A friend of the pond was recently given a booklet, "New Parramatta Road Draft Parramatta Road Corridor Urban Transformation Summary September 2015", and asked to comment for benefit of the state government ...
The pond's friend was shocked, startled and appalled ...
Here's how it worked. There were lots of small photos littered through the report showing derelict Parramatta Road as it is now ...
This sort of thing ...
Eek, is that a purveyor of halal meats?
Well we certainly can't have that, and none of that graffiti please, and so on and on ...
So what was the contrasting vision?
Well, without sounding too Prince Chuck about it all, anyone who can remember Godard's Alphaville will notice that the booklet's illustrations offer a scrubbed up futurist version of Parramatta Road, featuring relentless, soul-destroying, monotonous ugliness of a kind once seen as a sci modernist fi future ...
The pond suspects this vision of an urban environment and landscape will mainly be useful for a Godard or a Jeffrey Smart, wanting to draw attention to the intrinsic beauty of concrete ...
And so on to what the pond likes to think of as the complete Meritonisation of Sydney ...
For those unaware of Meriton - you can Greg Hunt the company here - that's apartment buildings of no merit whatsoever, without any redeeming hint of beauty, but offering an abundance of urban ugliness... or perhaps more to the point, urban banality ...
Here's how the Meritonisation of Parramatta Road will look ...
Anyone who's been to Dallas, who treasures the LA experience, knows that the motorway will do no such thing. It will encourage rat runs and avoiders, it will clog and corrupt the inner west, it will, in its own way, do as much for the inner west as the legendary Robert Moses did for New York. And in the process it will do diddly squat for motorists, as it shifts one sticking point and log jam to somewhere else on the grid ...
Just as there are listicles for the 5 Things in NYC We Can Blame on Robert Moses, so in due course there will be a listicle for The Many Things We Can Blame on Mike Baird.
Back to the well for another fraudulent, disingenuously so, image, concocted, whipped up by a graphic artist:
The banality is breath-taking, and once implemented, irredeemable:
This is of course a developer vision.
Both the Liberal and the Labor party have been hopelessly corrupted by developers. The example offered by the low comedy at Auburn council, a long running saga still running wild and free, is just the latest in a long line of Sydney comedy stylings ...
And the Parramatta road re-development conforms to the Auburn council's sense of style and class ...
Mike Baird presents himself as a pragmatist, a planner and a thinker.
But he's actually just the latest, and for developers - happiest - example of a Hun or a Visigoth, peddling delusional images ...
In the end, the pond was nauseated by the spectre of the offerings (that's as close as we dare get to an inadvertent Bond plug), and at the thought of the motorway that will soon roll on through, while some deluded punters imagine that this is what they'll be getting as compensation ...
Beyond the valley of the bland ...
This is actually where it will end ...
But hey, at least they've learned to plant trees ...
There, much better ... have a nice day. Come on back ya hear?
You're welcome ... enjoy your drive, and help maintain the Sydney brand of road rage ...
There is a PLAGUE of 'Developers' #OZ, aka leeches on a landscape, parasites on Paradise - I want to line my own pockets NOW and I DGAF about anyone or anything else!
ReplyDeleteThat last pic reminds of a Dr Who episode, Gridlock .... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gridlock_%28Doctor_Who%29
ReplyDeleteWherein drivers lived in their cars while ensnared in an interminable traffic jam.
But I don't wish to detract from the essential point of your post. That of the crushing mundanity of urban design ruled by property developers economic imperatives. Which will inevitably lead to the lyrics of that quaint little song ....
Little boxes, all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
They're all made out of ticky-tacky,
And they all look just the same.
So sad.
I never really got that one. At my house I'm usually on the inside looking out so I don't really much care what they look like to an external observer (if anybody is crazy enough to observe my house anyway). Why would anybody care whether their house looks just like a lot of other houses ? Is there some transcendent moral imperative to make every inconsequential thing in human existence look different from every other inconsequential thing ?
DeleteBut:
"... as it shifts one sticking point and log jam to somewhere else on the grid..."
That one I get. Why does it seem so utterly impossible for people to grasp this bbo* truth ?
^bleedin' bloody obvious
You taking it too literally; the boxes are a symbol of the shape of mind that our masters want to force on all of us. It's more efficient for them and they can make more profit if we have no alternative but to fit ourselves into the boxes they construct for our own good of course.
DeleteYou might not be bothered by the constant forcing into boxes that is an essential part of the capitalist project but I bloody well am. I hate ticky tacky boxes even if people mostly decorate them differently and create their own individualism.
Much better though if those of us who want to live in caves can do that without suffering all the angst that comes from being forced to live in ticky tacky coloured boxes that rich fuckers think are good for us.
The pond has put you down for a spot in a left-over chicken cage, GB, abandoned by the free roaming chooks now running wild in their natural state ...
DeleteAnd what colour would you paint your cave ? And what colour would your neighbors in the next-door caves paint theirs ?
DeleteChoosing a colour is even more angst making so I'd leave the walls alone. Choice is so overrated you know.
DeleteLooks a bit like Canberra to me.
ReplyDeleteI have this vision of Marine Le Pen coming to Sydney, sometime after her great electoral victory, and Lucy Turnbull mugging up to her. Slap me, please!
ReplyDeleteOr perhaps just a cup of tea and a good lie down. When did you start having these paranoid dreams? Are they accompanied by hot sweats? Perhaps a dash of lemon in the tea UC ...
Delete