Green buildings and sustainable cities – news and views

Subscribe to The Fifth Estate newsletter

Readers may have chuckled at the naive quotes supporting the two developments introduced in part two. 

Yet this appears to be how Adelaide now genuinely sees itself. Its “vision” expressed through the ambitions of significant developers, with council reduced to a support role providing catch-phrase content and a megaphone.

What does this say about Adelaide’s big visions, which only governments are capable of projecting? Here’s part six…

It is the ultimate contention of this series that the source of outsider disdain for Adelaide (refer part one) originates in an unconscious recognition that the urban fabric of Adelaide carries the contemporary imprint of a fundamental lack of a contemporary, unique, and compelling Adelaide vision.

For example, Melbourne’s decades-long laneways and city living initiatives were visionary in that they inferred new and compelling ideas for living in an Australian city. 

Yet adopting the same initiative in Adelaide (and many other Australian cities) is recognisably inauthentic. There is no guarantee that the adoptee will likewise bathe in the glory of being visionary. 

Of all Australian capital cities, Adelaide would be expected to be the most attuned to the importance of a vision.

The establishment of South Australia was motivated by a vision of a new hardworking society, lifting itself up with meritorious labour from the crushing forces of the British industrial revolution and European religious persecution.

The planning of the city is still celebrated in the statue of “Light’s vision”, a pilgrimage to which is undertaken by every Adelaide school-child (see title image).

MORE FROM MIKE BROWN’S SERIES ON PLANNING IN ADELAIDE:

Keen to tap into the post war manufacturing boom, its premier Tom Playford initiated Adelaide’s car-building expertise which spun off increased industrial capacity. He also constructed the then contemporary outer suburb of Elizabeth to house workers.

Adelaide’s Dunstan years were marked by a national popularity best explained as a visionary embrace of social and artistic freedom unequalled elsewhere in the nation. Though he also proposed a satellite city, Monarto, it never eventuated and is now the site of a zoo.

Adelaide’s origin story of free settlement, untainted by a convict past, still figures a little too large in its current self-estimation—it got off to a proper start, but what has happened since?

Of all Australian capital cities, Adelaide uniquely lacks the kind of locational advantage, aesthetic appeal, and financial momentum that its siblings possess in varying degrees. 

In order to stand equal with them, Adelaide always needed to be extraordinary.

Australia’s other capital cities look outwards, yet Adelaide fronts an inlet of the Southern Ocean. Its only direct orientation is towards another island—and its eponymous kangaroos. 

Adelaide’s connections to the world are mainly through its counterparts, but separated from them by semi-desert.

On this view, Adelaide has no real outlook; just an “in-look” (see image below).

Though conceived with visionary zeal, mediocrity seems also to have attended Adelaide’s development from the outset.

Adelaide was pegged out by Colonel Light next to a stream, not a river; on arable land neither desert nor lush; between an ocean inlet, not quite the open sea, and a low range of hills, not quite mountains. 

The tallest, cringingly named Mt Lofty, highlights the aspiration-reality mismatch that can still be detected in some of Adelaide’s self-estimation and promotion. 

Many extraordinary cities have managed to transcend unpropitious beginnings—think Las Vegas in its desert or Venice in its swampy lagoon. These cities literally invented their astonishing forms – but seemingly not Adelaide. Not yet, anyway.

Mediocrity particularly inheres in Adelaide’s fabric. 

Underdeveloped sites, some vacant for decades, still pockmarks the CBD. Most buildings in most suburbs are the first ever constructed on the land Light surveyed. 

Adelaide’s buildings are mainly timid copies drawn from other cities; its famed bluestone bodged up from rubble mortar and paint to resemble the real masonry of fancier capitals. 

A few genuinely remarkable projects by talented local interstate and international designers – think of the SA Health and Medical Research Institute and the future Aboriginal Art and Culture Centre – are rare compared to interstate capitals. 

Despite local commentators, such as Stephanie Johnston, regularly reminding their readers that Adelaide has an extensive history and current crop of exemplary design talent, the message is lost amidst the contemporary welter of urban disappointments, as observed in previous installments of this series.

To clarify what a vision is we also need to strike out what it is not.

The term “vision” is used here in a secular sense, not to denote a mystical Pauline Damascene event.  

Further, it does not refer to the kind of bracing strategic plans that regularly land with a thud of sparkly dust, such as the infrastructure fever-dream posed by the previous government – its “Globe Link” plan – as part of its successful election pitch, later quietly abandoned by its infrastructure agency in January 2020.

It is likewise with planning. 

Many will recall the “Yes Minister” sketch of the brand-new hospital that had no patients but was otherwise perfectly functioning.

Despite its celebrated recent planning reforms, it is difficult to believe that the snide commentary reviewed in part one will gradually subside once the new system takes root.

Good sustainability and planning systems are necessary but not sufficient conditions for visionary cities. 

Even if informed by strategic concerns, the planning discipline is fundamentally powerless to generate urban zest because, firstly, it requires the efforts of something or someone else for implementation and, secondly, a city’s pizzazz is largely immaterial; it rests in how lives are conceived and lived, not by how they are constrained. 

In conventional neoliberal terms, this is sometimes referred to as “the private sector” responding to the vicissitudes of the free market. 

Yet, as we observed in part two, that “free market” itself, as expressed by its pro-development apologists, delivers little more than marketing twaddle when it comes to the actual vision of a place. 

If we pull apart the precursor visions for Adelaide, the Playford initiatives, and those of the Dunstan years, we can detect a number of common features.

The first is that they all rest on immaterial benefits – a better life. It is a quality that might, but not necessarily, find eventual expression in the physical manifestations of a place. The vision that attended South Australia’s gestation preceded its eventual existence. The vision of the Dunstan years persisted with little physical change in Adelaide.

The second is that a vision is highly motivating. Vision, and pride in its achievement, drove Adelaide’s early development. Likewise, the artistic freedoms initiated during the Dunstan years found expression in the ongoing Festival of Arts and legislation expressing broader social liberation.

A third feature is that a vision can encompass many categories of existence. The singular vision of freedom that attracted America’s immigrants admitted a multitude of pathways towards that freedom. 

A fourth feature is that a vision can be both explicitly expressed and implicit. Melbourne’s city living and laneways initiatives enabled many to perceive a new way of inhabiting the city – a vision of urbanity – that they had not imagined beforehand. Simply reproducing that initiative in other cities does not mean that they too are visionary.

This points to a fifth feature—though it can be officially expressed a successful vision is enacted by individuals who buy into it. For example, a visionary city that holds equality as a fundamental virtue may not be marked differently than one that does not, yet be much more attractive place in which to live a full life.

A sixth feature is that, when viewed together, Adelaide’s successful visions were each renewed. As other cities passed Adelaide, old visions lost their motivating appeal.

Finally, we are also confining the idea of vision to its perception and expression within a city—an urban vision.

Urban vision is fundamentally a concept, a projection of a way of living that differs from and is more appealing than that currently experienced. Vision refers to the animating ideas that attract and stimulate participation towards its achievement. 

What is achieved thereafter carries the recognisable imprint of that vision, something that is currently lacking in Adelaide, it is contended here.

Urban vision thus conceived is much larger and sits above the regulatory instruments and strategic plans commonly associated with the notion. 

The allocation of blame for an absence of an animating Adelaide vision needs to be carefully ascribed. 

To illustrate, the mediocre built form of a city – the kind that seems to attract visitor disdain – is the product of many participants. 

Designers and developers are frequently splashed with the acid of public disgust. 

However, as we saw in part three, the designers of Victoria Square cannot be blamed for it still resembling a traffic roundabout.  

Likewise, the developers of recent Adelaide high-rises cannot be blamed for obtrusive scale mismatches. Recalling the scorpion-and-frog fable, they are in the business of making profit from development, what else would you expect? 

Likewise, if designers are merely engaged to “put lipstick on the swineherd’s pigs” don’t complain if the drove sullies our collective front yard—blame the lack of fencing.

Neither developers nor the talented designers they commonly engage are elected to develop and represent the collective-interest ideals upon which concepts like an urban vision are founded.

That role and obligation falls to government, both State and local. 

Visitor disdain should therefore be construed as a critique of poor urban governance.

We have observed that Adelaide has inspired visionary endeavours in the past.

If the absence of vision can be discerned in Adelaide’s urban fabric, it springs from the acceptance of existing mediocrity as marking peak achievement. 

It is the contention here that this acceptance has seeped into too many Adelaide endeavours, particularly its city-making efforts. These in turn now express Adelaide’s mediocrity to outsiders, as we encountered in part one.

It is also the contention here that the placid acceptance of mediocrity also motivates Adelaide talent to leave.

Fundamentally, the question they are left to answer is this: why should we choose to live in Adelaide above all other Australian cities?

The policy solution is NOT better marketing—recall that the cost of marketing is a tax paid for selling a bad product. 

Rather, it is reshaping Adelaide as a remarkable city that reflects a genuine, endogenous and compelling vision for its existence. 

Long-suffering Adelaideans deserve nothing less.

MORE FROM MIKE BROWN’S SERIES ON PLANNING IN ADELAIDE:

MORE FROM THE FIFTH ESTATE ABOUT URBAN PLANNING IN SOUTH AUSTRALIA:

Originally from Adelaide, Mike Brown has worked in NSW local and state government in planning, urban design, and strategic roles for 15 years. He is also a graduate of the Masters of Urban Policy and Strategy program at the University of NSW. More by Mike Brown

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

{{#message}}{{{message}}}{{/message}}{{^message}}Your submission failed. The server responded with {{status_text}} (code {{status_code}}). Please contact the developer of this form processor to improve this message. Learn More{{/message}}

{{#message}}{{{message}}}{{/message}}{{^message}}It appears your submission was successful. Even though the server responded OK, it is possible the submission was not processed. Please contact the developer of this form processor to improve this message. Learn More{{/message}}