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November 27, 2003
This is the image of urban life what we in Adelaide need to shrug off, if we want to think about the possibilities of Adelaide becoming a people-orientated city.
Of course, everyone with a bit of commonsense knows that Adelaide can never be like New York.They know in their bones that their place is other to New York.
They also realize that New York is the commercial heart of the American empire. It is the engine room of US capitalism.
And yet, they still hold that New York is what Adelaide should aspire to be. Being modern means a CDB full of skyscrapers.
Why just the other day some developer fellow was talking about a minor development in Waymouth Street representing the 21st century What is the image of the 21st Century in Adelaide?
Waymouth St. will become Adelaide's Wall Street! Is American financial capital moving here to springboard into China or continue to strangle Japan? Nothing doing. It is just another boring high rise apartment block tucked behind the new retro glass and steel 1960s Advertiser Building.
So you see its only by having skyscrapers that we can be truely modern and move beyond being simply provincal.
So the image inside their heads of what a modern city is, and should be, is this:
 (The link to the online Art & Architecture resource bank of the Courtauld Institute is courtesy of things magazine. )
This image contructs the place we live in. The image is part of a whole set of cultural preconceptions that shape the way we respond to the place.
The effect of this representation of urban life is that it blinkers people. It blocks them from thinking otherwise: a city designed for people rather than for commerce. They hang onto the idea that the whole point of a city is commerce and use this construct of the city as commerce to reshape the space to fit those preconceptions of modern live.
Commerce means making money and allowing the market to shape the design and structure of the city.
Commerce today means economic globalization. With the new market fundamentalism of the global economy comes a global culture based on consumerism, cultural superficiality, bad food and coffee. It's media elites (in newspapers, television and radio) want us as consumers to live our lives consuming more and more.
You can see the effect of economic globalization here:
If you read the Australian Financial Review you discover that Coca-Cola Amital has designs on the corner store.
You can see it in the advertising on the shop front. The Corner Store is really a shell or a space with a fridge to stack product of the carbonated drink market.
Coke controls about half of that market with only about half of that sold in Coles and Woolworth's supermarkets. Coca-Cola Amital has the market power to stand up to that supermarket duopoly and it has the corner store under its thumb.
That is one way economic globalization in its corporate form currently works its way through the local communities in our inner cities.
Coke is now trying to take control of the fruit juice market in Australia.
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Skyscrapers are sooo 20th century.