There was an interesting article by Guy Rundle on urban culture in the Sunday Age as part of its series Challenging Melbourne. Despite the standard postmodern blindness to all things sustainable Rundle's piece picks up some themes discussed on Junk for Code about the poverty of urban design.

Rundle poses some good questions in relation to the dilemma faced in forming a cultural urban policy. He asks:

"How do you satisfy the domestic demands of the bulk of the population while trying to present yourself to the world? More particularly, how do you distinguish between encouraging actual culture (the things people do as an expression of lived meanings, myths and values) and cultural production (the industrial manufacture of images and texts upon which contemporary economies rely)? How do you promote the latter without using the former as raw material? In key areas of culture, we must make decisions that will ensure that the market serves life, rather than vice versa."

"Although some stunning buildings have gone up in recent years, such as the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art---half rusting hulk, half Uluru---on Southbank, many standard buildings, particularly apartments, have plumbed new depths of public ugliness. Pseudo-Tuscan, pseudo-Georgian concrete slabs leant against each other, they are instant yuppie slums. The failure of governments to insist on better standards has greatly degraded the city....And then, of course, there is Federation Square. It is one of the most cutting-edge buildings of 1961....it is the ideal example of an innovative project that fell short of its ambitions. Was that really the sort of chance we should have taken with the gateway to Melbourne?"

"...nothing has changed more fundamentally in any Australian city than the way Melburnians eat, drink and socialise. The hundreds of small shopfront bars that have sprung up have changed not only the look and feel of the city and suburbs, but individual comportment itself - how the sexes mix, how people celebrate and so on. The chief casualty of this has been the pub, which, like the traditional milk bar, is on the way to being an endangered species. To a degree, that was inevitable, but the process has been sped along by the apartment boom. In earlier years, this process would have generated its own action group. Today, there is a different attitude, either postmodern - seeing the city as a fluid nomadic zone of signification - or defeated, conceding all to yuppies and developers. Yet it would be a pity for a whole pub culture to more or less disappear. Regulation for continuous use would help, as would incentives to maintain mixed use, so that pubs retained some of their traditional roles."