bluntie

I am a lonely moderate in a family obsessed with pinnacles. if there is a mountain they feel compelled to reach the top for reasons that elude me. the view is often nicer further down the slope, and conceptually it hurts to reach the top. where to from there? if I can’t eat the proverbial cheese until I get to the top then I will either go hungry or save the cheese so that I still have something to live for after peaking.
Late Autumn in Hobart at the top of Mount Wellington, on a clear day overlooking the bays and peninsulas of south-eastern Tasmania (Australia’s Cornwall in terms of its coastline among other things), but today battling a bare blizzard. This is not the gentle snow of Amsterdam. To snow here it has to be sharply windy from all directions, as described by the lean of feebly bent tea-trees which have also had the colour ripped out of them. I don’t think there is a town on earth with more shadows than Hobart; the mountain casts its blue afternoon shadow early and the island’s most famous gallery is built into rock, under darkness. Sandstone breweries, olde convict goals, colde coffee, artisan cheese, apples which have been dried and given the eyes and ears of an old lady and soft scented irreplacable wood carved into apples instead.

in southern Tasmania the leaves of the gumtrees are blue. everything is blue here except the orange ship waiting for Antarctica.

I find myself eye-rolling reading the deep bog of blogs about bikes saving our cities. the empty vacuum of directionlessness and regret (how we wish we hadn’t built that freeway there) is conveniently filled by bikes. it seems such a flimsy way to fill a void, using bikes to try to disguise fifty years of bad city planning. but when you think in tangibles and not in maps it might be that bikes really are the only way we can make the city better; addressing as they do the trifecta of health, traffic and street-life. the best way to encourage mass cycling is through congestion and poverty so it’s hard to imagine in a city like this.
It’s nice though that some of the best cycle paths in Melbourne really do exist as a foil to the freeway, sheltered by the road itself. i don’t think the delight of re-using the empty spaces of infrastructure will ever fade.

Now I spend my lunch breaks at the food court. does this depress you? it’s strange because I was educated all my life to dislike food courts. actually they are the pinnacle of inclusivity within the very narrow confines of profitable commercial development. I can go there alone, can spend $2 or $20. ok $2 is optimistic. but even if I didn’t buy anything there are enough outdoor seats and the space is so expansive and anonymous that I could just sit there, reading books about the privati$ation of our public space if I wanted, and I would not be nervous that the 18 year old clearing tables would ask me to leave.
It’s also droll because I was likewise educated to deride South Banks and North Banks and any other river-edge developments where homogeneous retail restaurant tenancies line up behind relentlessly diverse architectural facades to try to profit from the promenading tourists. but I rode home along South Bank last night (unlike London’s older version here are DDA level surfaces) and it was calm and lively, like a busy creek in spring.

and there is a third outcome. through no formula can we address the unequal catastrophe of resource scarcity and climate change. there are graphs and graphs that show that year on year the amount of sacrifice or the degree of ingenuity required is too great. the contrasts between the many worlds of our world are too wide and nothing will work for everyone. so we turn inwards, back to our own, and the question becomes more about harm-minimisation. how populous places can grow more food, how low-lands can defend their coasts, where all the people can go. here is white cat, beginning to plan how his adoptive country will fare, with all its empty ores and sand.

and here she is, sprouted, family doing well.

we havent reached even the middle of the beginning of data visualisation, of a global community, or of sustainable urbanism. so even as we are impressed by the work of artists and scientists who have managed to capture, for a moment, the unfocused concentration of a city, we can sense the limitations at both ends of the spectrum: projects that are too physical (a 100-year space-ship that bizarrely represents carbon emissions) and projects that are online and at the mercy of the scale of their audience/participators.
The creator of pachube, Usman Haque, also made a network of electrical use and consequence. cute and profound.
But the key point to emerge is that everyone loves animals.
Natalie Jeremijenko’s X-Species work in New York and in Melbourne gives a narrative to the creatures that don’t have a voice, and is probably where we should head with the dead weight of community engagement in urban planning: co-ordinate small actions into big data, make stories, give birds a voice, bring cats to the 10-seater negotiating table, let the people text the fish, and, instead of flyer-ing a neighbourhood with bubble-diagrams, have the fish text back.

it’s really not enough that Developer Cat is interrogating the site and testing the market, because on thursday night White Cat flew in to Tullamarine. Explicitly for the Formula 1, but implicitly to negotiate a new deal for a great pile of microscopic apartments on this very site. you can imagine my surprise, hair shorn short, but unmistakably White Cat so far from Columbia Road and Corfu; and you can imagine my nimby-ism when he did not hold back his ambition. we call it ambition, we mean greed: the greed of a ceo, greedy investment properties, the landlord’s greed, our own greed for continued employment.

if love is too hard, we are meant to at least respect the great master planning of Canberra. but clearly we should admit that it was a big mistake in existence and in execution. this is a small city of wealthy commuters, but their daily commute is via the qantas club and a mute view of the country far below. joggers and mountain bike, mowed medians and roads without traffic lights; if only the beautiful purple mountains would roll in on top of it. It’s been my job to find something interesting in the extraordinarily mundane, but the lake is truthfully satiating. to the lake, then. bearing in mind that this is the centre of the empty capital of a very un-populous nation.

To find your very own River Lea just take a map of your home city and locate the secondary river which cuts the 12mile path through the pretty and rough northern suburbs to the industrial countryside. In Melbourne that would be Merri Creek which connects Coburg’s multicultural family fun to the desirable inner north-east, via the smells of warm eucalyptus and charred sausage, surrounded by cactus palms and very stringy bark. Merri Creek is brown to make the sky appear bluer, it drowns people when it floods, and it winds around an outdoor velodrome and a drive-in cinema so this is quite a dramatic river, never mind the name.
Parallel, but in a Roman-straight line, runs the St George’s Road trail which speeds smoothly alongside the trains, going much further north than you probably imagined until, quite suddenly and without punctuation, it stops at one side of the ring road. Life is all about the journey, which is why there is absolutely nothing at the end of this one. Precedent would clearly suggest someone should’ve built an old abbey here instead of this factory.