'This suburb is of value to the whole of Melbourne': Save Our Suburbs and the struggle against inappropriate development

Struggles around the conservation and development of the built environment can be productively examined through the frameworks provided by Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptions of habitus, field and economic, cultural, social and symbolic capitals. In this paper, I examine, firstly, the strategies and resources mobilised in the defence of specific hierarchies of valuations of urban areas. Secondly, I look at the way in which the Melbourne resident action group, Save Our Suburbs, was able to subsume different sources of conflict under the banner of a particular representation of ‘a home’ in ‘the suburbs’ of ‘Melbourne’ – representations which the state government of Victoria attempted to devalue through emphases on global economic imperatives, free markets in urban land, and images of new ‘global’ workers and residents. Finally, through this examination I suggest the importance of location, place and built form for the Bourdieu-ian concepts of habitus, capitals and distinction.