It feels like a truism that significant cultural movements are born in the middle of cities.
But how true is that truism? It’s hard to seperate Detroit techno, for example, from the Motor City’s hard, industrial heart. But the sound was created around 50 kilometres away in Belleville, a small Michigan city of around 3,000 people, by three comfortably middle-class dudes: Derrick May, Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson. Maybe we just think cultural movements start in the centres of cities because they’re inevitably absorbed by them.
We rolled our chair over to the desk of Steve Duck, editor of our masthead Complex Australia, to put some meat on the idea.
The suburbs are growing
Steve was born in Penrith and lives in Narre Warren. He’s a testifier to what the Australian Government Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development research shows: that the highest population growth in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth is happening outside of inner-urban belts:
State government population projections anticipate that the Outer sector will have the largest share of projected population growth (65–76 per cent) and job growth (34–55 per cent) in each of the four cities through to 2031.
More people in these overlooked areas means more-diverse communities—and new opportunities for brands to create authentic connections with them. Steve sees it in more than the statistics: in 2009, he co-founded streetwear label Saint Side with Mark Gale in St Albans, a suburb he freely admits is “not a place anyone would go, you know, willingly”. There, they turned their stew of interests in “California culture, lowrider beach cruisers, West Coast rap, vintage basketball stuff, khakis and Chucks” into a brand. Now Saint Side has a shop in Melbourne’s CBD—moving from the suburbs in, not the other way around.
“Suburban areas are where the next waves are going to come from, and that’s where brands should be focusing their attention—to capture the youth who are going to be dictating the trends of tomorrow.”
The future is here; it’s just over there
Saint Side anticipated a curve that’s got nowhere to go but up. Steve: “Housing affordability and gentrification have shifted the demographics between the inner city and the suburbs. The pioneers, the people who shape youth culture and create the wave for the rest of us to ride, are always from lower socio-economic areas—and that’s traditionally been the inner city. So, naturally, brands focus on the inner city. But suburban areas are where the next waves are going to come from, and that’s where brands should be focusing their attention—to capture the youth who are going to be dictating the trends of tomorrow.”
Moving forwards, backwards
In reality, this dictation has already started; everybody, grab pen and paper. Steve, as editor of Complex Australia, is observing and reporting on it. “If we look at last year here in Australia,” he says, “one of the best releases was B Wise’s album Area Famous. B Wise is from the south-western suburbs of Sydney, and he wears that very proud. I was a big supporter of another rap release that came out last year by a young kid named Tasman Keith—coincidentally, his EP was called Mission Famous. He’s from a remote Indigenous community, a mission, so his whole steez is representing his mission.” The inner-city rapper’s influence spreading from the streets to suburban bedrooms is a cliché that’s starting to get moths on it. Things are working the other way around.
Making an impact
This about-face is only going to get more in-your-face, and Steve sees a chance within it for brands to build one-to-one relationships with their audiences. There’s “a cluster of less-jaded people in the suburbs who are going to be just as valuable to a brand as people in the inner city. Taking the brand to them is going to have a longer-lasting impact,” he says.
“When a sneaker brand brings a football activation to Dandenong, think about the impact that’s going to have on those kids’ lives—when an actual brand brings something that’s funded to their neighbourhood. The sense of civic pride will be monumental.
“I spend a bit of time in Dandenong. Entire soccer pitches right across from the train station are always occupied by two teams, and they aren’t organised leagues. These are just kids playing soccer, and they’re always there. So if I wanted to do a football thing, that’d be the first place I’d go.”
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