Edition 20
Cities on the Edge
- Published 3rd June, 2008
- ISBN: 9780733322822
- Extent: 288 pp
- Paperback (234 x 153mm)
The sheer pressure of numbers will test the old adage, that cities are the heart of civilisation. Many already teeter on the brink of chaos.
Climate change is the great new challenge confronting cities and the billions of people who live in them.
Highly-functioning cities are inspiring places – they allow creativity to blossom, cultures to flourish and communities to thrive. Getting this mix right is crucial to a viable future for Cities on the Edge.
The lead essay by outstanding urban planner Brendan Gleeson examines this and other stress points and suggests solutions to make cities better places to live and work.
His expansive essay sets the big agenda for a new generation of thinking about the increasingly complex nexus with Nature. Making cities more liveable, more sustainable and more fun is one of the great new global tasks.
The human, cultural and environmental implications of the global drift to cities are evoked in moving essays by outstanding writers including Margaret Simons, Robyn Davidson, Sally Breen, Nadia Wheatley and Creed O’Hanlon. Award-winning short fiction offers an intimate feel for city life.
In this Edition
The gift of the hinterland
CREATING AN ENTIRE city is something hard to plan, even now we know we are supposed to. Since Brasilia was founded in the 1950s, the brand-new customised city has, like the ex-urban garden suburb, gone out of fashion. Many of the cities with which...
Desert field of dreams
IN THE DISTANCE, the rows of high-rise towers on Dubai's infamous Sheikh Zayed Road glitter; ornaments on the edge of an immense plain. Closer, giant boxes – elaborate light-fringed shopping centres and business precincts – rise out of the dust. From the back of...
Ants on highways
GOOGLE AND MUNGO. I am sitting at my desk staring at Google Earth. My computer is short of memory and the program seems to take an eon to finish loading. When it does, I can see the lonely planet in cloudless clarity, surrounded by...
Once were Westies
AS A GUEST on a western Sydney community radio program recently, I noted the ease with which the young radio jocks – each born and raised in the city's west – referred to themselves as ‘Westies'. They transformed the pejorative term into one of...
Waking from the dream
Fire in the heavens, and fire along the hills,and fire made solid in the flinty stone,thick-mass'd or scatter'd pebble, fire that fillsthe breathless hour that lives in fire alone ...– Christopher Brennan, Poems 1913 IT'S BEEN A bad couple of decades for dreamers. So many...
Fluid cities create
WHAT MAKES A city culturally dynamic? What makes a city the sort of place that people want to visit, move to and explore? What makes a city the sort of place that spits out or draws in artists, musicians, writers and filmmakers? What makes...
City dreamers
FOR THE FIRST time in history, the number of people living in urban areas has outstripped those in rural areas – an urban reality that jostles uneasily with the iconic image Australia presents to the world. But beyond the wide outback spaces and sandy...
The house of roses
The ‘new' stranger in Australia bears the burden of representing not only what ‘Australia' was but also what we might become ...– Katrina SchlunkeI WAS IN my own strange country, our first Australian house – 10 Churchill Avenue, Bicton, Perth. It was a house, but...
Beyond the refuge of numbers
THE HUMAN MIND, when faced with the need to calculate figures higher than, say, the fingers of two hands, abstracted numbers from the immediate and sensual to the colder, more distant realm of statistics. When people become statistics, our fellow feeling is replaced by...
Home truths
WE DIDN'T WANT to go. The Gold Coast was a place for holidays, not living. Annual baths of intense bone-warming sunshine had been enough for even the coldest of my acquaintance.I loved Queensland, but I had never been a big fan of Surfers –...
Born to run
Height (six feet six), quickness, balance, shooting touch – Ralph was the embodiment of the complete basketball player. Over the next few years Ralph, and another brother (Warren, who was six feet eleven), were not just among the best players in the New Zealand national league, they were widely considered NBA material. In those days, the US was a more distant shore than it is now and there were fewer navigation aids available, especially for a couple of kids from a tough background in Rotorua.
Learning from the bush
THE OPPOSITION OF the city to the bush was, of course, one of the great topics of late nineteenth century Australia. Although beaten up by Bulletin writers and cartoonists, it was arguably part of the process of transforming immigrants into Australians. At the very least, the...
To Paradise and beyond
WITH A SWEEP of his arm, Dave Murray shows where the proposed dam would straddle the valley. Starting at a distant hill in front of us, his pointing finger moves around to a ridge behind and above us.The thing seems too gargantuan for this...
A cry in the night
IT WAS A cry of many voices. It sounded like anger, or lament. It was past eleven o'clock on the night of November 28, 2007 and I was in my study, tucked into the roof of my house, preparing to close down my computer...
Lost city of the Amazon
In every book I ever read Of travels on the Equator A plague mysterious and dread Imperils the narrator – Hillaire Belloc I DIDN'T KNOW quite what to expect of Santarem, but its waterfront emblazoned its unique history better than any book. Firestone, Goodyear and...
What lies beneath
WALK AROUND THE Sydney city block bounded by Kent, Sussex, Napoleon and Erskine Streets and you are on top of a cultural ground zero. Below your feet is one of the first places where Australia's Stone Age ended and the Industrial Revolution began.And ironically,...
The broom closet
IT'S LIKE THIS. Your baby is howling just as loud as the never-ending stream of stinking road-trains, and Jemimah's in the kitchen killing ants with a soup spoon, her dirty bare feet tensing as she applies force and laughs at the little popping sounds....
Dozer
HE'D DRIVEN DOZERS for thirty years. From bobcats to D10s. As a young bloke, he'd started in a warehouse driving forklifts. Now that's an art-form. The experienced could whiz them around on a pin and load a truck faster than an army by hand....
The possibility of water
I DON'T EVEN really know where I first met Eli. She was just one of those people I saw at parties and gigs and bars. I liked her and I didn't care that she was a junkie; most people I knew at that time...
Featured Contributors
Gregory Day
Gregory Day is the author of five novels. His work has won the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, the...
Brendan Gleeson
Brendan Gleeson is a professor of urban policy studies in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University...
Robyn Davidson
Multi-award winning Australian author Robyn Davidson was born in 1950, on a cattle property in outback Queensland, Australia. In...
Margaret Simons
Margaret Simons is an award-winning freelance journalist and the author of seven books.Her most recent work includes Latham’s World, an...
