I dream about carparks after I’ve spent time walking the city with a camera. The dream is about Adelaide’s renewal coming from the building of carparks in the CBD. If Adelaide in the past was known as the city of churches, then its future is to be known as the city of carparks. Such a bleak future.
In the influential chapter “Walking in the City” of his The Practice of Everyday Life Michel de Certeau argues that ”the city” is generated by the strategies of governments, corporations, and other institutional bodies who produce things like maps that describe the city as a unified whole. Certeau uses the vantage from a skyscraper in New York to illustrate the idea of a unified view.
By contrast, the walker at the street level moves in ways that are tactical and never fully determined by the plans of organizing bodies, taking shortcuts in spite of the strategic grid of the streets laid down by the urban planner. As a walker/photographer wandering the streets of the city by letting go of my habitual routes I just stumble upon car park after carpark.
In drifting, like an unmoored ship caught in the undercurrents of the urban ocean, I find my wandering in and out of car parks. Old ones, new ones half built ones. The car is everywhere. There is little urban diversity, few pockets of resistance to the car. The decisive transformation of everyday life is the intensification of our car culture, not its roll back. The spin of the developer-led urban regeneration says ”Urban Energy”.
I often feel that, in wandering through the urban renewal in the context of the aftermath of the global financial crisis, I am experiencing the new ruins when peak oil arrives and the oil start to run out. I start looking for the weeds that might be growing out of the new ruins.