One of the most enduring and pervasive ideas in urban policy is that cities should consist of numerous self-contained and self-sufficient neighbourhoods. With urban villages anchoring each neighbourhood, residents could work, shop, study and play locally, thereby saving on travel and building a strong sense of neighbourhood community. I’ve long been dubious about this romantic [...]
February 27, 2012 – 9:00 pm
A novel that deals with urban design, planning and the establishment of new cities is an unusual beast, but that’s part of what drew me to read the new book by veteran writer Frank Moorhouse, Cold Light. The protagonist, Edith Campbell Berry, works for a time at the body planning the development of Canberra in [...]
By Alan Davies
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Also posted in Planning
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Tagged Canberra, Cold Light, Edith trilogy, Frank Moorhouse, Garden City, Grattan Institute, League of Nations, Marion Mahoney Griffin, plannning, Robert Menzies, Walter Burley Griffin
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December 23, 2011 – 11:02 am
When I started The Melbourne Urbanist I wasn’t sure what direction it would take. While primarily about planning and development issues, I imagined it might also have a major sideline in reading and literature. Hence the Reading page in the sidebar. As things have turned out, there hasn’t been much interest in reading and books. [...]
August 18, 2011 – 7:40 pm
The English cricket writer, Neville Cardus, is famous for bringing a literary sensibility to the hitherto prosaic task of reporting on the game. International cricketer John Arlott said, “before him, cricket was reported … with him it was for the first time appreciated, felt, and imaginatively described”. British novelist David Mitchell may be the Neville [...]
There’s a small, independent literary bookshop in my local shopping centre whose days, I fear, are numbered. I can’t see how it will survive the online challenge. Its likely demise will make the shopping centre even more monocultural. This isn’t a big shop like Readings in Carlton, so its scope to live on by “adding value” [...]
The other night my son and I had the pleasure of attending a seminar titled Emotional Cities at the Wheeler Centre, Melbourne’s wonderful cultural institution for discussion of writing and ideas. The seminar was billed, somewhat pretentiously, as an all-star line-up of literary luminaries discussing the “architecture of the mind and the cities that inspire [...]
October 4, 2010 – 7:11 pm
Review: When we think about Melbourne: the imagination of a city, Jenny Sinclair, Affirm Press, 2010, Melbourne One of the observations made by Jenny Sinclair in When we think about Melbourne really strikes a chord with me – just how different the city is when you see it from the saddle of a bicycle. In [...]
