Contesting Chinatown: Place-making and the Emergence of ‘Ethnoburbia’ in Brisbane, Australia

Abstract

This paper juxtaposes the actual areas of settlement and settlement activities of Chinese migrants in Brisbane's southern suburbs since the mid-1980s, with the concomitant, Ôgovernment planned' construction of the city's Chinatown as an Ôexotic,' Ôethnic,' and Ôcosmopolitan' landmark. It argues that while the latter, as with Chinatowns in other Australian and world cities, has continued to appropriate the symbols of so-called ÔChineseness' to sell the locale to non-Chinese, the former, in recalling the notion of Ôethnoburbia,' significantly evinces actual Chinese migrants' agency and role in place-making. In the process, these migrants have not only established a local, ethnically meaningful environment, but also challenged the still current metonymic Western image of the Chinese as preferring life in Ôethnic' urban enclaves that had its origin from early Chinese settlement and fundamentally detached from the lives of other ethnic groups per se. Indeed greater recognition and comprehension of such locales may go a long way to illustrate that many Chinese living in Australia today do not fit the territorial, place-based identity often associated with them in the imagination of mainstream society.Successive waves of Chinese migration to Australia since the mid-1980s, and the settlement patterns of Chinese migrants in major East coast cities such as Brisbane, have engendered a good deal of interdisciplinary research on both the instigative factors behind their immigration, and their activities and experiences on settling (Ip

Chinese migrants in Melbourne and their house choices

“…The suburb chosen had to be near good education, transport and shopping centres. This supports other studies that have focused on recent Chinese immigration, mostly in the US (Li 1998; but also in Australia (Ip 2005). Recent Chinese migrants preferred to conceal their ethnic identity and not show it through their houses, as often described in the literature about migrants from south and east Europe, because unlike in the post-war decades, they were not expected to forgo their cultural heritage.…”

“…The most important features desired in a house for most participants, as also in Brisbane (Ip 2005), were not its size or garden but the high quality of education in the suburb, public transport and proximity to shopping centres and workplaces, and only then was the house itself considered if it were within the price range. Previously, most apartments in China had been appreciated because of their location and close proximity to urban facilities such as shopping centres and public amenities.…”

Ethnic Entrepreneurship and Placemaking in Toronto's Ethnic Retail Neighbourhoods

“…Rishbeth () also noted the potential for tension between different groups within a neighbourhood (in this case, newcomers and an established local community) when placemaking practices involve public spaces, arguing that in neighbourhoods with high concentrations of different ethnicities, planners must meaningfully engage with each community. Ip (, p. 73) found that the government‐planned Chinatown in Brisbane, Australia was a contested ground for Chinese placemaking against ‘the imagination of mainstream society’. This critique is similar to Anderson's () description of Vancouver's Chinatown as a Western creation of ‘Chineseness’.…”

Putting Transnationalism in Context: comparing Hong Kong Chinese-Australians in Sydney and Brisbane

“…Choi (1975, p. 67) estimates that in the mid-1960s, most Chinese-Australians were located in the capital cities (83 per cent), with almost half located in Sydney alone (45.8 per cent). And there was never, for example, a long-established Chinatown within Brisbane (Ip 2006). 1959-65 1965-70 1970-75 1975-80 1980-85 1985-1990 1990-95 1995-00 2000-02 …”

“…Historically Sydney has always been the iconic city of Australia and thus a magnet for Chinese migrants for centuries, while Brisbane's appeal as a destination of migration did not emerge until the mid-1980s. Brisbane was historically a city that Chinese migrants bypassed as they moved to northern Queensland in search of gold (Ip 2006).…”