Neighbourhood Connections of Iranian Migrants in Melbourne, Australia

A considerable body of scholarly work considers migrants’ experiences and the impact of the built environment and suburban design on the quality of social connections. However, missing from the literature is a consideration of how those migrants who value making connections with neighbours experience life in multicultural Melbourne’s suburban environments. The existing research has also not taken into account migrants’ perceptions of the suburban built environment and how the built environment variously influences their experiences. In my thesis, I use an interpretivist phenomenological approach in conjunction with reflective practice to address these gaps in the research. I draw on and analyse material gathered from interviews I carried out with Iranian migrants. To this, I add my reflections on my own experience as an urban planner and an Iranian migrant in Melbourne in a bid to understand how Iranian migrants experience neighbourhood connections in Melbourne. Melbourne is a large multicultural Australian city with many recently arrived migrants from diverse nationalities and language backgrounds. Against that backdrop, Iranian migrants living in Melbourne benefit from one of the oldest and richest cultures in the world, a culture that has long valued neighbourliness. The thesis examined their experiences of living in Melbourne, which has different cultural and spatial characteristics from Iran. This research contributes to several gaps in migration and urban studies research. One gap in the literature relates to questions about how the features said to define modernity, super-diversity and life in a post-colonial society like Australia align with Australia’s history of prejudices and negative stereotypes directed at migrants and refugees from the Middle East. There is also a lack of research about how Iranian migrants experience Australia’s suburban built environment and the extent to which the built environment influences their experiences of connection with neighbours and the neighbourhoods. This thesis adopts a qualitative research framework that draws on an interpretivist and phenomenological theoretical tradition. The author conducted 30 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with Iranian migrants in Melbourne as well as four walking interviews in the suburbs, including Northcote, Kensington, Mont Albert and Balwyn North. This method was supplemented using reflective practice, which involved drawing on the author’s own experiences and perspectives as an Iranian migrant and an urban planner. This research confirmed the importance of neighbourhood and neighbourhood connections for Iranian migrants in Melbourne. It also confirmed that Iranian migrants had different perceptions and experiences, from feeling supported to making strong connections to experiencing negative experiences. In particular, the research established that while many Iranian migrants experienced being welcomed in Melbourne, this was not always the case for those with darker skin colour and who had little or no education or who arrived as refugees or were considered Middle Eastern men, as intersectionality theory suggests. The research also confirmed that the built environment was key in shaping these experiences. Typical features of Melbourne’s built environment, like high levels of car dependency, low population density, and the relative absence of semi-private/semi-public and third spaces, resulted in many Iranians feeling cut off from their Australian neighbours and homesick. For some, this led to nostalgia for Iran. For others, like some Iranian women, living in less close-knit communities led to feeling greater freedom, which they reported enjoying compared to being constantly monitored and controlled as they had when they lived back in Iran. Finally, a combination of liveability indicators and ‘third spaces’ in inner Melbourne suburbs helped Iranian migrants to feel enhanced neighbourhood attachment. While generalisations cannot be made, given the small sample size, these findings give valuable insights into Iranian migrants’ lived experiences. Given this, there is clearly a need for more research on the experience of Iranian migrants in Australia.