Building community in masterplanned estates: No place for culturally diverse aspirations?

Prevailing forms of developing new residential land in Australia are Masterplanned Estates, which integrate ideas of place-making and building locally-based communities within the development. At the same time these areas have been attracting an ethnically diverse population. The paper focuses on the need to address the aspirations towards local social involvement from residents with a culturally diverse background, for whom community may have a different social meaning, more specifically. Reviewing literature on the relationship between the social environment and the experience of settling for migrants' community is conceded as an enabling as well as inhibiting process. The analysis of the academic discourse on Masterplanned Estates in Australia undertaken to date emphasises that the commodification of community as a social code may constrain other forms of community and the expectations of residents' from culturally diverse backgrounds have been insufficiently considered. The paper argues that the constructed narratives of community do not necessarily reflect the diverse aspirations of residents. Therefore, more unpacking of the process of masterplanning is needed to enable a more comprehensive understanding of culturally diverse experiences and meanings of community.