I grew up in a car-centric suburb, in outer western Sydney. It was a quiet place, leafy, with only a tiny shopping village. It was tranquil, uninterrupted by the sounds of traffic or crowds of people – and it was absolutely f*cking boring.

The car centric suburb is a place of isolation, loneliness and a vortex of despair and boredom.

Forced to catch the bus – privately owned – or rely on the car, my late father being the chauffeur, I realised I could not actually walk anywhere. Oh yes, the local park, but for any amenities, it required at least a bus trip. Usually, I required the train – public transportation.

I am not alone in my experience. Consider the following observation of Muizz Akhtar, writing in Vox magazine in 2022 about the American suburban experience:

Distance and isolation are fundamentally built into the urban areas — defined by the US Census Bureau as any area with at least 5,000 people — where most of us live. State and local governments prioritize building infrastructure for cars, and public transportation remains underfunded and unreliable. Wide roads and parking lots spread everything out and make walking extremely difficult, if a neighborhood even has sidewalks to begin with. Today, because a majority of Americans, including an increasing number of children and the elderly, live in car-centric areas like suburbs, our ability to form connections and community is limited.

Constructing suburbs for car-dependent travel fails to contribute to the building of human connections.

The suburban home is built far away from shops, cinemas, schools, theatres, universities and general places of public gathering. Yes I know, there have been (and are ongoing) developments in western Sydney. A university was established to accomodate students in the region. More businesses are moving out to Parramatta, which has become a hub of activity.

Surry Hills, in the inner city, and Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, are separated by kilometres. Yet they both have a social contact street culture. People can walk and meet each other in restaurants, bookshops, cinemas, pubs and so on. Urban planners are finally waking up to these kinds of deficiencies in western Sydney suburbia.

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and lockdowns were enforced, social isolation became a major issue. Involuntary confinement undermines the human need for social interaction. I do not want to say that I was completely unaffected by such lack of contact, but I was ready for such an outcome. Making myself busy and occupying my mind are social skills that I developed as a result of the normative isolation of suburbia.

No, lockdown was not a breeze, but it was something with which I coped better than most. Reading is a joy for me, because a good book transports you to another time and place, another location without leaving your house. No, it is no substitute for social connections. However, books became my way of breaking the monotony.

I will return to the impact of reading a bit later, but first let’s make an observation. Psychologists James Danckert and John Eastwood, writing in Psychology Today magazine, make the point that car-heavy lives construct a mode of living where we are always traveling away from our surroundings, not actually enjoying them. If enjoyment and connection is to be found by driving for miles away, what does that say about our suburban surroundings?

Spontaneous and serendipitous connections with potential friends are much harder to come by if we are cocooning ourselves in our cars.

A place which I enjoyed immensely and found connection was the old Soviet bookshop. Formerly located in Sydney’s CBD, it was the victim of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the ubiquitous move to the internet. Yes, you can find multiple publications on the Net, and of course, the tech giant Amazon dominates book sales. Be that as it may, there was something unique about that bookshop.

It was the place that taught me that the world can be understood and experienced. It was a supplement to my university education. I kept up my studies for my university course, but also undertook a ‘postgraduate’ course, if you will, in Marxist books. The Soviet example taught me that reading is not only a joy, but a way of understanding the lives and struggles of other people.

The storefront bookshop, while not completely dead, has been overtaken by online media. Social media is one way of connecting with people, especially those who are geographically separated from us. However, there is no substitute for browsing the shelves of an actual bookshop.

No, I am not suggesting that we demolish the existing suburbs. I am suggesting that we redefine our image of the suburb, not simply as an investment property developer’s dream of houses to be bought and sold like cattle, but rather as places of human connection, walk ability, and green spaces.

It is important to raise one final point here. We all need to save for a financially secure retirement. I guess I am thinking more about this question now that I am approaching decrepitude. How secure will we be retiring to suburbs that are located in the middle of a climate hellscape?

Socially connected living goes beyond just numbers, but let’s consider the following regarding living in safe suburbs – what happens when they get inundated, or demolished by cyclones? Should not we be planning our suburban communities for these eventualities?