Creative suburbia alive and well: QUT study

Many Australian creative industries workers shun the fashionable inner city and choose instead to live and work in outer suburbia, a university study has found.

Queensland University of Technology’s Professor Terry Flew said a three-year Australian Research Council study of outer suburbs had overturned the popular view that workers in creative industries were overwhelmingly attracted to inner-city areas.

In fact, many creative workers said they liked being away from the inner city and what they described as its distractions and conformity, preferring outer suburbia.

“There was less pressure to conform to the stereotype of the groovy, inner-city creative worker,” Professor Flew said.

He said many creative industries workers chose to live in outer suburbs not only for their more affordable real estate but also for a quieter environment and access to nature areas and family-friendly amenities.

The workers included graphic designers, multimedia developers, architects, musicians, visual artists and advertising people.

The Creative Suburbia research project is being undertaken by QUT’s Professor Flew, Professor Phil Graham, Christy Collis and Emma Felton, and Monash University’s Anna Daniel and Mark Gibson.

The researchers interviewed more than 130 creative industries workers in Redcliffe, Springfield and Forest Lake in Queensland and Frankston, Dandenong and Caroline Springs in Victoria.

While technically not “suburbs” of Brisbane and Melbourne, the areas were chosen because they were more than 10km and less than 35km from the centre of the larger cities.

“Generally they are at the end of suburban train lines and are a mix of established and new suburbs,” Professor Flew said.

He said the project set out to investigate the common assumption that outer suburbs were dull unproductive places, a kind of “death zone” according to some media, and that creative workers were only attracted to “buzzing” inner-city areas.

Professor Flew said Census data showed that inner cities accounted for only 20 per cent of urban employment and that Australia’s outer suburbs were multicultural and diverse.

QUT Creative Industries lecturer Dr Christy Collis said some creative workers liked being removed from the inner city.

“‘They liked being removed from the buzz and what some people called the distraction of the city,” she said.

“Another counter-intuitive finding was that some like to be away from what they see as the conformist culture of the inner city where they have to dress a certain way.

“They say that in the outer suburbs they feel free to experiment and enjoy non-conformity.”

Professor Flew said the research findings would help inform government urban cultural policy which he said currently viewed inner-urban amenity as a “kind of honey pot to creative people”.

“There is a strong view around the world that to attract creative workers you have to build fancy galleries, cafe precincts and creative industry hubs as incubators in the inner city,” he said. “Some creative workers like that but that policy has also missed a lot of workers.”

Professor Flew said government needed to recognise that creative workers were present in outer suburbs and needed help with networking and business development suited to their unique needs.