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August 31, 2003
The Australian is running a series on Australian cities in its Weekend Magazine. I haven't been reading them because they are generally puff lifestyle pieces for a Sunday morning. But I read this one by Terry Plane (with photos by Wendy Lear). It is about the city I inhabit, I'm interested in urban design and Plane says that Adelaide is the thinking person's city.
Adelaide as a thriving place of ideas contributes to Adelaide's enviable lifestyle.
That's the favourite image of the city.
So what are the thinking people in Adelaide saying about their city?
Eleanor Ramsay, an adjunct professor at the Hawke Research Institute (scroll down page) at the University of South Australia, is identified as a thinking person. She is given some space in relation to an inadequate public transport system. This is a linear north/south city of a million people squeezed between the hills in the east and the sea in the west. It iecame dependant on the car ever since the tram and electric bus networks were dismantled in the 1950s and 1960s. Transport is a problem.
Ramsay's solution? She says:
"You can't rebuild the city. But there are aspects of other cities that we could take. A fleet of bicylces, for example, all painted the same colour, available in a pool for anyone to just hop on and ride around the city. And more people living in the city...In Adelaide you can think more. Thinking time---that's the creative advantage."
In case you are wondering about the quality of the ideas being developed in Adelaide, you do need to understand that Ramsay is into lifestyle and glam. Adelaide city and its women, she says, are elegant and sophisticated without being flashy with a consistency of taste and an extraordinary depth of aesthetics. That is how she understands activism and policy intervention.
Ramsay's glam image of stylish sophisticates on bicycles hopping around the city does ignore the northern suburbs of Elizabeth,with its low rates of educational participation, high rates of domestic and community violence, long term unemployment and poverty. Elizabeth is the darkness to the power dressing of the glam lifestyle. Glam middle class innercity lifestyle ignores homelessness, lack of public housing, drugs, youth unemployment:-----the classic social justice issues are hidden.
Ramsay's glam lifestyle image ignores the existence of lots of dam ugly buildings in downtown Adelaide, such as the Hyatt and Hilton. Same standard buildings that are everywhere. It also ignores key questions such as those put on the table by Peter Sellars:
"Can we make public space for a public? Who is the public? What are we trying to say by democracy?.... there is so much that needs to be done and needs to be said and so few people are willing to stand up in public and say it and do it. So what happens is we get public work that says nothing and does not do much more. This sense of absence, this sense of blankness..."
Sellars asks some good questions. They have a good grounding in the vision of a green belt surrounding the City of Adelaide and North Adelaide that would be wide open spaces dedicated to public uses.
But Adelaide was not impressed with Sellars.
Plane's article then proceeds to knock the stuffing out of the image of the thinking persons capital by introducing the ideas of two thinkers in residence whom we have meet before: Charles Landry (also here) and Herbert Girardet.
So what do they add that is new? What can they add to enable South Australia to become a key place where the alternatives to the old modern industrial order are going to be developed and where the leadership can be nurtured? As Peter Sellars puts it, can Adelaide be the first place in the industrialised world that will go green, that really is based on the idea that you do not have to damage the planet to live here; can South Australia be the first place to demonstrate that and that people will in South Australia connect quality of life to social justice, living well and sustainably.
Landry says that Adelaide is too comfortable and settled in its identity:
It is too unquestioning about Adelaide's urban plan designed by Colonel Light, the first Surveyor-General of South Australia, of a city in parklands with squares at its four corners and its centre. And the complexity of the layers of government stifles economic growth. Nor is Adelaide an exciting city, apart from the Central Market and its environs which is the closest thing to an Italian pizza:
All in all Adelaide is a good place to bring up the kids but they have to leave to find work.
Change is not to be entered into lightly. Light and his vision are a part of our civic culture. We should be conservative in protecting the Adelaide Parklands is radical, given the continual economic pressure to erode these public spaces and to use them as public assets to make money through special corporate events for corporations. Light got it pretty right. The Square at the centre --Victoria Square---should be restored.
However, the consensus is that boring Adelaide needs a shot in the arm to shake it out of its complacency. Lifestyle is all very well says The Australian. Adelaide may be a very good recreational city
but South Australia also needs to get some economic growth going:
"Somehow Adelaide has to become better at generating wealth if it is to avoid sliding into genteel decline compared with the rest of the country. Its government, industry and citizenry face the challenge of how to produce the wealth required to fulfil the city's aspirations in a globalised information-age economy."
The answer of course is green development. If the abundance of sunshine is a problem because it causes complacency, then Adelaide can become a solar city and make solar power a major export industry.
The economic policy suggested by The Australian is not green development: it is a neo-liberal one with its trickle down effect and increasing inequalities. It is the one being followed by the Rann Government.
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Does Adelaide mean the square mile, the inner 5 ks, or the whole shebang? The reason i ask this is because these so-called progressives seem to think that Adelaide is the comfortable and relaxed set who think that various monsters haunt the wastelands past Regency, South and Daws Rds.