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June 7, 2003
This is via the always excellent Boynton. The destruction of cultural heritage was always one of the characteristics of Sydney town that I most intensely disliked about the global city. The tearing down to make way for the new signifies a cultural identity of contantly tearing themselves free of the past. The present is all that matters. The past is tradition that must be wiped away.
Adelaide, in contrast, is very strong on preserving the cultural heritage of the innercity. My previous abode, the electronic cottage, was built circa 1890s, in the south-east corner of Adelaide. One of the great pleaures of this form of inner city living was sitting on the verandah in the sun having lunch, reading, or sharing a glass of wine. However, the way we used the verandah was an exception in the street. Most people live inside the houseand so their existence has become very privatised. Gone is the interaction between the street and the verandah that was so popular with the working class who lived in the innercity up to the 1960s.
My 1890s electronic cottage has a heritage order on it. That means changes to the street frontage of the cottage are subsidised by the Adelaide City Council, if the renovations return the character of the cottage of the 1890s as defined by the cultural historians. You can do what you like out the back by way of renovations.
This heritage order counters or puts a break on tearing down the old to make way for the new in the name of "prestigious redevelopment", which is often little more than an another name for over-priced, ticky tacky middle-class slums. They call them units or sometimes townhouses, and they often build them as if they are prisons.
The old image of Adelaide as the City of Churches, so favoured by those living in the global city of Sydney, should be redescribed as the cultural heritage city. It has a regional cultural identity that is quite different from the old image of churches, religion, wowerism and puritanism; it is the reassertion of regional difference----- the beginnings of a new regionalism. The negative representation of regionalism (backward and provincal) by those who celebate globalization is an indication of the hegemonic tendencies of a postmodern Sydney that targets public space as a private good.
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Gary - it is a great pleasure to face the street and I'm really noticing the contrast while staying out in a suburb with fences again. Not to glamorise it - I guess for many it is the only light (sometimes sunny) place available in these cottages. Good to hear Adelaide is countering the loss of heritage. Only today I drove past an 100year old house until recently rented by a friend. It's being gutted as we speak, and the other houses in the street are all getting razed for neo-georgian villas that certainly switch the focus to the inside, away from the street.
btw - the site I linked to was found after reading your musings on architecture. It is one site that looks at houses from the point of view of their inhabitants over time. Good stuff.