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April 01, 2007
I was in Sydney Friday and Saturday working at the Marriott Hotel, Hyde Park. Dinner was by candlelight when the lights went out for Earth Hour. Not that many lights were turned off in the Hyde Park area of the global city from what I could see.
Sydney
This morning I walked around the East Sydney, Darlinghurst area with a camera. Disappointingly I took few photographs. I was suprised by the street beautification of the little back lanes in this primarily residential area. It was very pleasant inner city living. However, Oxford Street looked very tacky indeed. The drunken Saturday night gay revellers were still going strong and wild around Taylor Square.
In the fluid, uncertain flows of the global city----the "melting of the solids" leads to the fluid and fragmentary nature of social bonds and individual identity---the inner city world of East Sydney offers some security and dignity----albeit in a privatised sense. So our troubles--there were many troubled , despairing souls on the streets--- become private in a neo-liberal mode of life that is premised on consumer freedom. There were a few political signs---Vote Green--- around but I realized that postmodernism presupposes the collapse of Utopia. We just have these flows, a private existence, and psychosis. I shuddered.
At the Qantas club, whilst waiting for a plane to Canberra, I read the Australian Financial Review's boost about exciting new property developments in Adelaide's CBD property market ---regional Adelaide is increasingly becoming a modern metropolis full of vitality from the resources boom, with lots of affordable housing for Sydney investors---and Chris Milne's 'Adelaide Renaissance' from being the rusk-belt city of the 1980s.
A mood of confidence is returning to Adelaide, despite the continuing decline of traditional manufacturing in the face of cheaper products from China. The regeneration of socially progressive Adelaide is bolstered by BHP Billiton's $6 billion expansion of the Olympic Dam copper-uranium mine.
'Adelaide gets its groove back' reads like a marketing campaign to me whose storyline is China to the rescue. It's the praiseworthy interpretation of Donald Horne's The Lucky Country; a story that pretty much ignores the low spending on infrastructure projects and the slow shift to becoming a sustainable city. We get our groove back by going nuclear. It's dystopia.
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That's my city.
Always knew I was home when I came over the bradford and saw the coathanger. This is despite growing up in the far NW suburbs.