Items related to Griffith REVIEW 20: Cities on the Edge
Synopsis
For the first time in history most people in the world now live in cities. This is an enormous change of profound importance. The sheer pressure of numbers will test the old adage, that cities are the heart of civilisation. Many already teeter on the brink of chaos. Climate change is the great new challenge confronting cities and the billions of people who live in them. The lead essay by outstanding urban planner Brendan Gleeson examines this and other stress points and suggests solutions to make cities better places to live and work. His expansive essay sets the big agenda for a new generation of thinking about the increasingly complex nexus with Nature. Making cities more liveable, more sustainable and more fun is one of the great new global tasks. The human, cultural and environmental implications of the global drift to cities are evoked in moving essays by outstanding writers including Margaret Simons, Robyn Davidson, Sally Breen, Nadia Wheatley and Creed O'Hanlon. Award-winning short fiction offers an intimate feel for city life. Highly-functioning cities are inspirational places - they allow creativity to blossom, cultures to flourish and communities to thrive. Getting this mix right is crucial to a viable future for Cities on the Edge. Other contributors include James Woodford, Peter Meredith, John Kinsella, Wendy Steele, Kate Fitapatrick, JT Glazebrook, Gabrielle Gwyther, Adam Aitken, Marcus Westbury, Chris Womersley, Hamish Townsend, Brett Caldwell, Tony Barrell, Jorge Sortirios. Poems by Gregory Day and Geoffrey Lehmann. Photo essay by John Wright.
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Review
Hope' is probably not the keyword of the latest Griffith REVIEW. Its title, Cities on the Edge, signals its primary concerns: urbanisation, cities in gridlock, water scarcity and population growth, suburban life, community, inner-city living. There are excellent essays by Margaret Simons, Brett Caldwell and others, but the lead essay of the volume, 'Waking from the Dream', is by Brendan Gleeson, and is required reading. Gleeson, who is the director of the Urban Research Program at Griffith University and author of 'Australian Heartlands: Making Space for Hope in the Suburbs' (2006), is a gifted writer and a passionate researcher. His work is proof of how ridiculous it is to dichotomise writing as coming either from the conservative bastion of the university or the page-turning marketplace. 'Waking from the Dream' is a coherent wake-up call and a gripping read. Gleeson is a modern prophet whose turn of phrase is sometimes apocalyptic (a tool in trade of prophets), but it is prophetic writing produced by deep research, reasoned and persuasive thought. I am uncomfortable with many of his ideas, perched in my air-conditioned, inner urban home. So I should be. Gleeson's argument is that urban consumption appetites are the real problem as we face climate change and the future. He adds, 'the biggest guts are not in the suburbs'. This is one of Gleeson's biggest claims, that the long-held urban planning emphasis on high-density inner urban living does not add up. It is not the suburbs, for so long the urban elites' whipping boy, with their Fountain Gates and their ugly McMansions, their long suburban drives to the city, that are the main problem, but inner urban consumption. Gleeson quotes the conclusion to the Australian Conservation Foundation's crucial 2007 report, 'Main Findings': 'despite the lower environmental impacts associated with less car use, inner city households outstrip the rest of Australia in every other category of consumption... in each state and territory, the centre of the capital city is the area with the highest environmental impats, followed by the inner suburban areas.' But Gleeson is not simply a doomsayer. Far from it. He raises this issue of hyper-consumption in order to argue the need for a new solidarity in Australia, one akin to postwar solidarity as we all learn the necessity of modesty and restraint. 'These values and ambitions will have to be restored to public life and to institutional purpose if we wish to find a common passage through the coming storm.' Gleeson's essay, in all its detailed and passionate knowledge of our current urban and world crisis in global warming and mass consumption, is not without hope: 'We face a time of threat akin to global war: the peril is grave but not insurmountable... Restraint, sacrifice, solidarity: these are words that would shatter the dream of neo-liberal Prometheanism. Generating large consumption cuts is surely the province of the nation state. By electing the Rudd Government, Australia authorized a serious project.' You might not agree with everything Gleeson says, but read his essay. It's a page-turner. --Australian Book Review
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