Published Messenger Newspapers, Adelaide, May 7, 2003
PLANNERS AT ODDS WITH ARCHITECTS
PARIS is a beautiful place, no doubt about it, yet the man who rebuilt the city in the mid-1800s had an eye not for beauty but for the peasants, who were frequently revolting. The alleyways of the Paris slums could be easily barricaded in an uprising, therefore Baron Haussmann, on the order of Napoleon III, destroyed the old city and created wide boulevards with uninterrupted lines of fire for artillery to suppress insurrections. Haussmann's other agenda was to use the boulevards to link the Paris railway stations, creating a giant trading centre. The sidewalk cafes and the promenading by the bourgeoisie came later. The homes of 15,000 people were razed and the working classes were pushed from the city centre to the outskirts. Sound familiar? Haussmann's work restores your faith in the social merits of urban planning ... not. Along the way, admittedly, he also fixed the Paris sewerage system and created open green spaces but he then made sure one park was reserved for the rich and another for the poor. In any event, the boulevards did not prevent insurrections. The peasants simply became better organised, used more manpower and erected bigger barricades. Blast those accursed peasants! The point of all this is to ask whether, short of a revolution, Paris offers any lessons for Adelaide, particularly in the city centre which has seen an eruption of crowded apartment buildings in the past five years. The commentators of Haussmann's time protested that his slum clearance had left behind a fragmented, alienated city centre containing only luxurious apartments. Ditto here and much of what passes for new city living in Adelaide exists behind security gates, living cheek-by-jowl in a maze of alleyways and deadends where the taxis can never find anyone's address. In some cases it must be like living in a day-release remand centre. Are these the slums of the future? Where is the next Haussmann when you need him? As someone who lived in the city until I could no longer afford it and had to leave, I have a detached, cold view of these residential developments and do not know who to blame - planners or architects? A brittle tension seems to exist between the two sides over who should take the most blame for stuffing up a city, any city. I read recently where a Sydney architect Lionel Glendenning had suggested the answer to urban planning problems was simple - sack all planners. He listed among their many sins a lack of vision and creativity, hopeless inefficiency and a bureaucratic herd mentality that led to lowest common denominator solutions. ``A dry bunch of people,'' Glendenning said. Ouch.
The other day at the Rosewater supermarket carpark, I witnessed a young man sitting inside a car - inside, mind - who suddenly headbutted the driver's side window, smashing it to smithereens and, apparently uninjured, he drove off. True. An architect having just left a meeting with a council planner?
