Suburbs for sale : buying and selling the great Australian dream

![CDATA[The purpose of this this essay, is to explore some of the contours of the changing suburban landscapes across the city of Sydney, while at the same time analysing how conventional understandings and descriptions of ‘the suburbs’ have tended to implicitly endorse an assumption that the outer suburban areas contain little of interest or value, and are therefore to be either viewed negatively or simply ignored. It is on these grounds that suburban landscapes have generally been seen as both geographically and symbolically peripheral to the major dramas and dynamics of urban life. Negative terms such as suburban sprawl, blight, and McMansions follow very much in this tradition of rejection. But rather than simply dismissing these terms and ideas as simply more examples of a long-standing pattern of suburban condemnation, I’d like to see them as essential parts of the ongoing narratives or stories about the city and its diverse spatial existence. Such terms and descriptions, including the manifesto which begins this essay, not only provide important accounts of the way the city is physically changing but clues into the way in which it also being understood. These images, stories, and condemnations of the way some people choose to live their lives, reveal how we both construct and find order in the city in which we live, and the kinds of traditions of thought we draw on in order to do so. They are in this respect ways of trying to understand and to make sense of the city, that site which, according to Michel de Certeau, is ‘the most immoderate of human texts (De Certeau 1984: 92).]]