sick of it”.

Despite evidence which shows Australia to be a greatly safer place for children than it was three decades ago, an obdurate culture of fear drives the ever increasing parental colonisation of children’s lifeworlds. The colonisation project seems strangely disconnected to real social evidence, including, for example, a recent, and hardly reported, Australian Bureau of Statistics survey that shows a significant drop in crime in New South Wales between 2001-3 and an increase in the number of people who reported that their neighbourhoods were crime free.

The rising numbers of kids in therapy and the epidemic of child obesity are two potent markers of the extent to which fear rules our cities and communities.

A battle quietly rages

Like most advanced capitalist nations, Australia has long craved greater wealth, more freedom to use it, and more stimulating ways to expend it. Before the neo-liberal revolution three decades ago, the lust for gold was restrained by a diverse set of moderating influences with deep cultural roots (conservatism, religion, socialism, conservationism). The manipulated panic about “state fiscal crisis” that brought neo-liberalism to power throughout the English speaking world in the late 1970s saw the suspension of these moderating orders. The “growth machine” economy unleashed by neo-liberals promised to drive whole nations to heaven through the eye of the materialist needle.

The health assessment I have offered for our urban societies suggests that the "growth fetish" is a morbid desire whose indulgence has generated material enrichment at the cost of great civic and human impoverishment. A nation that denies the chance for health and happiness to many of its young is not a rich society, because it is brutish by nature and because it thieves from its own future. The attack on the young suggests that we have, as a society, lost the (re)generative impulse that is a precondition for a national future worth having.

Further, the open disregard of successive national and state governments and business elites for the highly apparent, indeed blatant, polarisation of our cities reeks of doom. The steady, nihilistic progress towards an Australia Divided is surely a Death March. Finally, the attack on the public domain represents another way in which Australia has campaigned against its own future, producing urban communities and cities that cannot undertake the task of nurturing and constantly modernising the civic values that underscore nationhood.

This short essay on the declining well-being of our urban young people places new demands on a politics of hope, which must somehow enter a dialogue with our heretofore voiceless children and youth. From this conversation must emerge a much sharper vision of what is needed to restore the health and happiness of our children. But we are a long way from even beginning this discussion. Australian children remain silent because they remain largely ignored.

Amidst this ruckus, ordinary things are happening that will shape the future. Children and youth are trying to live and grow, everywhere quietly in the shadows of "great events". The glowing structures erected around them, and the riches piled up in their sight, provide no shelter it seems from a Nature enraged by human perfidy. Our misshapen young must pay the debts that we accumulate. Fatter, sicker and sadder they face the future of furious miserable change that we are shaping for them.