bringing back nature
My role was to oversee the redevelopment of Dunstone Grove – Linde Reserve from concept to detailed design and final delivery. I am really pleased how the design objectives have translated into reality. It is a real oasis – away from the adjoining roads and traffic – a really pleasant place to be that enhances the community’s enjoyment of the environment. We naturalised, as much as possible, Second Creek and created artificial rock pools to allow for the natural habitat and fauna to re-establish and the community to interact with it. Already there has been an increased number of ducks; three families of ducks have been raised since the pools were established – even during construction works! Further we have been advised that frogs have returned to the creek. They have been heard at night and bubbles are frequently seen here.
I could talk for hours on the reserve’s many inclusions such as stormwater harvesting for reuse to irrigate this reserve & beyond, artworks, environmental sustainable design initiatives + more. I’ve already booked my son’s first birthday party here, that’s how proud I am of the finished product.
Sam Dilena NPSP Asset & Special Projects Manager
building dynamism
It is really important that we create an environment where young people and artists can express themselves.
If we don’t afford them this opportunity our young people will move to other places and our city will lose much of its dynamism and creativity. We will be the poorer for this loss.
Michael Hickinbotham, Managing Director Hickinbotham Group
Would I travel for that?
Last week, with some guilt, I went to Borders in the CBD to by a book. Guilty for picking over the bones of a dying business, guilty as the staff talked about their unknown futures. I was after a book that had been a business best seller for the last 6 years. Unexpectedly Borders had what I wanted on their shelves. I am so used to retail stores not having something in stock that my initial bad feeling left me and I got excited by the large 40% off tickets, I found my book and looked to the back for the price, calculated the discount and then it struck me, the deep problem that retail is facing. The discount price was still five dollars more expensive than if it had been purchased from Amazon (that’s including shipping). My emotions had swung from guilt to excitement to disappointment. (more…)
Public Spaces – Just add Arts
There seems to be a growing acknowledgment that the arts reflect our identity, our social conscience, our human lens on the world.
It’s an organic ‘thinker in residence’.
Integrating diverse forms of arts (performance, film, visual and music), organically throughout our City and our society, ensures that our human condition is fully expressed – irrepressibly. It’s our insurance towards creating a rich, vibrant, diverse and fulfilling life. (more…)
Renewal
Working in a job focused intensely on cities and how they function, I often come across the statistic that more than 50% of the world’s population lives in cities. It’s an interesting point for a number of reasons but what interests me most is what the term ‘lives’ might actually mean. Do you ‘live’ in a city if you sleep in the city? What if you work/play/relax/eat/drink/fight or love in the city. I think a lot of us think of a city as an entity that uses us- we respond to changes in the city (changes to public transport routes, road works, new buildings etc) rather than thinking that the city is an organic space/shape/being that should respond to a range of influences, one of which is people. Paying attention to how people use the city is really important.
Suburbanisation allowed people to develop a sense of privacy and personal space, which was almost unprecedented in human history (unless you worked as a shepherd or explorer). My parents’ generation, and to a lesser extent their parents, embraced cars, fenced suburban blocks and a belief that life/community/the city were things that you left the house to find. One of the spin-offs of this mindset is the belief that the city can exist without the input of ordinary people. It’s easy to see the development and changes in a city as the work of governments, councils, developers and investors.
Things are changing. More people are choosing to forgo the quarter acre block and opting for medium density housing, community groups such as food co-ops are generating new communities within cities and people are rediscovering their cities not just as places to work but also as places to be. This is great. The difficulty is that while it’s relatively easy to change the way you interact with a city (say by deciding to shop locally rather than by driving to a big shopping centre) taking the next step and actually starting a project that other people can participate in is hard. Renew Adelaide is an organisation which aims to plug a hole between the community and the people or organisations who own space. To put it simply, we match community groups or creative practitioners with spaces that are vacant or underused. This requires open-minded property owners and creative councils because what we’re doing is at odds with the traditional idea that access to space requires financial capital and that changes in a city trickle down from people in positions of power. Renew Adelaide, which is based on the successful Renew Newcastle model, challenges cities to consider the impact that comes from giving the people who use the city a chance to take a piece of the city and make it their own. No matter how good your infrastructure is (beautiful buildings, well-planned streets) it is people that make a city vibrant and Renew Adelaide is all about building vibrant cities from the ground up. Maybe we’ll see you in Norwood Payneham St Peters in the future?
Lara Torr, Project Manager, Renew Adelaide Inc.
