A suburban crisis?: Housing, credit, energy and transport

Abstract

While the 'ground zero' of the Global Financial Crisis has been among the metropoles of financial capitalism, the material grounding of the crisis has been in the urban periphery at the intersection of, land, housing, credit, energy and transport. It has been a suburban crisis, with its faultlines fracturing most prominently across the USA but with major tremors and aftershocks in other heavily suburbanised economies, such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the UK. In turn the global financial crisis threatens to reshape suburbia in uncertain and unpredictable ways. This article explores how the crisis interacts with more long-standing stressors pressing against Australian urban housing, credit, energy and transport systems. It raises questions about the implications for Australian suburbia of a forthcoming era of insecure energy supplies and wider limits to urbanisation.