Junk for Code

walking the city

My exploration of the city have been done on foot and so I'm very much at odds with a city structured around the movement of the car. My heart is with the Situationist International that worked within the Parisian flaneur tradition.

"The ordinary practitioners of the city live "down below", below the thresholds at which visibility begins. They walk - an elementary form of this experience of the city; they are walkers…"

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, (1988, p. 93)

For me the pedestrian is the key figure of urban mobility which I contrast to the mechanised modes of transport (train, bus, car) and its commuters. I hold the effects of these modes of transport responsible for the poor state of city living.

In Adelaide the City Council is complicit in allowing the car to dominate the city. The current council resists any attempt to roll back the flow of the car to make space for walkers. The car has to be dominant because the city is a commercial site: a space to make money. The city is not a place to stroll. Hence the future of the city is all about carparks, shops and commece. They still see the central region as a redevelopment site for commercial and industrial construction and for new commuter roads.

So the grid or plan of the ordered city is based on the flow of mechanized transport to and from the inner city, not on the play of residents. Our play and spontaniety is constrained by the grid, buildings, traffic flows and the noise of mechanized transport. There is little redevelopment in the guise of urban renewal taking place in Adelaide.

According to material on the Incite site (via Anne Galloway at Purse Lip Square Draw), there is a long history of intellectual and artistic investment in the practice of walking in the city. It says

"I am thinking, of course, of the tradition of the flâneur in French writing. From Baudelaire, to Breton, Aragon, Benjamin, Debord, Perec and Réda, writers have self-consciously centred themselves, and the ordinary residents of the city, in the act of aimless strolling through Parisian streets. This deliberate idleness is thought to open subjectivity, by walking without intent the writer makes 'himself' receptive to chance and unseen possibilities .... Unpredictable encounters with others: persons and buildings, are said to allow the impact of the external world on self to be gauged."

I have spend many hours walking Melbourne and Sydney in the early 1980s and then Adelaide, initially with a Leica camera, then with a white standard French poodle who always strolled out in front.

I'd gone back to Melbourne several times in the last year. I noticed how much both the old layers of 19th century Marvellous Melbourne (the cultural capital of Australia) and new one of the late 20th century suburban Melbourne were being radically transformed. It was not just Southgate. Redevelopment was happening in the inner city area and there was redevelopment around Spencer Street Station:
The city was becoming something glitzy and blue glassed.

What I could see was that Melbourne's lovely nineteenth century heritage was going. The old had to make way for the new.

In place of the old there were all the high rise apartments in the Docklands.

It's all function and form in this designer city of developers and planners who see the remaking of the city as urban renewal and deem it to be a good thing.

A lot of it looked like a good old 'spatial fix' to keep capital going to me, rather than a concern for a living city of people.

The power of property and finance capital is paramount in Melbourne and the planners have failed to control either the content or the form of the city centre. It had become a commodified space.

Money was pouring into the inner city not culture. The old new in an expanding CBD is branded in international imagery, but a lot of it looks so homogenous. The dead hand of the modernist brutalism and contempt for context and earth weighed heavily on the urban fabric.

I half suspected that a 'Disneyland Melbourne', built around nostalgia for the heritage that is disappearing, would soon be proclaimed as the latest fashion in built form.

The old bohemian Melbourne, which was part of the city of the British Empire, with its back lanes in the city block that functioned as pedestrian pathways is disappearing. What was lacking in the urban renewal was a distinctive cultural fabric of a living city of people walking, playing and having fun.

Do I sense a renewed conflict between the dynamic cosmopolitan CBD and the defensive, protective suburbs? A metropolis with unequal access to the luxuries of the inner city?

What then of the flaneur tradition that walks the city? It holds that the aimless wanderings

"also transform the city itself. To the flâneur urban surroundings suddenly become both familiar and alien (1996: 100), inscribed with a subjective resonance, strange associations and the depth of myth. By making themselves travellers in their own city, these writers believe that they are capable of subverting the dominant image of Paris as grid, plan or spectacle. The walker is held to invite an alternative city to express itself, one that cannot be separated from the pedestrian body."

Further,

"...walking in the city also involves a vital act of temporal dislocation. Wandering purposelessly across Paris is said to allow these writers to tap into buried layers of history, memories both personal and collective. Their footsteps mark an infusion of the past in the present, triggering parallel journeys that cut back and forth against the more conventional progression of time....despite the solitary tradition of the flâneur, the ambulatory writers of Paris regarded their city as a place of connection....Indeed, their wanderings were intended to highlight the multiplicity of relations that the reductive activity of capitalist planning was perceived to deny."

Do we have a similar tradition of the flaneur in Australia? If there is----and I have no idea if there is one----did this process of personifying a city give rise radical representations that challenged or resisted dominant representations of the developers, urban planners and politicians?

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Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at November 4, 2003 12:36 PM | TrackBack