Dr Simone Blair
The Australian Centre, University of Melbourne
Waterways: Water Lifestyles in Master Planned Communities
The advent of Master Planned Communities (MPCs), signals a change of direction in the way that the Australian suburban environment is being conceived. In these places relationships between people and their environment are no longer being ‘left to chance’. It is clear that ‘fully planned’ developments ‘embody’, through landscaping, a script that direct residents to conceptualise and interact with their environments in particular ways. These designs may be water intensive or water sparing. In many of these developments, water is foregrounded as a lifestyle choice, a choice that says something about the residents who live there and their understanding of their place in Australian society. The kinds of scripts – waterscapes and landscapes – that emerge in MPCs are a result of interactions between non-human agencies and the developer’s and resident’s own ideas about ‘nature’. Thus, these landscapes can ‘teach’ residents how to value and meaningfully engage with particular landscapes, while at the same time, MPCs, through their lakes, streams and wetlands can potentially inform resident’s everyday awareness of water cycles, water abundance and weather patterns. Through ethnographic research in different MPCs this project (commenced March 2007) seeks to explore how different suburban landscapes inform – if at all – resident’s understandings of both their place in the water-cycle and the status of water in their surrounds.
Biography
I have recently completed my PhD dissertation through The School of Social and Environmental Enquiry at The University of Melbourne. My thesis entitled “Shooting a Net at Gilly’s Snag: The movement of belonging among commercial fishermen at the Gippsland Lakes” was based on 15 months participant-observation fieldwork with commercial estuarine fishermen in Victoria’s southeast. Here, I explored the changing nature of fishermen’s social relationships, and their understandings of place, belonging and marine tenure in the context of rapid political and environmental change. Of particular relevance to my current research interests concerning water attitudes in suburban Melbourne was my socially and environmentally contextualised investigation of how commercial fishermen conceptualised their relationship to their environment, and in particular how they understood the lake’s ecology, catchment dynamics and water-places.
Email: s.blair@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au