Eat, Drink and be Civil

Emma Felton

A City in Transition: Brisbane

• Shift from provincial town to emerging global city

• Political and social legacies which contradict its new image and presentation

• Research recognized the importance of the material and discursive city

Legacies

• Historically low public expenditure on education, art, cultural resourcing.

• British migrants encouraged over other ethnicities.

• Agrarian development favoured over urban development.

• Ultra-conservative, authoritarian State governments for many decades.

• Climate of anti-intellectualism

Brisbane

‘Australia was born urban and quickly grew suburban’

(Graeme Davison 1994)

• Urbanism kept at bay in Brisbane for most of 20th century.

• Shift from suburban to urban, denser modes of living requires different techniques and competencies.

Changes over a decade

• Influx of migration, large and diverse population increase

• Large expenditure of public and cultural infrastructure

• Largest % increase in jobs of all capital cities since 1990.

Changes over a decade

• Increase in Education expenditure in line with other States.

• Enhanced and increased public spaces eg: parks and boardwalks

• Boost to cultural and arts infrastructure

New ways of being in the city

• Growth in city space offers new modes of engagement, identification and ways of being in the city.

• Enhanced opportunities for sociability.

• Encounters with difference

'The city is a place of our meeting with the other.’

Barthes 1982

Sociability and the City

• Maffesoli’s (1997) concept of tribes based on shared affinities and lifestyles, mostly grounded in the city.

• Central cohesive element of tribes is emotion - based upon the affective, life affirming impulse of ‘being togetherness’

City Space is social space

‘Social relations are constructed spatially. Spatial relations are structured socially’

(Watson 2005)

The Café and Sociability

• Café a part of an ontology of the city

• Early coffee houses marked by a diversity of patrons from all walks of life, except women

• Gender implications in contemporary cafe

Civility and the cafe

• Role of public and semi-public space enables modes of civil interaction

• Habermas’s concept ‘public sphere’ based on reasoned exchange and open and inclusive character

• Conversation aimed at dialogical egalitarian

• I spend a lot of time dining in the Valley’s restaurants and going to the clubs and pubs in the area. I have quite a few friends and family also living in the area …

 • It is close to areas such as the Valley where

myself and friends shop, socialise and relax.

 • Most of my friends live in the area.

An unfinished story

• Brisbane has a buoyant economy and small population

• Population growth and urban development will continue to shape the city as different to its provincial past