Urban Broadcast Collective

This Must Be The Place

In this installment of This Must Be the Place Elizabeth and David give a post-film review, along with Rebecca Clements (and also a bit of help from Trent and Casper), of the Jane Jacobs documentary “Citizen Jane: Battle for the City”. As is discussed, the film features a fantastic variety of archival footage and also has very high production values. It tells the iconic mid-20th century story of battles over freeways, slum clearances, high rise housing towers, the ‘cancer’ analogy that propelled urban renewal projects, and the frontlines between grassroots activism and top-down planning orthodoxy more broadly.

Perhaps for planners there isn’t so much to learn from the film – Elizabeth and David to this end use the word “undergraduate” in the same sniffy way that chilled Elizabeth long ago (hearing Virigina Woolf describing James Joyce’s Ulysses, and wondering how hard someone would have to work to be so far up themselves). But there are several interesting insights into Jacobs’ background as a journalist, and it’s also worth revisiting her ideas afresh rather than tending to rely on what these ideas have been distilled into over the ensuing decades. The film celebrates – sometimes with a heavy, sappy hand – the inherent value of people and community, and makes a strong case for political engagement. To quote Jacobs, “I think it’s wicked, in a way, to be a victim”

Also discussed in the review: pre-war Robert Moses as ‘bully for the people’; issues with looking at public and high-rise houses only from the outside; OTT choices of music; the Pruitt Igoe myth; gentrification (not, notably, discussed in the film); differences between preservation and life; Jacob’s glasses (I think – well we should have); and the challenge of accommodating nuance in a film while still making it compelling. Also some other stuff – part of which is set to the slightly distracting “ears on the street” soundtrack of Federation Square of a Friday evening.

“Citizen Jane” was shown at Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne. It’s great to watch and also an excellent curiosity builder for a general audience. And if you’re a planner, you’ll no doubt see several people you know in the audience.

The Green Bans and Gentrification by SoundMinds Radio

In this episode, we take to the streets of Sydney. We meet public housing resident Barney Gardner at his house in the suburb of Millers Point, which is just under Sydney Harbour Bridge. I’ve spent a bit of time with Barney over the last couple of years, interviewing him for various research projects on inner city gentrification. Barney was born in Millers Point and has lived there all his life. In 2014, he was told he had to move out of his house and the neighbourhood. The public housing he was living in was being sold off. For most of the last two centuries Millers Point’s proximity to major wharves and maritime industries saw the place develop as a largely low-income, working class neighbourhood. In the early 1970s the ‘Green Bans’ saved the suburb from modernist redevelopment.

We talk to Nicole Cook, a Lecturer at the University of Wollongong, about urban development in Sydney, and what the Green Bans teach us about Global Sydney. Nicole is a Lecturer in the School of Geography and Sustainable Communities at The University of Wollongong. Nicole is an urban geographer with research interests in urban governance, power and participation, social movement and resident activism, housing and home. Barney Gardner was born in Millers Point and has lived there all his life.

AUDIO

Blue Dot Sessions, Outside the Terminal

The Kyoto Connection, Close to the Abyss

NSW Parliament, Life time resident Barney Gardner addresses crowd outside NSW Parliament House

Tanya Plibersek, Millers Point Public Housing

Blue Print for Living, Iconic Buildings: Sirius Building

SHFATheRocks, Jack Mundey and the Victory – Part 3 of 3

Urban Green Space by Urban Squeeze

What are the benefits of urban green spaces? What are their costs? Can urban greenery save lives, improve health and reduce health costs? Tony Matthews and Jason Byrne discuss these and other questions, as well as whether more urban greenery can reduce heat stress, Australia's biggest natural killer. @drtonymatthews @CityByrne

Lieven Ameel of the University of Tampere (Finland) on the literary unease of urban life by This Must be The Place

This episode of This Must Be the Place features an interview by David (a self-confessed Finnophile) with Lieven Ameel at the University of Tampere in Finland, when David was a visiting scholar. They discuss Lieven’s book about literary representations of urban life in Helsinki in Early 20th Century Finnish Literature ("Helsinki in Early Twentieth-Century Literature: Urban Experiences in Finnish Prose Fiction 1890-1940" blogs.helsinki.fi/urbannarratives/publications/). Finish literature from the early 20th century tends to have been threaded through with unease about urban life – lots of farm girls getting exploited etc., perhaps because “it’s so easy to use a city is a metaphor or allegory of the human capacity for good and evil”. Apparently there was a rich body of urban literature from Finland, but this has largely been forgotten and not translated – even works by authors whose rural-based work is better known. In Finland, seemingly universal anxieties about cities and change were amplified by the fears of a newly formed country that defined itself in rural terms. Also, if you listen right to the end there’s us discussing Fawkner cemetery, Beechworth asylum, unmarked graves at Sunbury asylum, and more. Note - in the podcast we wonder aloud - when did cremation become legal in Victoria? The answer seems to be: 1903.

Energy Futures by Urban Squeeze

What does the future look like in terms of energy generation? How can we produce cheaper and cleaner energy to power our cities? Should you put solar panels on your roof? Tony Matthews and Jason Byrne discuss these and other questions, as well as the challenges of connecting renewable energy to the grid and new innovations in the sector. @drtonymatthews @CityByrne

Round-up of the Urban History Planning History (UHPH) conference, “Remaking Cities” by This Must be The Place

In this episode of This Must Be The Place Elizabeth and David do a round-up review of the 14th Urban History Planning History (UHPH) conference, themed “Remaking Cities” and hosted by RMIT University in January-February 2018. The UHPH is a biennial (every 2 years! For anyone else who wonders about that word) conference, and Elizabeth and David contributed in various respects to the planning and organizing of this, the 14th installment of the UHPH. In this discussion they cover (with varying levels of impartiality) several of the excellent plenaries including Chris Gibson on the geographies of making and manufacturing; and Cathie Oats on the future of Trove, the National Library of Australia’s digital archive service. They also comment on a few different sessions of interest including (in no particular order) quarrying and clay pits (the discussion is itself recorded at Fleming Park Brunswick, itself a former claypit); PBS radio; INXS and the Eels; post-war campuses including La Trobe and Macquarie; the failed border realignment of the ACT; Rambo the merino in Goulburn; Kodak in Melbourne; arcades; Ruth and Maurie Crow; past plans for a ‘mega centre’ at Moorabbin Airport; and modern Jewish Melbourne (featuring Catherine Townsend of the Newlands Estate episode). They also discuss the logistics of conferences generally and the final panel held at the conference. The final panel covered the future of the UHPH conference, of digital resources, and of the urban history discipline within the constraints and exclusions of the casualised university. The panel featured Lauren Piko, Seamus O’Hanlon, and Kate Folington (PROV). Frankly it would have been a good (or better) podcast in itself than a roundup discussion a week later, but this wasn’t thought of at the time. See the UHPH program website here: www.remakingcities-uhph2018.com/. Full papers will be available soon. Note - the next UHPH will (probably, but not officially) be held in Launceston.

Planning La La Land: A Scholarly View by Suburbanista Podcast

 

Los Angeles is generally seen as the prototypical car-dependent, sprawling city. Six to eight lane freeways criss-cross the Los Angeles metropolitan region. What many people don’t realise is that Los Angeles has been leading the way in the USA in terms of public transport investment, especially rail-based transit, over the last decade or so. In this, the inaugural episode of the Suburbanista Podcast (@SuburbanistaPod), Paul Maginn, aka @Planographer, discusses some of the major planning and transport issues and challenges within Los Angeles with Prof Marlon Boarnet (@Marlon_Boarnet), Chair of the Dept. of Urban Planning and Spatial Analysis at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School.  In this episode Paul asks Prof Boarnet what planning lessons, if any, can Los Angeles offer other global cities.

Natural Disasters by Radio Reversal

Natalie and Jo talk about “natural” disasters, and how disasters are constructed and experienced along a variety of intersecting political, economic, social, and spatial lines. They explore environmental justice, what goes into turning an event into a disaster, how disasters intersect with collective trauma and collective identities, and processes and practices of resilience and recovery – with the help of lots of examples and gratuitous scare quotes.

@RadioReversal @DrNatOsborne @joanna_horton

Land and Cities by City Road

What is the secret life of land title registration? The Torrens system of land title registration, developed in South Australia in 1858, is fast becoming the most popular system of land conveyancing and administration around the world.

Sarah Keenan discusses the Torrens system of title registration that was invented for South Australia to assist the project of colonial settlement and land speculation. It was designed to increase efficiency of conveyancing, but title registration fundamentally changes the nature of title to land. The defining principles of Torrens title registration are ‘the mirror, the curtain, and indemnity’. These principles work together to hide the land’s unregistered history, making that history disappear from legal view. However the people who have those histories still exist. The Torrens system of title registration, or versions of it, are today favoured by the World Trade Organisation and World Bank, and are increasingly being adopted around the world in an effort to make land a liquid asset. New forms of title registration are being innovated to assist financial markets in land, for example the Mortgage Electronic Registration System in the US, which played a key role in facilitating the subprime crisis.

Whereas title to land in the common law world was previously conveyed using paper deeds that proved the owner had a history of possessing the land, under the Torrens system title is conveyed through the centralised, singular and increasingly electronic process of registration. The system was designed to make conveying land faster and more efficient, but it also changed the legal concept of land title, making it a discrete, dephysicalised object. Registered title is thus out of sync with land, which has a physicality and history that cannot be wiped away. This lack of synchronisation between land and title has a number of troubling effects. Dr Sarah Keenan is Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London. Sarah is a legal geographer with research interests in critical race and feminist engagements with property.

https://cityroadpod.org/

Sustainable Housing by Urban Squeeze

What are the features of sustainable houses? Is sustainable housing rewarded enough and should it be incentivised? Should you take your house off-grid? Will you be healthier and happier in a sustainable building? Tony Matthews and Jason Byrne discuss these and other questions, as well as some new technologies for sustainable house design. @drtonymatthews @CityByrne