Sydney - We Need to Talk!

Chapters → Surry Hills Shopping Village Sophie Webber

Surry Hills Shopping Village Sophie Webber

Out the back of the now-named Surry Hills Shopping Village there are a couple of benches, next to some post office boxes, two bike racks and a big rubbish bin. At any one time, folks and their dogs rest before making the walk across the (perilous!) car park and up through Redfern, they wait for friends or family to finish their shopping, and, often, a foursome of old Greek men sit, debate and gesture, sharing a box of icecreams from Coles. There is always a diverse collective using these benches to wait, rest, observe and share.

There are other convivial spaces in the Surry Hills Shopping Village too. Until recently, the Café Surry hosted single older residents able to stay and commune for hours over a coffee and ham and cheese sandwich; here, they were a part of something, a community. Small groups of informal community and social workers check in on local residents too. On either ends of the shopping centre are stalwarts: the two Roosters fans – way deep in Bunnies territory – in the longstanding key and shoe repair shop, and the now half-empty fruit and vegetable shop. Despite their misplaced allegiances, one nearby resident’s mobility scooter covered in South Sydney red and green is nearly always making its way down the corridors between these shops.

I want to wager that the soon to be demolished Surry Hills Shopping Village represents one of the last spaces that serves the complex and conflicted Redfern community. This is not, however, the centre’s preeminent reputation, even amongst urbanists and critical inner-city residents. Instead, it enjoys colloquial recognition as “Murder Mall” or “Meth Mall” – perhaps because of its proximity to the nearby public housing estates of Redfern and Surry Hills. From my experience, the only thing murderous about the Surry Hills Shopping Village is the carpark – because of lawless inner-city drivers seeking cheap parking rather than any kind of illicit activity. Yet, for these observers, and others, the diverse ways of being, doing, living, and very publicly, that intersect in the Shopping Village represent a clash. But, it is in this clash – in the most unlikely of spaces: a privately owned, soon to be demolished and redeveloped inner-city suburban shopping mall – that the multicultures of Redfern thrive and express themselves.

Consumption geographies are not nearly as common now as in their hey-day at the height of concern with the globalization of goods and economisation of culture at the turn of the millennium. [11] While cultural urbanists devoted their research at this time to socio-spatial diversity, specificity and paradoxical outcomes, there was an overriding narrative critiquing a convergence driven by new forms of consumption – specifically, the same-ness of big-box malls reproducing themselves across suburban landscapes around the world. This was a critique of Westfield in the wild, driven by increasing dependence on cars and the Americanisation of culture. The processes at play in the Surry Hills Shopping Village are contemporary too, relating to gentrification, the aesthetisation of space, or even racial banishment – issues under lively debate in urban geography. But, there is something deeply intriguing about this explicitly privatised, commercial, and consumption-oriented space, being also a site for conviviality, difference and the metropolitan multiculture.

This multiculture persists despite ongoing efforts to rename, redevelop, and securitize. Linked to state and developer supported proposals to “clean up” Redfern, and other nearby inner-city suburbs such as Waterloo, the Redfern Mall was rebranded to the Surry Hills Shopping Village in the late 1990s.

Although there’s never been a murder in the Murder Mall, the pejorative perhaps refers to a nearby murder of a drug dealer. But, the terms of the moniker are clear – for instance, an Instagram account for “@themurdermall” mocks those sleeping rough in and around the Mall. In turn, it will become the Surry Hills Village – with “providores” and “boutiques”.

This suburban multiculture is far from the sterile, commoditised vision of a shopping mall as a site of individual consumption. While local shopping streets have usually been contrasted with shopping malls, as sites that enable more fluid and less commodified multicultures to take shape [12], in many ways the Surry Hills Shopping Village has more affinities with the space of a local shopping street than it does with a glitzy Westfield. To be clear, there are still the “big-box” monocultures, with Coles and its liquor-selling affiliates having a particularly large presence inside the mall. For better or worse, these stores also reflect the folklore of the Mall, with extra surveillance measures installed, including several security guards, and strategically positioned mirrors to check shopping trolleys as they exit.

These measures – and new ones borne of pandemic spatial control – want to diminish the Shopping Village as a site for congregation, and yet it overwhelmingly continues to be this physical, hybrid public- private space.

As much as the shopping centre offers a range of consumption services – or at least it once did – it appears to act more as a site for fleeting collectivity and conviviality.

Over the months, shops have shuttered in anticipation of the redevelopment as boutique apartments. First, the chemist moved up to Crown Street, then the butcher retired, sharing beers with his customers. Other shops have followed, including the beloved Café Surry, whose mostly older clientele looked nothing like those who frequent the famed cafes of inner-city Sydney. And, as these shops have shut up, new advertising is plastered in its place for the apartments and fine-dining restaurants for which they are making way. According to the developers, this development will now contain the “right mix of everything.” This mix, if the advertising which now encases the Mall is to be believed, is now all young white people. It’s hard to imagine the Redfern multiculture thriving in this development.

11 Goss J (2004) ‘Geography of consumption’ Progress in Human Geography 28(3): 369-380.
12 Zukin S (1998) ‘Urban lifestyles: Diversity and standardisation in spaces of consumption’ Urban Studies 35(5/6): 825-839. See also Zukin S, Kasinitz, P and Chen, X (2015) (Eds) Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai, New York: Routledge.

It all started when…

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Maecenas non leo laoreet, condimentum lorem nec, vulputate massa. Phasellus sodales massa malesuada tellus fringilla, nec bibendum tellus blandit. Class aptent taciti sociosqu ad litora torquent per conubia nostra, per inceptos himenaeos. Phasellus sodales massa malesuada tellus fringilla, nec bibendum tellus blandit. Suspendisse nec congue purus. Aliquam bibendum, turpis eu mattis iaculis, ex lorem mollis sem, ut sollicitudin risus orci quis tellus.