ABSTRACT
In the social sciences much has been written about ‘community’, and more recently about ‘social capital’ – a shift in focus and terminology that is interesting in itself. Much of this writing has been focused on the issue of social connectedness and social harmony or conflict, often framed as ‘community cohesion’, and more recently conceptualized as a ‘depletion of social capital’ (see Putnam 2000, 2007), lamenting urban anonymity and social disconnect. High mobility, heterogeneous populations, socio-economic fragmentation and the pursuit of individual success overriding communal considerations in the context of modern urban living and global capitalism have all been cited as reasons for this attenuation. A recent surge of interest in ‘social cohesion’ – a notion closely intersecting with
community and social capital – comes mainly from ethnically diverse Englishspeaking ‘immigrant societies’ (Robinson 2005; Chan, To, and Chan 2006). Social cohesion usually becomes a matter of intense public interest after a flare-up in local conflict, such as incidences of ‘urban riots’. For example, Robinson (2005) analysed renewed policy interest in community cohesion in England following street confrontations in three English cities in summer 2001. A renewed emphasis on social cohesion by the Australian government in the late 1990s to 2000s has been seen by many as moving away from the ideology of multiculturalism, which treats
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2015 Vol. 38, No. 1, 75-91, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2014.939205
Introduction
In the social sciences much has been written about ‘community’, and more recently about ‘social capital’ – a shift in focus and terminology that is interesting in itself. Much of this writing has been focused on the issue of social connectedness and social harmony or conflict, often framed as ‘community cohesion’, and more recently conceptualized as a ‘depletion of social capital’ (see Putnam 2000, 2007), lamenting urban anonymity and social disconnect. High mobility, heterogeneous populations, socio-economic fragmentation and the pursuit of individual success overriding communal considerations in the context of modern urban living and global capitalism have all been cited as reasons for this attenuation. A recent surge of interest in ‘social cohesion’ – a notion closely intersecting with
community and social capital – comes mainly from ethnically diverse Englishspeaking ‘immigrant societies’ (Robinson 2005; Chan, To, and Chan 2006). Social cohesion usually becomes a matter of intense public interest after a flare-up in local conflict, such as incidences of ‘urban riots’. For example, Robinson (2005) analysed renewed policy interest in community cohesion in England following street confrontations in three English cities in summer 2001. A renewed emphasis on social cohesion by the Australian government in the late 1990s to 2000s has been seen by many as moving away from the ideology of multiculturalism, which treats
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2015 Vol. 38, No. 1, 75-91, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2014.939205
diversity as an intrinsic value, towards a new ‘assimilationism’, which sees social cohesion as being potentially threatened by ethnic diversity (see e.g. Parliament of Australia 1998). In this article, we focus specifically on the issue of community cohesion, using a
case study of two Melbourne suburbs. The two localities are geographically close, within the same local government area in the north of the city, but with considerably different socio-economic and ethnic profiles, and both in the process of dynamic social change.1 Melbourne’s cultural diversity and socio-demographic change were the key starting points of the study that this paper reports on. Over the past decade, Melbourne has become the main Australian immigration gateway city, receiving the highest numbers of overseas arrivals from increasingly diverse sources (ABS 2012). ‘Greater Melbourne’ now matches the ‘super-diverse’ London with 36.7% and 37% of foreign-born, respectively (ABS 2012b; BBC 2012). ‘Greater Melbourne’ contains 4 million people spread over 9990 km² (2011 Census) and is indeed a ‘city of cities’, composed of vastly different, but invariably ethnically diverse local areas and suburbs (Forrest, Poulsen, and Johnston 2003). We set out to explore what it is like to live in a Babylon-like city for the locally born, for long-term immigrants, and for those who have recently arrived. Our conceptual focus, which we illustrate by empirical data, is the impact of social
change on community cohesion in the context of suburban ethnic diversity. We identified different processes of social change in the two localities: in ‘Northburb’, they are best subsumed under the notion of gentrification; while in ‘Greenburb’, we framed the dominant process as ‘ethnic fragmentation’. We initially approached our fieldwork with a simple and grounded definition of community cohesion in mind, asking our participants about their suburbs – whether they found them safe, friendly and good places to live in, whether they knew their neighbours and got along with them – and worked inductively towards an empirically informed definition that includes the feeling of safety, inclusiveness, friendliness and other features of a neighbourhood and a suburb. The result is presented in Table 2 in the concluding section of the paper.
