Paper short abstract:

3175, 3976, 3805 - why and how do people 'rep' their neighbourhoods? Converging arts and anthropology, this paper attempts new understandings of suburban space and place that encompass its cumulative, changing and creative nature by focusing on young creatives in Melbourne's South-East suburbs.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the emerging creative scene in Melbourne's South-East suburbs. Between the central metropolis and vast rurality, fieldwork conducted in this stretch of suburbs reveals a diverse group of young people part of a rising creative community.

Navigating local 'street' culture against institutional and commercial presence, this essay explores the processes, tensions, and potentialities of place-making in the suburbs by charting where and how creativity occurs. This appears as a textural cultural landscape with creativity 'above' ground - largely through institutions - and 'below' ground through subversive place-making practices. The different ideas of being and becoming across this landscape empower decision-making and determine collective futures (Tuck and McKenzie, 2014).

Charting key community arts initiatives and individual experiences of creative practise, this study considers why and how young people in the suburbs mobilise their locality for creative expression, and their creativity for local purposes. Neighbourhoods are bound and constructed, branded and performed through the self; place is reified as something made through the cumulation of entangled threads of movement along which people live their lives (Ingold, 2011). This paper implicates creativity in the building and imagining of suburban identity and futurity.

Centring Massey's (2005) beckoning toward an alternative approach to understandings of space, this research harnesses alternative methodologies (mobile methods) and crosses disciplinary borders to urge for a convergence of arts and ethnographic practices.