Fifty Years of Ugliness

The Australian Ugliness (Robin Boyd, Text, 1960/2010)

Como Street

In 1960 Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness became the classic treatise on the malaise of this country’s architecture and planning, offering a withering critique of all that Boyd found wanting in the Australian built form of the late 1950s. The book has now been re-issued in a handsome fiftieth-anniversary edition, with Boyd’s text bracketed between an introduction by Christos Tsiolkas and an afterword by John Denton, Phillip Goad and Geoffrey London, and its reappearance provides an interesting prompt for reflection. In the subsequent half century our cities have expanded astronomically, and no doubt there is plenty of ugliness out there in the built environment. But what kind of ugliness? Have we moved on from those trends that so bothered Boyd? And if so, have we just found newer, more effective ways to blight our landscape?

Continue reading →

How to Not Read Everything I Write

I occasionally feel self-conscious about the weird mix of content on this site, with film reviews sitting alongside detailed discussions of urban planning issues. While I think some of my planning stuff (like my essays about the town of Seaside, or the urban design and planning of Disneyland) might be of interest to a broader readership, some of my posts are pretty technical and I appreciate must be annoying to the readers that followed me over here from my old film-related site, Cinephobia.

For this reason, I’ve now made it slightly easier to skip to just the content you’re after by creating subdomains you can bookmark for each of the two main threads of content. The two new addresses, which should be self-explanatory, are:

www.sterow.com/film

www.sterow.com/urbanplanning

You can also get an RSS feed that just delivers the film or planning articles. Here’s the film feed, and here’s the planning feed.

Continue reading →

The Victorian Car Parking Review: Why it Matters and What Should Happen Now

God's Abacus

There was movement on one of the most long-awaited planning reviews going around last week, with the announcement that a new Advisory Committee will examine draft car parking controls and prepare a further report.

The car parking controls have become the bad joke of Victorian planning. The current review recently passed its seven year anniversary, having been initiated in May of 2004. The original terms of reference for that review made it clear it was building on earlier work conducted by Hansen Partnership in 1999, and then-Planning Minister Robert Maclellan was telling Planning News that a review was imminent back in the mid 1990s. The draft Advisory Committee report was released in 2007, but a long silence followed: we were already making fun of the former government’s inaction on the topic in Planning News back in May of 2008. The change of government had only deepened the suspicion that we might never see action on this front.

Continue reading →

And to Think That I Saw it on Colonial Street

Colonial Street B

A while back I posted about Courthouse Square, the classic town square used in countless film and television productions. As I argued then, I think these backlot places are interesting because they at once reflect and shape our ideas about community. When Hollywood production designers build a backlot set, they will aim for something that is at once familiar yet generic (since it will be used in many productions), while simultaneously desirable (since Hollywood films tend to show a world that is a little bit more exciting and interesting than our own). That’s the part where they reflect our desires.

Yet once built, those sets reappear in many productions. Over time, with repetition, those generic backlot communities can come to actually shape our image of community. I don’t want to over-sell this idea: obviously we don’t simply passively absorb a picture of the world from movies and then start to believe this is the way the world is, or should be. But I do believe that pop-culture iconography is party of the language we draw on to make sense of the world, and that Hollywood’s images of the quaint small towns, leafy suburbs, or the polluted big city become powerful visual signifiers that influence the way we picture different types of community.

Continue reading →

Old School Spielberg

Super 8 (J.J. Abrams, 2011)

With Super 8, J.J. Abrams pays tribute to a body of work that some feel Hollywood has been methodically aping for thirty years: Steven Spielberg’s work of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Yet even if you accept the Peter Biskind “Hollywood drank Spielberg’s Kool Aid and was forever changed” school of thought – about which I said a bit more here – you’d have to acknowledge that it was a particular aspect of Spielberg’s filmmaking that Hollywood latched on to. The lesson everybody seemed to learn from Jaws, Close Encounters, and E.T. (plus George Lucas’ Star Wars) was that people were after escapist, wonder-inducing science fiction and fantasy. What almost all of the imitators didn’t understand, or couldn’t replicate, was Spielberg’s knack for depicting the real world setting and the domestic backdrop against which the adventure took place. That, of course, was what made the transition to the extraordinary and other-worldly in Spielberg’s work so effective. What makes Super 8 really interesting, albeit not completely successful, is the care Abrams devotes to replicating that more mundane side of the Spielberg formula.

Continue reading →

Photo Round-Up

A round up of various photos that I haven’t posted previously.

In posting these I make no great claim for their quality. I know the difference between my amateur efforts and really good photography. But this is my site, so I post my photos, modest as my efforts are.

All are clickable for a better view over on flickr.

Waterfall, Mount Field

Continue reading →

Starting Over

like clockwork

So the Victorian Planning Minister, Matthew Guy, has established an Advisory Committee to “overhaul” the Victorian planning system. Talk about a mixture of feelings.

It’s worth reflecting on how many reviews there have been into the functioning of the Victorian system since the major overhaul in the 1990s that produced the VPPs. In terms of reviews or audits of either the overall operation of the system, or very substantial parts of it, we have the following:

  • Better Decisions Faster: Opportunities to Improve the Planning System in Victoria (August 2003)
  • Cutting Red Tape in Planning (August 2006)
  • Making Local Policy Stronger – Report of the Ministerial Working Group on Local Planning Policy (June 2007)
  • Melbourne 2030: Audit Expert Group Report (March 2008)
  • Victoria’s Planning Framework for Land Use and Development (May 2008)
  • Modernising Victoria’s Planning Act (various discussion papers throughout 2009)

It’s a bit shocking just putting the list together. That doesn’t include the various reports into particular bits of the system, such as the smaller system reviews still noted as active (as I write, this includes the controls for advertising signs, home based business, the residential zones, parking provisions, retail policy, and the State Planning Policy Framework) and a few others that seem to have gone AWOL (such as the review of the heritage overlays, or the functioning of Section 173 Agreements).

Continue reading →