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August 6, 2007
I walked around the Adelaide CBD yesterday afternoon. There are a lot of new buildings going up at the moment --a mini-boom you could say. This is such a contrast to the lack of development from the end of the 1980s--the end of the last national boom. Adelaide was the place to escape from in order to find work and to live a more fulfilling life.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, development, Adelaide, 2007
This regional urban space is deemed to be an unremarkable, and even a constraining force, according to the global adverts (eg., the 4 wheel drive ads) which promise excitement, stimulation and empowerment, if we travel to new, exotic and unfamiliar spaces. According to the adverts we daily live in the spaces of our urban neighborhoods and surburban communities that are deemed to be diminished and unremarkable and provincial.The latter offer dreamworlds of promotional culture and exciting experiences elsewhere.
Car advertising invokes the fantasy of leaving behind the constraints of a crowded, mundane and polluted urban environment for the wide open spaces offered by a nurturing nature.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Supreme Court, Adelaide, 2007
The flip side of the denigration of urban life-- our-imprisonment within the spaces of the everyday life--- is the idealization of nature (and the technology to get us 'there') as the antidote to the mind-numbing boredom of daily life. Invoking nature (spectacular wilderness terrain) as the endpoint of vehicular travel confirms the belief that spatial mobility can offer access to places, experiences and events that are fundamentally different (eg., the visual splendour of the natural landscape).
In the Arcades Project Benjamin remapped nineteenth century Paris as a primeval, phantasmagoric landscape in which humanity once again slumbered under the spell of myth and nature. Horkheimer and Adorno developed this constellation of ideas as one of the principle organizing motifs of Dialectic of Enlightenment: "It is as if," they write, "the final result of civilization were a return to the terrors of nature" (p.113). So we have dystopian nightmares of frightening and dangerous spaces that threaten our safety, security and well-being.
But the adverts says that the 4wheel drives protect us from the sublime forces of nature.
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When I was last in the town of my birth a month ago, an article in the paper there proclaimed that newly released land in Adelaide was more expensive than Melbourne or Brisbane, and possibly the most expensive in the land. Maybe there is a large profit to be made in backyard hydroponics?