In from the Periphery: Becoming (G)locally Cosmopolitan in Springvale

Abstract

How might notions of what is cosmopolitan be geographically reinterpreted through the diverse settlement of recent migrants and refugees in Australia? This article brings this question to bear on Springvale, a suburb in the Australian city of Melbourne, discussing the area’s geographical circulation of people, businesses and products as a means of understanding the interstices between marginalised cultures or traditions and the role of architecture and the built environment in this context. Discussion of these questions involves the description of the physical and spatial environment of Springvale, concentrating on its commercial and industrial centres. In part, this illustrates the marginalisation of certain buildings and uses, but also how the process of establishing new kinds of activity and identity alters the nature of environments. The result is that these perceptually and geographically peripheral zones are paradoxically becoming centres in a diversifying metropolis, affording new nodes of usage and inhabitation that are arguably becoming sites of “local cosmopolitanism.”

Keywords:

• Architecture
• built environments
• refugees
• multicultural environments

The questions for the cosmopolitan citizen are something like: What are the grounds on which you stand when you assume you’re “standing” as a world citizen? Is the cosmopolitan world just a mélange of diversity and plurality, or do the fault-lines of difference demand the hard labour of cultural translation? Living and working in the interstices between cultures and traditions makes us aware of the complex relationship between material objects or ideas and their symbolic circulation.

—Homi Bhabha¹

As Australia’s suburbs have become sites for the settlement of diverse diasporas from the Global South, this has had implications for their self-identities and constructed environments. This article explores these implications through a discussion of the built environment of Springvale, a suburb of Melbourne where one of the city’s most culturally and linguistically diverse local communities has developed (fig. 1).

Figure 1. Aerial view of Springvale, October 3, 1958. Photograph by Jim Payens. Payens Collection, Museums Victoria (item MM 137213). Aerial view of Springvale, 2019, Google Maps.

While it has often been perceived that Australia has become more cosmopolitan, this has generally been framed in relation to cultural and social developments overseas, its increasingly mobile citizens (at least until the onset of COVID-19) and deliberate cultivation of the attributes associated with globalised sophistication. However, in its contemporary definitions, cosmopolitanism has also been related to people who have also moved selves and cultures across the world under less favoured conditions, in which the crossing of geographical boundaries might be understood in diverse ways as a contemporary condition.² Such definitions are inclusive of those displaced, in exile and/or re-territorialising themselves and their communities in lands distant from their origins, persons who have arrived at their new place of settlement as refugees, and by extension, the second and third generations of such settlers who have developed status and influence in their locally globalised environment.³ In this context, it is useful to deploy, as Tzaninis does, cosmopolitanism as a flexible construct, “an assemblage of practice and parlance,” that is situated wherever international migrants live their everyday lives.⁴ Bearing this deployment in mind, this article draws on the complexity of cosmopolitanism as it has come to be theorised, whether as “everyday cosmopolitanism,” “minority cosmopolitanism,” “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” “rooted cosmopolitanism,” or “working-class cosmopolitanism.”⁵ What all of this association of terms represents is a “thicker” view of what being cosmopolitan might mean in a diverse society. This “thickness” is also based in what might be termed “glocality” on the part of particular areas, in which the intersection of trade, exchange and cultural interaction within a local suburban environment is ordinarily overlaid with global networks, through personal and community connections, importing and exporting of goods and services.⁶

Within the Australian suburban context, this position can be seen in relation to other recent situated studies of “everyday” or “ordinary” cosmopolitanism in immigrant/multicultural locations. For instance, Hersi, et al., in their study of African-Australians in Brisbane’s suburb of Moorooka, describe the area as “undoubtedly a ‘cosmopolitan space’,” due to the presence of this community’s businesses as well as meeting and socialising places.⁷ Similarly, Greenwood notes in her discussion of the Sydney suburb of Cabramatta, that while its popular appraisal as being cosmopolitan is grounded in a kind of local cultural tourism, particularly food tourism—publicised as in the popular media in such a way that “to be familiar with Cabramatta was to know one of the secrets of the cosmopolitan city,”⁸ it also could be argued the suburb’s locals are being cosmopolitan in their invitation to cultural and social exchange. In this sense, “local” cosmopolitanism does not need to be externally validated; Williamson’s study of the Sydney suburb of Campsie noted the ordinariness of its “vernacular cosmopolitanism,” in contrast to top-down notions of the cosmopolitan.⁹ While such studies explore particular places at particular times, what they describe are dynamic social and physical environments, places in which, following Appadurai’s line of thought, “conscious choice, justification, and representation” are constantly affecting the construction and operation of cultures in such environments.¹⁰ The issue of agency is important here, and this is often raised within critical refugee studies within which refugee narratives are placed within the contexts of “freedom” (from the situations and places from which refugees have fled) and capitalist development.¹¹

The interest of this article is then how such everyday lives connect, influence and are influenced by the physical and spatial surroundings of the suburb in which they are situated. These conceptions of cosmopolitanism have an overlap with notions of “everyday multiculturalism,” in their emphasis on lived experience and quotidian practice, as well as a re-centring of the city’s identity away from its central business district and places of established dominant identity towards new centres (such as Springvale) which may be physically on the geographical and perceptual periphery of the metropolis.¹² The emphasis here, as Papastergiadis has suggested, is “not on claiming the city [suburb] in the name of cosmopolitanism, but on co-production of perspectives and social relationships for a coming community.”¹³ This interest extends into the role of the suburb in the co-constitutive relationship between cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism, taking the position that cosmopolitanism needs to be multicultural to be grounded in the everyday, and multiculturalism needs to be cosmopolitan to be more than a governmental instrument for controlling minorities.¹⁴ The difference between what is cosmopolitan and what is multicultural can be seen in terms of agency, of the increasing ability of minority communities to self-define their relations with locality, city, nation and world, coupled with the differences between first, second and further generations of particular backgrounds and the resultant degrees of mixing, reification or redefinition of identities. More broadly, the process of analysis underlying this article has involved exploring how the influx of diverse immigrants has led to recontextualisation of pre-existing urban environments as well as the development of new ones, to locally grounded cosmopolitanism within the recent history of a particular place and its cultures.

As a pretext to how these aims have been related to the current built environment of Springvale, a few words about the empirical bases of our study are warranted. As part of a larger research project on refugees, industry and settlement, local government and community organisations as well as individual community representatives were drawn upon for archival documents and recollections, overlaid with the authors’ extensive surveys of Springvale’s contemporary commercial and industrial streetscapes.¹⁵ In representing the dynamics of Springvale’s history and geography, this study has adopted the view that its built environment is a mixture of foci and flows, of (sometimes literally) fixed elements and the sometimes seen, sometimes unseen forces that run concurrently or counter to these elements. Springvale’s community is comprised of a variety of cultural groups and social groups, nodes and paths, flows, concentrations and lacunae, and these have been mapped as an integral part of a process of spatialising a variety of cultural, social, economic layers, and allowing them, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, to be seen as combinations of the “smooth” (the movement of communities to particular areas and sites, the contingent inhabitation and siting of industries, businesses and buildings, the responses of local government as it evolves from tolerance of the new to themed promotion of identity), and the “striated” (the working with regulations and zoning, the development of communities into organisations whether religious, commercial or social).¹⁶ Overlaid on what can be seen in space, this mapping has been used to explore how place/places are connected to a multiplicity of overlapping and intersecting memories. Mapping over time has also revealed how the tactical responses to contingencies and overarching forces have transformed into agency and the ability of individuals and communities to plan strategically, to shape how and whose memories are being preserved, commemorated and developed into futures.

The following section will provide a brief introduction to Springvale’s history, in particular the impact of demographic changes in the area from the mid-1970s onwards. Springvale, located approximately 35 kilometres from Melbourne CBD, is typical of many suburbs that have formed around Australian cities as they’ve carpeted farmland in low-density sprawl, a place of “utilitarian suburbanism” but relative accessibility in terms of acquiring homes, employment, and business opportunities (fig. 2).¹⁷

Figure 2. Springvale in relation to metropolitan Melbourne, including locations of Enterprise and other suburban hostels map. Map by authors, with “OpenStreetMap” GIS data.

Springvale and the Enterprise Migrant Hostel

Conflicts in Southeast Asia in the 1970s, particularly the war in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, led to a surge of human movement, initially to adjacent countries such as Thailand and Malaysia, then often followed by more significant journeys via plane or boat to destinations such as Europe, the Americas and Australia (fig. 3). The catalyst for Springvale’s distinctive contemporary character was the presence of the Enterprise Migrant Hostel, which served as transitional housing for over 30,000 migrants and refugees from its opening in 1969 until its closure in 1992. From the mid-1970s onwards it was one of the major centres for the settlement of refugees from Southeast Asia (the other being the Midway Hostel in Maribyrnong, in the northwest of metropolitan Melbourne). From 1976 until the early 1980s, a bulk of the hostel’s refugees originated from Vietnam, though there were also some from Laos and Cambodia. While certainly not the first major group of refugees to arrive in Australia, these refugees constituted the first major influx of immigrants from anywhere in Asia since the Racial Discrimination Act of 1975 fully replaced the previous Immigration Restriction Act (1901) or the “White Australia” Policy that had been adopted at the time of Australia’s federation in 1901.

Figure 3. Global map, Southeast Asian refugee movements. Map by authors.

The residents of the Enterprise Hostel initially sought employment and permanent housing in the immediate area. While some found work in nearby factories and other local businesses, as ex-refugees they often faced barriers to finding employment. Apart from racial prejudice, many found their previous qualifications were unrecognised and they had difficulties communicating in English.¹⁸ Surveys undertaken in Australia in the 1990s found a larger proportion of self-employment amongst former refugees than other migrants, a result of the lack of employment opportunities, and ex-refugees’ ability to see the entrepreneurial opportunities created by the demographic changes that their community represented.¹⁹ Some banded together in informal work arrangements. As one of our Cambodian-Australian correspondents recalls, “sewing was massive back in the day … all the aunties would get together and they would win those big contracts, all in refurbished and retrofitted garages.”²⁰ The collective impact of this development of new forms of local business can be read in the physical and spatial environment, most obviously in the commercial and industrial areas of Springvale and other suburbs where refugees were originally settled, but also in a more diffused manner across metropolitan Melbourne and, as parallel developments, in Sydney, Brisbane and other Australian cities across the country. Since arriving as refugees, most individuals and groups within places like Springvale started by being engaged, as de Certeau would put it, in tactics rather than strategies, making the most of the limited spaces and resources at their disposal to make distinct places through contingent transformations of the spatial and physical environment they found themselves in. However, as first, second and now third generations for these communities have become established, their environment might now be seen as the embodiment of local cosmopolitanism, rather than an enclave of marginalised ethnicity.

Surveying Springvale’s historical land use over the years reveals the progressive urban transformations before, during and after the Southeast Asian influx in the mid to late 1970s and early 1980s (fig. 4). Springvale in 1946 is a developing suburb within productive farmland; whereas by 1961 there are a business district, general/light industrial, and public zones, as much of the surrounding farmlands had been repurposed for industrial use. Also, a large area to the west zoned as “reserved residential” was temporarily used to accommodate the first influx of European migrants until the construction of the Enterprise Hostel in 1967. By 1985, the Enterprise Hostel site had been changed to a “public purpose” zone with a small allotment set aside for “business” in the immediate vicinity. Around the retail zone, public open space was introduced with a slight expansion of the business district into Buckingham Avenue, parallel to Springvale Road. This area has been further developed to the present day. The commerce on Springvale Road has expanded westward, eating into residential areas on Buckingham Avenue and other nearby streets. These developments can be attributed to migrant influences on Springvale’s built environment as their needs increased pressure in both commercial and industrial zones, and consequently influenced changes in local planning zones. While residential and commercial areas of Springvale have expanded, it is the suburb’s industrial zones that have seen more profound changes. Here, Southeast Asian settlers, as well as occupying industrial buildings to manufacture products, have also brought about changes of use of several sites, converting or constructing religious and community buildings amongst warehouses and factories. As a result, localities initially planned for light-industrial uses have now been transformed into mixed-use zones. By 2022, land use shows this significant shift in the local planning scheme, where some areas have been rezoned to match the built environment interventions of Springvale’s community.

Figure 4. Pre-Southeast Asian migrants’ settlement 1946, 1961, 1985, 2022. Victorian State Government historical land use maps: Aerial Survey of Victoria: Ringwood, Springvale (Adadtra Airways and Department of Lands and Survey, 1946); Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works Interim Development Order, 1961 (Department of Lands and Survey); Melbourne Metropolitan Planning Scheme, 1985 (Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works); Greater Dandenong Planning Scheme—Local Provision: Springvale, map no. 1, Amendment VC205, Environment, Land, Water and Planning, 2022 (Melbourne Metropolitan Planning Scheme Imperial Series). Drawings and annotations by authors.

The commercial zone in Springvale shows clear spines of Southeast Asian enterprises along Springvale Road and Buckingham Avenue, and the area has gradually become a major location for retail shops, restaurants, food outlets and a diverse range of services oriented towards communities of Southeast Asian origin (fig. 5). Nearby areas show how the development of the area has shifted in emphasis. For example, Springvale Market Square (built in 1987), located on Queens Avenue facing the railway line, has a vacant street frontage but its rear frontage has developed as part of a car park-centred retail development, a change that speaks of a community that has grown more affluent (fig. 6).

Figure 5. Springvale context map: the hostel, commercial, light industrial, and railway corridor. Google Earth satellite overlay. Map by authors.

Figure 6. Streetscape of Springvale Market Square: Queens Avenue and car park. Map and photographs by authors.

Buckingham Avenue is illustrative of how this process has further developed, to the point that it has become the commercial focus of Springvale. In the 1970s, Springvale Shopping Arcade was constructed, partially by adapting an existing retail arcade building fronting Springvale Road and connecting it to Buckingham Avenue. Then, in 1998, a major redevelopment of the street began with the demolishing of the Institute to make room for a much enlarged Springvale Shopping Centre.²¹ Since this time, the street has undergone remarkable change. There is no trace of the single-storey residential buildings that once occupied the street. Ageing retail spaces such as the Springvale Shopping Centre are now giving way to influences from urban Asian cities. New eateries now offer a “clean,” branded experience and no longer only cater to locals of Southeast Asian origin. A broader globalised Asian influence is also visible in the increasingly sophisticated spatial layout of the built environment, with the insertion of “lanescapes” connecting disparate buildings together, suggesting that the area’s “local” cosmopolitanism has now become part of a wider city’s cultural identity.

While the proliferation of increasingly sophisticated retail shops and restaurants projects a worldliness in relation to the growing “Asian century,” other forms of cultural shifting can be found in new building uses and typologies in the surrounding area. For instance, in the industrial zone of Springvale, in between a metal stamping factory and a workshop manufacturing kitchen cabinets, the casual visitor might be surprised to see the Guan Di Daoist temple along with its requisite Teo Chew community centre, established in a nondescript warehouse in the 1990s during a second wave of spatial occupation,²² and nearby, between other light industrial buildings, to also find the premises of the Hakka Chinese Association of Australia and the Australian Vietnamese Women’s Association (fig. 7).

Figure 7. Streetscape of Parson and Regal Avenue, showing the Guan Di Temple and other surrounding uses. Map and photographs by authors.

The siting of these religious and community buildings and uses, in a light industrial zone on the periphery of an outer suburb, raises various questions about why they are there and what this implies for the broader planning and urban landscape of the city. However, since these functional changes have been made, what was a light industrial zone of little cultural interest has become an area where social, cultural and religious activity has blended with industry in a manner quite unusual for an Australian suburb. More recently, these uses have been joined by other religious buildings, notably a Greek Orthodox Church, indicating that such a change has been influential as well as assisting communities of Southeast Asian origin. The Springvale of today is the culmination of this interplay where a novel urban environment is sustained by municipal infrastructure (fig. 8).

Figure 8. Buckingham Avenue showing the changes over the first two decades of the twenty-first century. Google Maps and Google Street view. Image editing by authors.

Goods, Services and Built Environments

As noted in the previous sections, food-related enterprises have been prominent in the development of Springvale. So perhaps it is the food networks that have formed within these communities that illustrate these links the best (fig. 9). Desires to have familiar foods where none were procurable and to maintain culturally differentiated food identities have been the principal motivation for the establishment of a great number of food manufacturing enterprises and the formation of networks to distribute their products, first locally and then city- and country-wide.

Figure 9. Geographical spread of food manufacturing and retail in Springvale, Google Maps, Image editing by authors. Photographs by authors.

Connections between localities where ex-refugees and other migrants settled formed early with the sharing of resources between food retailers. The Nan Yang Supermarket on Springvale Road has been running continuously since 1980, within a year of its owners’ arrival in Melbourne, and the owner recounts the sharing of stock between themselves and a similar supermarket in Richmond.²³ The establishment of food manufacturing facilities were further catalysts for the formation of networks within the Melbourne metropolitan area and occasionally further afield (fig. 10). As just one example, The Fortune Tofu produces their product in a small factory in Springvale, initially sending their tofu to local food retail establishments and restaurants. As the demand grew, they began selling to Asian supermarkets across Melbourne and then developed national distribution. Now, when Australian-made Asian food items are found in major supermarket chains all over the nation, this seems unremarkable, but this is evidence not only of increasing acceptability of a particular foodstuff with the Australian public, but also of the increasing centrality of Southeast Asian products as an integral part of an increasingly cosmopolitan national diet. As Springvale’s community has become more central as well as economically influential, goods are now moving according to multidirectional transactions, involving an increasing flow of Australian-made “Asian” products and produce to a global marketplace.

Figure 10. Local food production network map. Map by authors.

While the presence of goods, services and signage in various languages mark the physical environment as different to other suburbs of Melbourne, the architectural impact of these changes to Springvale’s built environment is more difficult to gauge. The character of Vietnamese-, Cambodian- or Lao-Australians’ commercial architecture is not distinct in its physical form. However, there are a few distinctive buildings and structures, and their relation to the general distinctiveness of the goods, services and signage compared to other Australian suburbs provide clues to broader implications of the suburb’s development. The Nam Sơn Vietnamese restaurant on Windsor Avenue, Springvale is one such adaptation. Established to serve Vietnamese and Chinese food, the restaurant occupied an existing shop space on the same block and within easy walking distance for residents at the Enterprise hostel. They are still serving phở to this day, albeit to a much wider community, in a building that hardly appears to have changed. As such, it represents many such businesses in the area. As the community of ex-refugees and related migrants grew and economic resources accumulated, they adopted and adapted many pre-existing businesses. In the 1980s, the change of ownership was not always obvious, but the visibility of Southeast Asian identity has steadily increased over the decades, often evidenced by successive small changes in signage. For example, the Kingsvale Bakery on the corner of Windsor Avenue and Springvale Road initially showed an innocuous sign on the Windsor Avenue side advertising Bánh mì. Later, it was rebranded to Tiệm bánh, and has since changed its identity to become various eating establishments, including the energetically named Saigon Oi.

The broader context of this development has involved a weaving of chronology and geography, initially through dangerous journeys across the globe, then locally with developing connections via trade and communication that has brought localities such as Springvale into re-centred global networks, not just as places of last resort and exile but as nodes, spatial inscription and transcultural placemaking.²⁴ Their presence may have started with the tentative occupation of space as a necessary survival tactic—but from such beginnings, members of these communities have become representations of globally as well as locally spatialised communities and strategic planners of their own communities’ environment, however contested that may still be.²⁵

Gateways, Nodes and Community Identities

Evidence of this, connected to the merging of community and governmental interests, can be seen in the recent development of symbolic gateways in Springvale, a phenomenon that has also happened in Melbourne’s other two suburbs with similar recent cultural histories, Footscray and Richmond (fig. 11).²⁶ The gateway at the south end of Buckingham Street is the most prominent and expressive public structure in Springvale, and in contrast to the abstracted forms of the smaller northern gate elements, it is composed as a traditional Sino-Vietnamese ceremonial gateway with a tiled roof or pailou.²⁷ While the intertwined histories of Vietnam and China mean there are strong resemblances between Chinese and Vietnamese architecture, arguments about their differences elide the much larger differences between either of these traditions and Cambodian or Lao architecture, suggestive (as these are many other cultures present in the Springvale area) of the impossibility of evenly or fairly expressing cultural representation in a singular work of architecture.²⁸

Figure 11. Gateways in Springvale, Footscray and Richmond. Google Street view. Image editing by authors.

Figure 12. Streetscape of Buckingham Avenue, Google Maps. Photographs by authors.

In a broader sense, the gateway signifies more than an internal discussion over public cultural representation. As a public structure the gateway represents government support, identifying the area around it as a place where the presence of minority communities is something to be celebrated rather than ignored or worried about. In this respect, as Springvale’s gateway was supported by the local business community, its intention was as much about branding as about “fixing” the identity of the place. As can be seen in the images, none of the architecture of the area, apart from the Daoist temple, is obviously culturally specific in its forms. Signage and visible products provide all the clues to identity, along with the identities of people engaged in running businesses, shopping and eating in the area (fig. 12). From a commercial point of view, such branding indicates a point of difference, with the intention of attracting customers and visitors from beyond the immediate neighbourhood, and leveraging this to economic advantage, and perhaps this has played a part in local communities gaining political influence, cultural content being an intrinsic part of the area’s commerce (noting that there are no equivalent gateways to residential districts). In other studies, conclusions have been drawn that the production of such culturally distinctiveness is about evoking cultural nostalgia and “engraving” identity in a new place of settlement.²⁹ But not only has identity has become intrinsic to contemporary local and economies, such identity is now globally projected, symbolically and literally in terms of goods, services and people in the context of an increasingly ascendant Asia.

In the emergence of this second and third generation of migrants as leaders—not only of local business organisations and culturally specific community organisations but as local government representatives and civil leaders—there is evidence that the local population is actively negotiating their place of influence within an increasingly Asia-centred globalised environment.³⁰ As outlined by councillor Richard Lim, a prominent local government figure of Chinese-Cambodian refugee background, the potential of Springvale to develop its multiple cultural identities more publicly and emphatically is based on commercial potential but also a desire to share what these communities have brought to the area and by extension to the city as a whole in terms of its multiple and glocalised identity:

My objective, my dream, is to change Springvale to be like a Southeast Asian country. I want to change from the street point of view, like in Malaysia, you know, [you] have an arcade, a covered arcade that has a lot of street food. … My goal is to have a Cambodian gateway around here, and behind us [where there is] a lot of Thai, Lao, to have a big Thai gateway there. Further down to the south we’ll put a Vietnamese gateway. Then you come into Springvale you wake up you realise that oh, it’s like Vietnam!³¹

In a sense, Councillor Lim’s proposal represents a vision of re-centring that goes beyond the single existing gateway in Springvale as a proposition for that is evocative of a parallel trajectories towards the future, based on the confluence of specific histories (of Vietnam, Cambodia and other places of immigrant and refugee origins) and representation of how this could develop (a modern Australian suburb based on the symbolic sampling of ethnically based architectural expression of its constituent immigrant communities).

The growing Asian influence on Australian cities is due in no small part to the influence of migrant populations and to the rise of the Global South, and this leads to a pluralistic view of what it means to be cosmopolitan, to be—readopting an older conception of the term—a citizen of the world rather than only a national subject, of literally being in the coveted state of worldliness. As well as the cosmopolitanism of people, changing built environments also raise the issue of the cosmopolitanism of place. Springvale has become a focus for cultural (and culinary) tourism, the encouragement of which is embodied by the presence of the new gateways. These elements, in combination with the shops and businesses of the surrounding area, mark Springvale as a place with heterogeneous cultural identity—a destination for those wishing to experience something of the world that has migrated to and developed in this place. The broader context of this development has involved a weaving of chronology and geography, initially through dangerous journeys across the globe, then locally with developing connections via trade and communication that has made a locality such as Springvale into a node for re-centred global networks. From this node, second- and third-generation members of Vietnamese–Australian and other once-refugee communities have an increasing ability to enact “transcultural placemaking,”³² through the spatial inscription of their business enterprises, and socio-cultural and religious organisations.

Conclusion

To return to Bhabha’s statement from the outset, cosmopolitanism comes from a complex “glocal” identity that is supported by technology, infrastructure and a sense of home, “in mature communities with adequate foundation when their ‘I am’ matures into a satisfying truth.”³³ The development of such places as Springvale can be seen as making apparent local agency in the built environment, and its confluence of largely informal/unselfconscious but culturally inflected adaptations to streetscapes is a worldwide phenomenon. The polyglot nature of Springvale—its population’s multitude of origins—is thus more than of local interest. It represents the “glocal” in that it offers specificity of different “locals” within a shared built environment, not just in cultural terms but in relation to the enmeshing economies and socio-economic development between locality and (in this case largely Southeast Asian-originated) globalised influences.³⁴ In terms of social relations, both everyday cosmopolitanism and everyday multiculturalism are suggestive of practices that thrive on connections beyond national boundaries, related to the increasing cultural and economic power of formerly colonised or marginalised peoples, particularly where they now reside in the cities of the putative “West” or “global North.”³⁵ The “convivial” manner in which this has largely occurred suggests an increasing confidence in their place in the nation.³⁶ The worth of what the residents, business owners and community leaders of Springvale have to convivially share as cosmopolitan citizens is demonstrative of “(g)local” cosmopolitanism as a flexible assemblage that is increasingly central to the contemporary suburban built environment.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the support of the Australian Research Council. This text discusses research undertaken as part of the ARC Discovery Project Architecture and Industry: The Migrant Contribution to Nation-Building (2019–22). Within this project, thanks are due to Sophanara Sok for sharing the experiences of Cambodian refugees in the area and Councillor Richard Lim from the City of Greater Dandenong, who shared his visions for the future of Springvale. Thanks are also due to Rhonda Diffey of the City of Greater Dandenong’s Archive; Chris Keys of the Springvale Historical Society; Jan Trezise of the Enterprise Hostel Committee; Bon Nguyên, President of the Vietnamese Community in Victoria; Hanh Do, Kim Bui-Quang and other members of the board of the Vietnamese Museum Australia, as well as two Springvale business owners who prefer to remain anonymous.

All human participation recorded in this article is covered by the ethics approval obtained for the ARC Discovery Project noted above. This was provided by the University of Tasmania’s Social Sciences Human Research Ethics Committee: Ethics Ref No. HOO18177, under which all participants gave consent for publication of their stories and quoted statements.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Beynon

David Beynon is an Associate Professor in Architecture at the University of Tasmania. He investigates the social, cultural and compositional dimensions of architecture, and adaptations of architectural content and meaning in relation to urban renewal, migration and cultural change. He completed his architectural qualifications at the University of Melbourne in 1990 and then worked in architectural practices in Singapore and Brisbane before registering as an architect and funding alsoCAN Architects in Melbourne with his partner in 1995. He then completed a PhD in Urban Design in 2002 (also at the University of Melbourne) and combined architectural practice in Melbourne with academic work at Deakin University before joining the University of Tasmania in 2019.

Freya Su

Freya Su is a PhD candidate in architectural science at the University of Tasmania. Freya examines the relationship between climate data selection methodology and hygrothermal simulation. Before embarking on her current studies, she assisted Mark Dewsbury and co-authored publications about condensation. In 2015, Freya found Snug House Tasmania, conducting airtightness testing and energy efficiency assessments in a multi-disciplinary building design studio.

Van Krisadawat

Van Krisadawat is a PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania. His research focuses on using mapping processes as a form of historiography. He is also interested in architectural/urban representation techniques and data visualisation. He completed his Bachelor of Architectural Studies from Victoria University of Wellington and Master of Science in Architecture from KU Leuven. He worked as an architect at Benoy Architecture in Hong Kong and at Hassell Studio (AUS practice) in Bangkok

Notes

1 Kwame Anthony Appiah and Homi Bhabha, “Cosmopolitanism and Convergence,” New Literary History 49, no. 2 (2018): 171–98, quoting 188.

2 Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, eds., Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context and Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022).

3 Amanda Wise, “Everyday Multiculturalism: Transversal Crossings and Working Class Cosmopolitans,” in Everyday multiculturalism, ed. Amanda Wise and Selvaraj Velayutham (Basingstoke: Houndmills, 2009), 21–45.

4 Yannis Tzaninis, “Cosmopolitanism beyond the City: Discourses and Experiences of Young Migrants in Post-suburban Netherlands,” Urban Geography 41, no. 1 (2020), 144.

5 Ayona Datta, “Places of Everyday Cosmopolitanisms: East European Construction Workers in London,” Environment and Planning A 41, no. 2 (2009): 353–70; Susan Koshy, “Minority Cosmopolitanism,” PMLA 126, no. 3 (2011): 592–609; Pnina Werbner, “Vernacular Cosmopolitanism,” Theory, Culture and Society 23, nos. 2–3 (2006): 496–98; Pnina Werbner, Anthropology and the New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist and Vernacular Perspectives (London: Bloomsbury, 2008).

6 Datta, “Places of Everyday Cosmopolitanisms,” 353.

7 Abdi Hersi, Indigo Willing, Ian Woodward and Zlatko Skrbiš, “Minority Cosmopolitanism: Afro-Cosmopolitan Engagement Displayed by African Australians,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 41, no. 2 (2020), 166.

8 Justine Greenwood, “Cosmopolitan Capitals: Migrant Heritage, Urban Tourism and the Re-imagining of Australian Cities” in Migrant, Multicultural and Diasporic Heritage Beyond and Between Borders, ed. Alexandra Dellios and Eureka Henrich (London: Routledge, 2020), 119–32.

9 Rebecca Williamson, “Vernacular Cosmopolitanisms in Suburban Peripheries: A Case Study in Multicultural Sydney,” Sites: A Journal of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (2016): 111–33.

10 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, University of Minneapolis Press, 1996).

11 Yen Lê Espiritu, “Thirty Years AfterWARd: The Endings That Are Not Over,” Amerasia Journal 31, no. 2 (2005): xiii–xxiv; Eric Tang, Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the New York City Hyperghetto (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2015); Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Speak of the Dead, Speak of Viet Nam: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Minority Discourse,” New Centennial Review 6, no. 2 (2006): 7–37; Ma Vang, “Critical Refugee Studies,” Critical Ethnic Studies 6, no. 1 (2020), https://manifold.umn.edu/read/critical-refugee-studies/section/21cc6956-947d-4127-8aa8-a22974331ad1.

12 David Beynon, “Centres on the Edge: Multicultural Built Environments in Melbourne,” in Everyday Multiculturalism Conference Proceedings, ed. Selveraj Velayutham and Amanda Wise (Sydney: Macquarie University, 2007), https://www.alsocan.com.au/writings/centres-on-the-edge-multicultural-built-environments-melbourne.pdf. See, also, Amanda Wise and Selveraj Velayutham, eds., Everyday Multiculturalism (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009).

13 Nikos Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 192.

14 Nikos Papastergiadis, Cosmopolitanism and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 197–98.

15 City of Greater Dandenong Archives; Springvale Historical Society Archives; Enterprise Hostel Committee; Vietnamese Community in Victoria; Vietnamese Museum Australia.

16 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1987; orig. 1980).

17 Greater Dandenong Council, “Springvale Activity Centre: Historic Narrative” (Melbourne: Greater Dandenong Business, 2017); James Jupp, Andrea McRobbie and Barry York, “Metropolitan Ghettoes and Ethnic Concentrations,” Working Papers on Multiculturalism 1 (1990), 111 (published for the Office of Multicultural Affairs, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet by the Centre for Multicultural Studies, University of Wollongong).

18 John van Kooy, “Refugee Women as Entrepreneurs in Australia,” Forced Migration Review 53 (2016): 71–73.

19 Christine Stevens, “Balancing Obligations and Self-Interest: Humanitarian Program Settlers in the Australian Labor Market,” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 6, no. 2 (1997): 185–212; van Kooy, “Refugee Women as Entrepreneurs in Australia,” 72.

20 Sophanara Sok, interview with David Beynon and Jane McDougall, audio, June 17, 2022.

21 Greater Dandenong Council, “Springvale Activity Centre: Historic Narrative” (Melbourne: Greater Dandenong Business, 2017), https://www.greaterdandenong.vic.gov.au/_flysystem/filerepo/A4699971.

22 Annie Wong, representative of Guan Di Temple, interview with authors, audio April 17, 2022.

23 Anonymous Business Owner, interview with David Beynon, audio, 2020.

24 Jeffrey Hou, Transcultural Cities: Border Crossing & Placemaking (New York: Routledge, 2013).

25 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), xix.

26 David Beynon and Ian Woodcock, “Interpretation/Translation/Quotation? Contemporary Architects’ Interventions into Multicultural Australia,” Quotation, Quotation: What Does History Have in Store for Architecture Today? ed. Gevork Hartoonian and John Ting, Papers of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia New Zealand 34 (Canberra: SAHANZ, 2016), 26–34.

27 Yansong Wang and Yapeng Duan, “A Study on the Classification and Value of Ming Dynasty Paifang in China: A Case Study of Paifang in Jinxi County,” Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering 15, no. 2 (2016), 149.

28 Cameron Lucadou-Wells, “Asian Gateway: We Don’t Want to See Springvale Split up,” Star Journal [online article, nvn, npn] (2013). https://dandenong.starcommunity.com.au/news/2013-08-02/asian-gateway-we-dont-want-to-see-springvale-split-up/

29 Sanjoy Mazumdar, Shampa Mazumdar, Faye Docuyanan and Colette Marie McLaughlin, “Creating a Sense of Place: The Vietnamese-Americans and Little Saigon,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 20, no. 4 (2000), 321.

30 Greater Dandenong City of Opportunity, “Mayor Cr Eden Foster (Yarraman Ward),” https://www.greaterdandenong.vic.gov.au/councillor/mayor-cr-eden-foster-yarraman-ward; Maribyrnong City Council. “Deputy Mayor, Cr Cuc Lam PSM,” https://www.maribyrnong.vic.gov.au/My-neighbourhood/Deputy-Mayor-Cr-Cuc-Lam-PSM.

31 Councillor Richard Lim, interview with David Beynon, Springvale, Vic., August 2022.

32 Jeffrey Hou, “Your Place and/or My Place?” in Transcultural Cities: Border-Crossing and Placemaking, ed. Jeffrey Hou (London: Routledge, 2013), 1–16.

33 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), xx.

34 Koichi Nagashima, “Glocal Approach Toward Architecture of the Future,” XX UIA Beijing Congress (1995), 10.

35 Paul Gilroy, After Empire? Melancholia or Convivial Culture? (London: Routledge, 2004).

36 Sheila Giffen, Christopher Lee and Renisa Mawani, “Worlds at Home: On Cosmopolitan Futures,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 40, no. 5 (2019): 525–33.