It’s now been over five years, three failed papers and numerous self-reflections since the cultural trauma of my visit to the USA. I had a neatly planned itinerary that was aimed at identifying and hopefully learning from sustainable urban design - the American style.
It has taken another three visits to fully appreciate the differences between the way Australia and the US deliver urban design.
San Francisco in relative terms is a surprisingly small city, especially if like me your urban design training was in Brisbane where a city and its powers rival state governments.
While Brisbane closely represents the nearest Australian model to an American city, using criteria such as governance, cultural influences and history. San Francisco’s cityscape resembles Beirut 1970’s glory, which is far removed from the American suburban culture.
Walking the streets of San Francisco you start to realise what being an Australian is all about. The numerous and surprisingly perfect forms of Eucalypts and other Australian natives sometimes confused even me to where I was. However, this is a city so compact opponents to Melbourne’s Major Activity Centre outcomes would fail to be heard.
Cultural districts such as, China Town, Russian, Castro, Haight-Ashbury and Pacific Heights are dotted with hi-rise apartment blocks, lower storey pads as well as magnificent period mansions.
While there are stringent building controls enhancing the character of each district, the overall fabric of the city is one that doesn’t look and feel out of place. This is a city that is only 80 square kilometres in area and a population nearing 800,000, which provides a density rate of 10,000 people per kilometre far more than any Australian city will ever see.
Actually the city of San Francisco is actually no bigger than Melbourne’s Boroondara, which only has around 150,000 people.
This cultural diversity in the form of its people and their built environs was something that I would not experience again during my time in the US, except perhaps Las Vegas but that is another cultural experience far removed from the multi-cultural exchange that contributes to San Francisco and especially today’s Melbourne.
It is true the whole San Francisco Bay Area has an population exceeding seven million but the compact nature of the city of San Francisco is far different that the surrounding urban sprawl south through Silicon Valley and San Jose and towards the western areas of Oakland and Alameda.
San Francisco provides a clear American example, other than the traditional compact city icon: New York, that they are achievable in modern western societies. Dare we say it, even under the car-loving American and dominated urban development processes. While they are achievable the real question that fails to be debated is; are they sustainable?
But what is sustainable?
This is where I finally understood the reasons why sustainability and grasping the values associated with such a subjective word are not being embraced. Embraced in such a way as how an exchange of money for the purchase of goods is conducted. The transactions exchange of reward for service is achieved because of a known or learnt appraisals of the value of service against the reward.
This would then suggest that the values of sustainability are either not known or they are not being learnt. I find it hard to believe they are not taught in professional institutions. In my third career change, I prefer to call it a realignment, it was noticeable that published research, debates as well as the development of the role of urban design towards the arguments in favour of sustainable future.
How do you value something you do not know? Therefore while the messages might be getting out there is it being learnt? Are we really adopting Agenda 21 principles and objectives to develop a sustainable future of our responsible communities? The answer is simply – No!
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