Power, Glamour and Angst

Inside Australia's Elite Neighbourhoods

Ilan Wiesel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9789811313660
• eBook ISBN:
  9789811313677
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping
• Index: Social Sciences

Power, Glamour and Angst is about the social and cultural life of three Australian neighbourhoods – Toorak (Melbourne), Mosman (Sydney) and Cottesloe (Perth) - which are home to some of the nation's wealthiest and most powerful citizens. The book explores how living in these neighbourhoods shapes the lifestyles, social networks and status of Australia's elites. The book explores the everyday rituals through which residents produce their neighbourhood's status. It maps residents' social networks and exposes the local institutions – including schools and sports or social clubs – in which access to such high-powered networks is granted or withheld. Power, Glamour and Angst examines how the collective social and cultural capitals of elite neighbourhoods are mobilised towards varied objectives, from initiation of business connections and opportunities, through to opposition against unwanted development or traffic, both sources of ongoing angst. Deeply conservative and resistant to change at their core, despite their wealth and power these communities have not always been successful in fully repressing external pressures. In the 21st century Australian city, even elite neighbourhoods must learn to adapt to population growth, urban densification and increased cultural diversity.

© The Author(s) 2019

Ilan WieselPower, Glamour and AngstThe Contemporary Cityhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1367-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Polarisation

Ilan Wiesel¹

(1)

School of Geography, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Ilan Wiesel

End Abstract

Elite Neighbourhoods at the Second Gilded Age

World War I brought an abrupt end to what was known as the ‘Gilded Age’, a term coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner as the title of their 1873 book. Twain and Warner’s novel depicted the prosperity—but also the greed and speculation—that drove extreme inequality in the late nineteenth century in the United States. There was more wealth than ever before, and yet, it was concentrated in fewer hands than ever. Similar trends of polarisation were evident in other developed countries (Piketty 2014).

The first gilded age collapsed with World War I. The destruction and cost of the war saw the wealth gap radically diminish from its historical high to new historical lows. And yet, throughout the twentieth century, wealth inequalities in developed countries rebounded steadily, slowed down only temporarily by World War II and the rise of Keynesian economics mid-century. By the start of the twenty-first century, the wealth gap has almost fully bounced back to the record highs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Piketty 2014, p. 122). Riding the waves of globalisation, a technological revolution, cultural change, and neoliberalism (Irvin 2013; Freeland 2013), the wealth of the wealthiest 1% of global citizens—and primarily the top 0.01%—has skyrocketed, leaving the rest of the world far behind (Piketty 2014; Credit Suisse 2016). A second gilded age has begun.

Globally, in 2017, the wealthiest 1% owned 50.1% of all household wealth, up from 45.5% in 2000. The wealthiest 1% own approximately 25% of wealth in Europe, and approximately 35% in the United States. Yet, even ‘the 1%’ is a crude category, masking the fact that much of its wealth is concentrated in the hands of an even smaller category of people, the so-called super-rich. Since 2000, the number of millionaires globally has nearly doubled, increasing by 170%. The number of individuals with a net worth of US$50 million rose five-fold, “making them by far the fastest-growing group of wealth holders” (Credit Suisse 2016, p. 18). Just eight of these billionaires own as much wealth as the 3.6 billion people who make up the poorest half of humanity (Oxfam 2018).

Australia’s self-proclaimed ethos of egalitarianism is captured in the popular slogan of ‘fair go’ and the title of its national hymn ‘Advance Australia Fair’. Yet, this ethos is contrasted by the actual levels of wealth inequality evident in Australia—over half the national household wealth is owned by the wealthiest 10% of Australians, with the wealthiest 1% owning between 15% and 23% (Sheil and Stilwell 2016; Oxfam 2018).

Such studies of national and global trends in wealth inequality (Piketty 2014; Credit Suisse 2016) offer compelling statistics as evidence of the second gilded age. But how does such extreme and rapidly rising concentration of wealth manifest in the everyday realities of an increasingly urbanised world? And, in what ways are the privileges of elites supported by the structures, dynamics, and everyday lives of the cities and neighbourhoods in which they reside?

Exploring similar questions, Davis and Monk’s (2011) edited collection Evil Paradises: Dreamworlds of Neoliberalism vividly portrays the landscapes of a contemporary ‘savage, fanatical capitalism’, and the extreme inequality it produces. Evil Paradises highlights the extreme spatial segregation and fortification of wealth in man-made utopias across the globe: an amusement park in the Egyptian desert; a private natural reserve in the United States; faux-Californian suburbs in Iran and Hong Kong; the fantasy-like megaprojects of Dubai; and even the luxury securitised neighbourhoods accommodating both foreigners and the local elites in Kabul. From city-sized supermalls, through to artificial island suburbs, these “alternative universes” of the super-rich embody their desire for “infinite consumption, total social exclusion and physical security, and architectural monumentality – that are clearly incompatible with the ecological and moral survival of humanity” (Davis and Monk 2011, p. xv).

In this book, I take Davis and Monk’s (2011) line of argument a step further. More than just sites for the wasteful spending of capital, drawing on Bourdieu (1986), I demonstrate how elites’ paradises serve as sites for accumulation of capital, and as such are instrumental to elites’ domination of the second gilded age. The premise of such a perspective is the two-way relationship between the polarisation evident at the scale of the city—growing segregation and inequalities between rich and poor neighbourhoods (Pawson and Herath 2015; Randolph and Tice 2017)—and the polarisation that is evident in measures of global and national distribution of wealth (Piketty 2014; Credit Suisse 2016; ABS 2016). The growing gap between neighbourhoods is not only a symptom of the global polarisation problem, but integral to it. As such, the urban neighbourhood is also potentially an important site for intervention to address growing inequalities.

The book examines these questions through a study of three of Australia’s most affluent suburbs: Toorak in Melbourne, Mosman in Sydney, and Cottesloe in Perth. The terms ‘neighbourhood’ and ‘suburb’ are used interchangeably in Australia and, as such, the term ‘suburb’, as I use it throughout this book, does not necessarily indicate low-density urban form or distance from the city centre as it does in other cultures.

As urban neighbourhoods, Toorak, Mosman, and Cottesloe, while certainly glamorous, are not as fanciful as some of the ‘evil paradises’ depicted in Davis and Monk’s collection. Furthermore, these suburbs’ perceived vulnerability to the savages of metropolitan growth—especially thoroughfare traffic and residential densification—appears contradictory to the narrative of an all-powerful elite on the rise. Yet, these three suburbs are important as sites in which Australian and other elites build their power and capital in its three guises: economic, social, and cultural (Bourdieu 1986). Understanding this complex, at times contradictory, story of glamour and angst in Australia’s elite neighbourhoods is key to understanding social class relations in the cities of the second gilded age.

My intention in this book is not to offer a comprehensive account of the histories of the three suburbs, which have been documented by others (Souter 1993; Marchant James 2007; Foster 1999). Nor is the book particularly concerned with statistical measurement of the socioeconomic profil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Polarisation
• 2. Prestige
• 3. Networks
• 4. Diversity
• 5. Mobilisations
• 6. Densification
• 7. Thoroughfare
• 8. Contradictions
• Back Matter