thinking through the city
Thinking Through The City is a blog about our city – a place to share ideas and thoughts about the City of Norwood, Payneham & St Peters, and urban life in general.
Today over half the world’s population lives in cities; this despite the fact that cities occupy only about 3 per cent of the earth’s land surface. Urbanisation has provided valuable economic, social and cultural opportunities, but are our cities at risk of becoming soulless? Might we be in danger of making our cities places where business goes on as usual but life in its real sense is lost ?
This blog aims to start a conversation about how can we work together to create more liveable creative cities. How can we improve the design of our urban spaces to enhance our well-being: to be more sustainable, more creative, and more viable? Our cities and urban spaces must fulfil many needs, from making us feel secure, to enhancing our sense of identity and belonging, to giving us the space to play and socialise.
What in particular is the place of art in the city? Is its function to celebrate, to reflect or to challenge our perspectives? Is it to help us dream and renew our imagination? What meaning does it add to our lives and public spaces? Thinking Through The City welcomes your comments and contributions.
This is a blog for everyone. We hope it will attract comments from people – citizens – of all ages, cultures and professions. What is it that you love about this city, or indeed any city? What’s missing? What would you change if you had the opportunity? Follow our conversation threads or add some of your own, either way, feel free to scroll down the page to add your comments or reflections.
Remember, you don’t have to live in Norwood Payneham & St Peters to have your say!
Some Thoughts on the “city” and public art
I have lived in Stepney for a decade. Despite the official name of our local council, I don’t think of myself as someone who lives in a city but rather someone who lives near one. It’s noteworthy that many of the posts on this site explicitly refer to the Parade and/or Norwood in discussing ideas about the city. Can we infer from them that a city is a place in which residents are within a 10-minute walk of a cafe? Where does that leave the other NPSP precincts?
I walk a lot; over the years this has allowed me to see a variety of public art in our area. A particular highlight was a burial shrine for a dead crow that I saw created on the corner of a nature strip in St Peters. I watched the work evolve over a number of days around the corpse: flowers, stones, twigs tied into crosses, and leaves were gradually added. It was quite the installation and much more evocative than many of the official, council-funded public artworks that I have seen.
As well as pieces created with a deliberate intent, there is a lot of incidental art to discover; wonderful juxtapositions of materials and forms, often seen in people’s gardens or our parks. I think it was the American writer Alice Walker who wrote about women expressing their artistic impulses through their gardens, I think this is true of all gardeners – even those who limit themselves to iceberg roses and English box hedges!
If you want to celebrate the local community and our art-making, encourage people to walk around their neighbourhoods, it’s there for the seeing.
October 11, 2011 at 5:10 am
Thanks for the comment Kate. You are absolutely right we should be encouraging people to walk around their neighbourhoods and celebrate their local culture. There are so many different textures to Norwood, Payneham & St Peters – it is difficult to encapsulate. Your thoughts made me think of the idea of ‘artistic citizenship’ ; there is a project that has been initiated and run independently by the residents of Kensington asking residents in the area to decorate their front gates with recycled materials. It is really fun to walk around the area and in search of these gates. Quite inspiring!
October 11, 2011 at 7:31 am