A city of two tales : distinction, dispersal and dissociation in Western Sydney

Two competing narratives frame perceptions of Western Sydney. The first views the Cumberland Plain as accommodating the city's working class and migrants, the battlers in the bungalows who contrast with the affluent denizens of the Eastern and Northern suburbs. A more nuanced narrative has recently emerged recognising a more variegated social landscape, a patchwork of poor and prosperous places. Many residents of Western Sydney have enjoyed increased real incomes and have seen their houses increase enormously in value. At the same time those who are poor, unemployed, welfare-dependent have missed out on the fruits of the boom and been cut adrift from what Mark Latham called the 'aspirational classes'. The West is no longer the homogeneous landscape of the Australian Dream but a place of social polarisation and tensions, a microcosm of global processes. This paper will consider the role of public housing in this social mix. I will look at the egalitarian social engineering ambitions of those who planned this housing in the postwar years and how it has become residual accommodation for those on welfare rather than working class housing. I will take the example of Mt Druitt and explore the way in which the lines of social distinction are drawn, how locals experience and respond to the popular stigma that their region attracts. I will then consider current strategies to redevelop clusters of 'problem' public housing as 'mixed developments' under public/ private partnership arrangements and whether (as is the official conviction) this form of urban renewal is likely to confer more life opportunities on state tenants.