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March 25, 2007
The south-east corner of Adelaide city is slowly changing. The old workshops, factories and depots are slowly being replaced by apartments and middle class service industries--lawyers, accountants, economic researchers, bloggers and photographers, hairstylists etc. Even politicians and policy wonks.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, car workshop shed, Adelaide, 2007
It's the familiar process of gentrification within Adelaide with a difference: more and more people are living in the city inside the parklands perimeter, rather than in the gentrifaction of the suburbs that start outside the parklands. What kind of city will it become as a result?
Nothing like Melbourne or Sydney that is for certain. The global city is not even a possibility for Adelaide, despite the dream time of business people and Liberal politicians. An attractive people-city then? Perhaps. The possibilities are there, but they requiring rolling back the car to make way for people to create their own public spaces. And protecting Light's parklands from the right wing Labor politicians who still dream of the glory days of F1 returning to put Adelaide on the map in a global world.
What we need is a few more innovative architects to create visually interesting buildings that express a critical regionalism (rather than globalism); a critical regionalism in the sense of creating an architectural forms that address the realities of global warming in Adelaide ---hotter weather, less water. Do we have such an architecture? Not really. that's the downside of Adelaide--it has not responded creatively to the environmental realities caused by economic growth in the 20th century.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, River Murray, south of Goolwa barrages, 2006
Adelaide could lead the nation in becoming a sustainable or solar city ---but it falters and fears to cross the threshold. It dreads being too different.
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