Walking/photographing Adelaide

Adelaide: an urban heat island

The skyline of 1970s modernist Adelaide from the top floor of the Wakefield St car park. We are looking west towards Victoria Square.

Little has changed in this part of Adelaide since I left living in Sturt St in 2014 to move to Encounter Bay on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula. The only change is the hotel on Whitmore Square-- the dark building in the left background.

Summer in the CBD is very hot due to the way surfaces like asphalt trap heat even as cars and buildings exude it. When a city is markedly warmer than its surrounding rural areas, it is called an urban heat island. Adelaide is one of the worst in Australia and it can be stressful, if not dangerous, to be outside during a heatwave with 40+ degrees temperatures. With climate heating, the impact of higher temperatures will become more evident in the CBD.

old signs + the new urbanism

One result from walking with the poodles around Adelaide's CBD is that my 'walking Adelaide' usually involves wandering down the various laneways and the back alleys as well as into the various carparks. In doing so I occasionally stumble across an interesting image, or even two, in a few of these back alleys.

An example from January 2019:

Usually these signs/images are on the walls of an alt-Adelaide (the seedy underside of Adelaide), and they have been there for many a year. They are off the main pedestrian thoroughfares, and so they are been forgotten and unseen. So they slowly decay over time until there is a major urban development, which its usually a hotel, a block of student apartments or an office block.

Adelaide modern

Prior to mid twenthieth century modernism Adelaide was a planned city of red brick and sandstone within a self-contained rectilinear grid encircled by parks and green space, never to be built upon, with its discrete zoning of dwelling, work, transportation and recreation. It was Colin Hassell and John Morphett who rejected the established classical/gothic revival architectural order in early 20th century Adelaide.

The modernist ethos was to make a modern world, to sweep away the old and, out of chaos, build stability. Concrete was the stuff of dreams of a progressive, dynamic cosmopolitanism. Adelaide did not experience the modernist Brutalist style of building deployed to satisfy the urgent demand for cost-effective post-war housing on a mass scale that was frequently associated with socialist utopian ideals, and dreams of collective living.

One of the themes that I explored off and on when I was living in Adelaide's CBD was the modernist architecture from the 1960s and 1970s. These pictures are of the backs of those overlooked "form follows function" buildings along Pirie St which survived the mindless razing of so much of Adelaide's built heritage from the 1960s to 1980s:

Many of the modernist buildings that are gathered together in the Victoria Square precinct are of the 1970s butalist genre, such as the Department for Education's headquarters on Flinders Street and Wakefield House opposite St Francis Xavier's Cathedral. Whilst photographing these kind of buildings I realised the importance of light to architecture and how it can transform a building completely, both inside and out. This is especially the case with the roughly textured béton brut buildings.

West Terrace Cemetery

When we lived in Adelaide's CBD in the first decade and half of the 21st century one of my favourite afternoon poodlewalks was in Adelaide's west parklands, especially Park 23 (G.S. Kingston Park or Wirrarninthi) with its sculpture trail plus the heritage listed West Terrace Cemetery. Wirraninthi used to be called Wirranendi, and over the years that I was living in the CBD I witnessed its extensive replanting with trees, shrubs, grasses and the ecological rehabilitation of the stormwater wetlands.

We--the two poodles and me-- would spend many an hour wandering around and exploring the cemetery in the late afternoon. It was safe territory. The poodles could explore the fenced grounds whilst I could take photos. I just had to keep an eye out for the cyclists riding through the grounds and for the occasional graveyard visitor. I usually went to the forgotten, rundown areas, which I found more to be more interesting than the newer, and more flashy Italian/Greek grave stones. I thought that the latter were excessive--over way the top.

Adelaide's empty shops

It could well be the case that with the disappearance of the Holden car plant at Elizabeth, Adelaide is in danger of being a distressed city with its unemployment, run-down buildings, an inequality with its impoverishment part of the population, an underperforming public school system, declining living standards, and a limited skill base due to young people leaving to find work in Sydney or Melbourne.

This long and uneven process of de-industrialization has resulted in crisis management by the South Australian state government; one that aims to prevent further urban decline in the context of post-Fordist capitalism. However, Adelaide struggles compared to Melbourne or Sydney, as the latter have weathered industrial decline far better than Adelaide, due to these two larger cities having benefited more from globalisation.

It is true that a faltering Adelaide has begun the process of adapt and respond to economic change.in the form of re-invention--of slowly transforming into becoming a post-industrial city. This is a transition from producing and providing goods to one that mainly provides services. In a post-industrial society, technology, information, and services are more important than manufacturing actual goods. This, it is argued, is the path to recovery.

The subsidised casino, convention centre and sports stadium are designed to encourage urban development, give Adelaide a competitive edge in the competition between Australia's cities, and a new image as an attractive city in contrast to the rusting industrial image. Adelaide brands itself as a destination that seeks to attract visitors and a creative class of new residents in the CBD.

What I do find disturbing is that there are still a large number of empty shops in the CBD. The above picture is of an empty shop is in the western part of Hindley St, which is in the northwestern area of Adelaide's CBD.

Austral Stores building

Slowly, ever so slowly, I am returning to working on the Adelaide book project after couple of years. We left living in Adelaide's CBD about 3 years or so ago, and shifted to living on the southern Fleurieu Peninsula coast. Most of my daily photography on the poodlewalks now happens along the coast, whereas when we lived in Adelaide, the daily photography emerged from walking the CBD with the poodles.

Adelaide's CBD has changed since 2016. What is noticeable to me as a visitor about the new development in the CBD is the increase in both the high rise apartments and the coffee shops/cafes. Adelaide is becoming post-industrial.

Occasional day trips to Adelaide are all that I can do these days, and this particular trip was designed to pick up the photography from where I had left off 3 years ago. This photo was made on a day trip to Adelaide when I was able to spend some time wandering around the CBD as a flaneur. The above picture was taken from a car park behind the back of The Austral Stores building in Hindley St.

Port River Estuary

I have come across more pictures in the archives from my photographic sessions in and around Port Adelaide in 2011:

I made this picture whilst I was wandering around some edge lands along side the Port River estuary.

Port Adelaide

I have been going through my archives and realized that the images that I made in and round Port Adelaide do form part of the Adelaide book. The book is more than the images of the CBD of Adelaide. For some reason I had kept these two areas of Adelaide separate when I was photographing.

The Port is intrinsically connected to the CBD as it was, and still is, the terminal or exit point for South Australia's exports. Historically the exports were loaded onto ships at Port Adelaide. Today, the goods continue to be railed to the Port but they but they are now exported in containers through the container terminal in Outer Harbor.

Elizabeth after Holden

This picture was made whilst I was on a recent visit to Elizabeth for the opening of Eric Algra's photographic exhibition This is Our Town. Elizabeth is a town that is struggling to come to grips with the closure of General Motors Holden car plant in October 2017; an event that ended more than a century of car manufacturing in Australia.

The recent Holden commemorative mural on the wall of the shopping centre ---Elizabeth City Centre--remembers the past as the town confronts the fallout from the 12,000 job losses in the northern suburbs from the ripple effect in the supply chain of the component suppliers, and the range of logistics companies as they close down.

The Holden plant closure represents the end of the old style nation building centred around industrialisation and manufacturing. Elizabeth was a planned community with a utopian vision for how modern life based around steady job and money, happy workers, orderly streets, stable families and a pleasant place to live. It was a car city that championed the car. It was a city going places.

people in the city

When I used to poodlewalk around Adelaide's CBD when I lived in Sturt St (2005-2015) the people in the city outside of the office hours. were few and far between. The CBD was noticeable for the empty streets on the weekends -the doughnut city I called it. An alternative name could have been zombie town as the past cast a very long shadow over the city.

This started to change just before we left in 2015 to live on the southern coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula. Small bars were opening, more people were living in apartments, people were on the street outside of business hours and the laneways from the central market to the railway station were being developed

This is a significant change: a transformation from Adelaide being like a country town to Adelaide having an urban life. I notice the difference when I walk around the city with a camera 3 years later.