Suburb versus Neighbourhood

For the sake of American readers, I’ve been using the term ‘neighbourhood’ in my posts, but I realised that I’d unconsciously switched to the Australian term ‘suburb’ in my post last night. Consequently, a bit of explanation may be in order.

I live in the suburb of Evatt. This doesn’t mean that I live in an entity outside of or separate to Canberra. The term ‘suburb’—which literally means ‘under-city’—typically refers to a part of a city in Australia. Consequently, Evatt is what most Americans would call a ‘neighbourhood,’ akin to Sugar House in Salt Lake City or Back Bay in Boston.

Named suburbs aren’t just for certain historic or quirky quarters, however. Canberra consists entirely of dozens of these suburbs, and everyone lives in one. Even the commercial centre of the city (as much as Canberra has a centre) occupies its own suburb: Civic. And ANU has its own suburb as well: Acton.

Because Canberra is a planned city, each suburb has been carefully planned too. A typical suburb houses about 2,500-4,000 people, is bounded by major roads, and has public green space running through its centre. This green space always includes the suburb’s primary school and local shops and contains an integrated network of footpaths, making it possible for most people to shop or go to school by foot or pushbike without ever touching a road.

Things are considerably less neat in Sydney, but even this teeming city of 4,000,000 people is really just a series of named suburbs, each with its own individual character.

This distinction, however, is of lesser importance in Australia in large part because there’s no such thing as city government anyway. Thus, though Sydney has a ceremonial lord-mayor (to cut ribbons and wave in parades), the city is actually governed by the New South Wales state government. And Canberra is similarly managed by our territorial government.