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July 13, 2003
Adelaide is in the midst of a festival of ideas. Tim Blair, keeps his iconoclastic image intact by calling it Adelaide’s Carnival of Sour Left Wing Rabble. The carnival for lefties that is supported by the SA Government, has a diverse program, including an urban theme that links into the ongoing concerns of the thinkers of residence programme about making cities work.
Making cities work is topical issue in spite of Tim Blair's disdain and anti-intellectualism. Despite the big shift to innercity living, the global city of Sydney, for instance, does not work well. Many people are leaving it because of the expensive housing, the 3-4 hours daily travel time to work and a polluted urban environment.
Adelaide, as Charles Landry, a thinker in residence points out, is too spread out to work properly. Though bounded by sea on the west and hills on the north, it is unbounded north and south. So it becomes a suburban spread with all the smaller communities becoming a vast expanse of housing with the southern beaches merging into one.
Adelaide is half the area of London yet has a seventh of its population. As a city Adelaide lacks the vibrant hubs and nodes around train stations and shopping centres where people can interact because of the multiple use: civic, retail, offices, services, cultural, entertainment. Consequently, shopping centres such as Marion, are often a building mass in an ocean of car parks; whilst some trains stations are not even connected to the shopping centre. It lacks the hubs and nodes where people stop, linger, and lead a public life rather than retreat into white picket fence domesticity.
Tim Blair may pour scorn on planning and aesthetics but bad urban design affects our lives. Adelaide started of well with the great colonial grid and became a town of rectangles with parks.
Looking back to the 1950s from now, we can see that Adelaide's progress or development was badly designed. There was lack of imagination then--it was all about cars, factories and public housing. There was little sense of urban joy, poetics or commitment to place. Suburban modernity in the Playford era was the Lucky Country: buying a home, planting a lawn, establishing a garden and washing the car in the driveway. The house was functional but it stood for quality of life. Those living in a wholesome suburbia turned an empty shellor box into some sort of place-bound home that stood for a flight from the stench, disease and squalor of the inner city.
What is now acting to make cities not work well? All the talk is about efficiency and we do not connect cities to place.
Today, bad urban design continues, because architectual design is disconnected from sustainablity and there is a lack of eco-friendly urban development. The urban ecologist, Herbert Girardet, another of Adelaide's thinkers in residence, has pointed towards sustainable dwelling. He has rightfully argued for solar hot water systems and rain water tanks to be made compulsory on all new buildings.
However, the ideas being tossed around about making cities work better have yet to be connected with dwelling.Or the lack of dwelling as the dark side of modernity. The form of glass skyscrapers of Mies van der Rohe signifies the indifference to poetic dwelling.
What we do is seek the traditional beachside shack to regain dwelling in the sense of belonging and rootedness in an unstable and constantly changing society. This stands for tradition, security and harmony. It guarantees wholeness and meaningfulness in a homeless world.
Or we turn to place as eco-rural living ecotone, as exemplied in Living at the Edge with its deep concern about protecting wilderness of Tasmania's old growth forests in the Tarkine from logging. From this perspective dwelling and urban life are opposites.
This forgets that place is a basic concept of architecture.It refers to the relationship between the built form to the landscape.
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They employ a thinker in residence and then trash the budget for cycling in SA, cutting it by 50%, when all other transport funds were reduced by nowhere near as much. It is revealing that the Diana Laidlaw did more for cycling than this Labor government has. So much for the poor, young or environmentally conscious who wish to use a cheap, sustainable and health promoting (then again not many governments are interested in primary health care of any kind) mode of transport.