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June 26, 2003
I found some time yesterday to attend a 'seminar' on the future of Adelaide. It was difficult to get to at 5pm with work and walking the dogs but I managed to squeeze the time in.
Maybe it would give me some ideas about how to develop this weblog. How does romanticism speak in the neo-liberal present?
The seminar was organized by the Adelaide City Council under the auspices of the thinkers in residence program.
The thinkers in residence is a good idea. I had missed Herbert Girardet and his ideas of Adelaide as a green city--that happened about the time of the big shift, rennovations and a holiday. Time is a big problem these days.
The theme of the Charles Landry seminar was urban renewal and development through unlocking the creative potential of the city. The topic was double the population of the city or perish as a city but it was really about thinking creatively about cities as places to live and dwell. It overlaps with innovative Adelaide
Adelaide is on the cusp. It has been bypassed by global capital and it has little in the way of population growth. The young people leave the place for work and fun in Melbourne or Sydney. To all intents and purposes Adelaide is in danger of sliding from a good and vibrant regional city to a decaying large country town.
Something needs to be done. But little gets done in Adelaide. Hence the old 1970s image of Athens of the South is very tatty. It is a good image--a vibrant exciting place with a vigorous artistic life--- and it was recycled by all the speakers. They all started from the premise that Adelaide is a good place to live. As a place it gives an anchoring and sense of community belonging. They mostly addressed how it could be implemented.
The City Council has decided the answer to urban renewal and development is to double the population living in the city boundary----in the inner area surrounded by the square of parklands. So we have lots of new housing going up in the form of apartments, townhouses and units (we now live in one of these); but none of them have any connection to sustainable living at all. No solar power, no recycling of water water, no capturing of rainwater has been built into these mass of buildings.
Any form of urban renewal disconnected from sustainable living is scandalous in a city, which depends on the River Murray that is on a life support system and is facing a 20% decrease in winter rainfall due to global warming. These building are just plonked on the urban land without any sense of people dwelling within the landscape.
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I think there is a whole lot of plonking going on everywhere, not just in the ecological sense either. Just think of the impact that a lack of housing security will have upon us in the next 5-10 years.