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October 7, 2007
If Federation Square is common space of the public then this space is also an island disconnected from what lies on the north side of the CBD across Flinders Street. I'm thinking of the disconnect to Melbourne’s nineteenth-century structure of streets and lanes: to the little lanes, such as both Hosier Lane and AC/DC Lane that run parallel with Swanston Street.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Federation Square, 2007
Federation Square is an example of post-modern restructuring of urban form which accompanies the shift to a global information economy and it signifies a shift in the urban imaginary-- a change in the relationship between our images of reality and empirical reality itself.
Federation Square as a public undertaking was to designed to both revitalize the Yarra waterfront, enhance both the city and the state and to create a space that would become integrated into Melbourne’s overall economic and social fabric.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, Federation Square, 2007
Though it gives Melbourne an urban sense of identity and an urban focus for community activities that a spread out-Adelaide lacks, it remains isolated or cut off from the lanes that represent the other side of Melbourne's new urbanity.
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Gary
I have referred to Fiona Druitt's Towards home and away from home: the networked cosmopolitanism of Federation Square in Crossings in an earlier post on Federation Square. Have you read it?
My memory of Adelaide is that it is a spreading suburban landscapes where everyone feels like they have to move further and further out, and the downtown CBD suffers. it empties out as people return to their homes in suburbia from working in the city. The city closes down at the end of each day.
Unlike Melbourne, little is being done by the state government to rejuvenate and revitalise the city. There is no vision