The Public City: Essays in honour of Paul Mees

Melbourne.

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The Public City: A New Urban Imaginary

BRENDAN GLEESON AND BEAU B BEZA

The public choice theorists are wrong … both theory and practice suggest that only planning works in reality.

Paul Mees (2000, 284)

Neo-liberal Urbanism and its Discontents

In an era dominated by neo-liberal governance and corporate assertion, Paul Mees strove through scholarship and advocacy to reinstate the centrality of state and civil society in debate about Australian cities. He was explicitly, not to say vehemently, opposed to what Hodson and Marvin (2010) term ‘neo-liberal urbanism’—a view of the city and its governance that prioritises the market as both the favoured mechanism of resource distribution and the arbiter of public opinion and preference. In recent decades, neo-liberal urbanism has done much to reframe and delimit the space for state action and civil conversation in Western, especially Anglophone, societies. There has been a steady advance in the space made (indeed protected) for the private sector in urban governance, including planning, building and design, infrastructure and the provision of services. Neo-liberalism has been a potent, redefining influence on urban governance and process but not hegemonic or uncontested. It has taken a variety of forms, mitigated by culture, context and history at a variety of levels, from global institutions (e.g. the World Bank, IMF) through the nation-state to municipal governance (Peck, Theodore and Brenner 2009).

If differentiated by geography and history, ‘actually existing neo-liberalism’ (Brenner and Theodore 2002) has nonetheless been a vastly reconstitutive global force. In its ideological and political forms, free-market radicalism has encountered opposition from progressive perspectives, especially traditional social democratic interests as well as newer social movements, such as environmentalism and radical cultural assertion emerging from the Global South. Neo-liberalism has emerged as a contested and countered but nonetheless remarkably successful force in displacing, if not extinguishing, progressive ideology in public and political cultures, especially in the Anglophone world (where Pusey [2003] termed it ‘the English-speaking disease’). There has been a conspicuous withering of institutional and political interest in perspectives that assert alternative, especially progressive, courses—a contraction of the public political imagination memorably captured in Margaret Thatcher’s injunction, ‘There is no alternative’ (quoted in Harvey 2000, 258).

Neo-liberal authority has proved remarkably resilient in the face of sustained critique and opposition, especially in the wake of its own massive manifest failures. Its greatest recent negation was the Great Recession of 2008–09 which, by near consensus of expert opinion, was attributable to prolonged undermining of state oversight of economies and institutions. And yet this epic political and economic default failed to stymie the underlying momentum of economic liberalism. Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 2009 announcement of the ‘end of neo-liberalism’ proved premature (Rudd 2009). Perversely, world recession has unleashed a potent newer variant of neo-liberalism, ‘austerity governance’, which has sought to socialise the losses incurred in the great economic default through curtailment of general entitlements and wages (Harvey 2014; Peck, Theodore and Brenner 2012).

The triumphs of neo-liberalism have been aided by the conspicuous inability of social democracy and its institutional correlates (industrialism, welfarism) to adapt successfully to two epochal changes: first, economic globalisation and the rising aspiration and power of the Global South; and second, the rapid, broadscale pluralisation of Western cultures and peoples and, associated with this, the emergence of a ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman 2011). These shifts, realised and mediated by technological changes, combined to produce a cosmopolitan world where traditional social and geographic alignments and affliations have rapidly diminishing meaning and purchase. And yet within a rising tide of fluid heterogeneity, neo-liberalism as a political project has been remarkably successful in channelling popular and institutional ambition towards increasingly narrow, ‘econocratic’ ends. The ideal was a civil society deprived of political expectation, except that of authority wielded by the market (or its potentates) and abetted by a residualised state. The latter was by no means impotent; withdrawal of provision and regulation was countered by enhanced interventionist capacity to secure the conditions for general growth and private accumulation. Pusey writes:

The market was meant to bury deliberative politics, to reduce popular expectations of government, to redefine politics as economic management tout court and to neutralise normative culture. To use Francis Fukuyama’s phrase, it was meant to bring us to the end of history and even to kill the shaping influences of memory and history in national politics. (2008, 27)

Australian Stories

Australia has borne many of the material consequences of the neo-liberal agenda, especially a major institutional contraction of the state sector through privatisation, deregulation and corporatisation. The strengthening grip of neo-liberal thinking on urban planning and management has been steadily charted in scholarship (e.g. Gleeson and Low 2000; Mees 2005, 2010). And yet arguably its most serious consequence—in Australia, and globally—has been the closing of political and institutional minds to the possibilities of collective effort (Pusey 2003, 2008). This is an especially poignant and dangerous outcome at a time of unprecedented collective threat, in the forms of climate change, resource depletion and economic default (Beck 2009).

For a ‘nation of cities’ beset by mounting ecological and material problems, the weakening effects of neo-liberal urbanism on institutional purpose and civic confidence are of grave consequence (Gleeson 2010; McManus 2005). We now possess generations and cohorts of policymakers and public officials who simply have no idea how to design and implement collective solutions to the increasing array of problems thrown up by deregulated markets (Pusey 2008). The many struggles and setbacks that attended the Rudd/Gillard federal governments’ nation-building programs (2007–13) were arguably at least partly attributable to this prolonged dimming of bureaucratic skills and mindsets—as was the timidity of their urban programs, which followed a decade of withdrawal and disavowal during the Howard era (1996–2007).

The Abbott administration elected in 2013 has put a decisive end to the modest federal urban excursions of the Rudd–Gillard era. This withdrawal reasserts the traditional antagonism of conservative parties to federal urban commitment (Troy 2012) rather than reflecting a more general neo-liberal hostility to public intervention. Internationally, there is an emergent form of neo-liberal thought, perhaps best termed ‘econocratic urbanism’, which avows a policy interest in urbanisation as a putative crucible of enterprise-driven growth (e.g. Glaeser 2011; Kahn 2010). It supports limited urban intervention to secure and maintain freewheeling growth and entrepreneurial ambition, with a rhetorical if minimalistic commitment to inclusion and sustainability.

And yet, the resources for hope remain vividly apparent. While neo-liberalism has eroded the political economic imagination and the prospect for state action, other change processes, notably cultural pluralisation and the emergence of green advocacy, especially locally, have enriched civic resources. The stultifying authority of modern industrial institutions and professions has been challenged and greatly weakened in a civil society characterised by greater plurality of identity and heightened distrust of orthodoxy. For some time, critical sociology has pointed to the rise of a new ‘reflexive’ modernity, counterbalancing accounts that report a civic mindset dimmed by prolonged neo-liberal assertion (Beck, Giddens and Lash 1994).

Ulrich Beck speaks of the ‘zombie concepts’ of industrial modernity that are increasingly called to account by social change and civic scepticism (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2001). This confrontation poses threats for neo-liberal urbanism as much as it does for the traditional progressive view of city development and governance. Neo-liberal urban action is marked by econocratic rationale and, frequently, by negation of participatory process, both of which are likely to encounter increasing contest and counter-assertion in a pluralised Australia, where new passions and anxieties swirl in complex play in cities straining to accommodate rapid growth.

Further, Pusey believes that manifest environmental threat will reanimate the civil imagination and reauthorise the necessity of state intervention. So also global warming might give us an opportunity to mobilise power in a way that brings vested interests to heel. More fundamentally, the climate emergency has the potential to restore the legitimacy of state intervention and to generate the needed cultural energy for nation-building government—those very resources that our economic reformers have tried so hard to erode! (Pusey 2008, 28)

What new progressive purpose might emerge from the remobilisation that Pusey foretells? How might it assume an urban form—namely, what are the prospects for a new Australian urban imaginary that could light a path of state and civil action away from the endangerment on the darkening near horizon? Importantly, a new urban conception must embrace a world remade by the decline of industrial modernity, at least in the West. At the same time, an age of decline welcomes the rise of an ‘urban age’ in which, for the first time, humanity is mostly settled in cities and towns (Gleeson 2012). Industrialism remains potent; it is defining the ambition and materiality of the new industrial economies at the heart of contemporary globalism. Yet the boiling megacities of the industrialising Global South do not mirror their Western predecessors. Through technology and globalism they are deeply embedded in a ‘second (reflexive) modernity’ that is giving way to the complex, sometimes contradictory, possibilities of cosmopolitanism and the vicissitudes of risk society (Beck 2009).

In Australia, the rise of reflexive modernisation witnesses the demise of the modern city, which provided the substrate for traditional progressive urbanism, especially a politics and purpose centred on industrial class divisions. A new emergent urban substrate is marked by heterogeneous spatial formations:

new economic relationships, especially a post-industrial economy

rapid population growth, largely but not only sourced through record levels of immigration from a widening array of global nations and regions

relentless and rapid social and cultural pluralisation, and rising claims for recognition of new human identities

increasing dispersion and decentralisation of metropolitan regions, but rising socio-economic disparities sourced in the retention of power and resources in wealthier inner-city regions

heightened social and spatial polarisation and emergent forms of residential segregation reflecting class fragmentation and declining social solidarity generally (rise of ‘aspirationalism’)

growth of an NGO (non-government organisation) sector, especially but not only committed to environmentalism and sustainable localism

epochal technological shifts, especially the emergence of digital technology

a radical and still rapidly evolving recasting of public culture, including the decline of traditional media and the emergence of new media forms

failure and declining authority of sclerotic welfarist institutions, especially those premised on the simpler socio-economy of industrialism

a radical diminution of professional authority mirrored by rising civic scepticism.

A progressive urbanism must be fashioned in this new spatial context and mindful of the necessities and desires it presents for public action, especially planning (Fincher and Iveson 2008). It must also counter the imaginaries that have been spawned by neo-liberal urbanism, which usually proclaim their visions of desirable city form in modish language: the entrepreneurial city; the smart city; the creative city; the knowledge city. The common wrapping is a bright universalism that masks the agonies of a failing world: ‘what exploitative compound growth is doing to all facets of life, human and otherwise, on planet earth’ (Harvey 2012a, 274). Although cast as transformative signs for urban ambition, these imaginaries tend to legitimise, not oppose, the underlying political economy of neo-liberal globalism.

Social democracy and its institutional correlates, in the West, have not been able to respond quickly enough to the many vicissitudes of neo-liberal urbanism and an increasingly ‘fluid’ modernity (Bauman 2011). In the midst of political decay, however, seeds for new progressive assertions are found in views that find civic resources enriched through cultural plurality and green advocacy. New possibilities for progressive assertion are signalled, if we wish to see them, in the emergent social spaces of ‘reflexive’ modernity and in the Global South’s megacities, where alternatives to neo-liberal urbanism are increasingly asserted (Harvey 2012b). What seems to be urgently needed are new urban imaginaries that illuminate and guide the possibilities for change that surely lie in the confluence of an increasingly conflicted and vulnerable neo-liberal order and the new assertions of democratic identity in an increasingly cosmopolitan world (Fincher and Iveson 2008).

A New Urban Imaginary

We may discern the outline of an alternative contemporary urban imaginary in the advocacy and scholarship of Paul Mees. It might be termed, in shorthand, ‘the public city’, without signalling simple re-subscription to the urban causes of industrial modernity. Mees’ interventions in urban debate and scholarship had several distinct vectors, which contested both the imaginary of neo-liberal urbanism and the claims made for its institutional application. In terms of the latter, he was especially scathing about the putative benefits of substituting private for public service provision (e.g. Mees 2005, 2010, 2012a). And yet he was, especially in collegial conversations recalled, equally scornful of public agencies whose imaginations and capacities were diminished by lingering attachment to sclerotic industrialism. He was known for advocating a complete refounding of state purpose and effort in quest of sustainability and justice, to be achieved via a thoroughgoing overhaul of institutional make-up and culture (e.g. Mees 2008; Mees, O’Connell and Stone, 2008; Morton and Mees 2010). Although, as the title of his first book stated, Mees (2000) favoured A Very Public Solution to the problem of transport in the dispersed city; simple reaffirmation of state institutional purpose was anathema. He wanted nothing less than a revolutionary reframing of state transport institutions that would end a modernist path dependency that favoured the private car as principal means of conveyance (e.g. Al-Dubikhi and Mees 2010).

Although committed to renewal of state action, Mees was equally concerned with civil society, regarding it as both bedrock and wellspring for the improved urban governance that he desired and advocated for Australian cities (e.g. Mees 2007a, 2009, 2012b). Mees was a tireless, indeed peerless, academic contributor to the grassroots causes of Australian urban advocacy. He was committed equally to the difficult twin labours of ‘messy analysis and activism’ (2010, 198). In this context his work drew much, if perhaps unconsciously, from the tradition of urbanism inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s 1968 avowal of a Right to the City (Harvey 2012b). Yet the significance of civil society to his urban imaginary was more than a fabric of protest and counteraction. For him, it was the great—though disregarded—first resource for urban governance. Here lay the collective wisdom and purpose that must necessarily and continuously contest the claims of technical and political authority. (He quoted approvingly Nietzsche’s injunction that ‘Power makes you stupid’ (Mees 2010, 198).) Mees’ ideal city governance would comprise a strongly authorised metropolitan planning institution with an overriding zeal for sustainable urban transition, interrogated constantly by robust citizen participation structures.

Mees abhorred the charades of citizen engagement in the contemporary Australian urban process: sporadic, farcically shallow consultation processes overlaid on a grinding underflow of petty litigation through planning appeal systems (e.g. Mees 2003; Mees and Dodson 2007). His desired model was regular, openhearted public participation in plan-making and minimal recourse to statutory revision through the appeal system (which he saw as favouring power and money). Civic participation of the highest commitment and integrity would produce and authorise statements of planning intent and strategy. Planning bodies would otherwise be authorised to undertake decisive shaping of urbanisation to achieve sustainability and equity in Australian cities. Mees was more than impatient with the prevarication and petty conflict that too often deflected progressive planning purpose. (It was only institutions of urban reaction—notably, the state road agencies—that had efficacy and power.) Of course all of this presupposed, as stated above, a complete break with neo-liberal urbanism and a reorientation of state purpose to embrace the transition to post-carbon sustainability as a leading object for urban policy. Integral to this was commitment to justice—social and spatial (e.g. Mees 2005, 2007b).

We may say that Mees, in his scholarship and activism, provides the elements for a progressive urban imaginary, the public city, which can be distinguished from other progressive motifs: the cosmopolitan city (Sandercock 1998), the just city (Fainstein 2010), the green city (Low et al. 2004), the rebellious city (Harvey 2012b). They are powerful, estimable pages of a new urban testimony, but, equally, disjecta membra of progressive thought that float outside the popular consciousness. The Meesian perspective, rooted as much in the record of advocacy as the annals of scholarship, presents a powerful complementary sign of urban transition that speaks directly to power.

The public city is distinctive for its vision of re-authorised but utterly transformed state power, embedded, checked and challenged, as much as authorised, by a watchful, confident and well-informed citizenry. It is, however, a frame waiting to be engaged and enriched by other reformist imaginaries, especially those explaining and asserting the significance of cultural pluralisation and cosmopolitanism as starting points for renewal of civil consciousness and purpose. These were not leading themes of Mees’ work, though his vision invites and accommodates their critical incorporation.

Aim and Plan of the Book

The idea of a public city is a significant legacy but exists only in trace outline in the Meesian record. It awaits redefinition, enrichment and—indisputably most important to Mees himself—practical translation to the urgent task of urban transformation in Australia and, of course, more generally in an urban age overshadowed by grave endangerment. Several first-order questions are apparent:

How can institutional transformation be achieved to ensure state agencies are committed to the urgent goals of carbon transition, spatial justice and ecological and social resilience? How are reactive institutional vectors (path dependencies) to be disrupted and reset towards sustainable transition?

What new economic arrangements are needed to effect the transition to sustainability and resilience, and do these amount to a new, progressive urban dispensation? How are these to be applied to management of urbanisation and realisation of urban wellbeing? Is a sustainable market society feasible?

Outside the realm of the state, what are the vested interests that resist sustainability transition, and how might they be opposed through civil action and state reform?

What forms should metropolitan governance take to respond to both the urgency of sustainability transition and the need for a ‘true’ deliberative democratic process?

In the face of the manifest failings of industrialism, and of its social assumptions, how is human urban need to be conceived, measured and planned for?

What lessons can Australian urban debates and practices draw from their international correlates?

What are the possibilities for urban scholarship as resource for social transformation in a context of epochal risk and change? What role should public intellectualism play in strengthening urban civil society and in interrogating state purpose?

These questions are no more than first steps towards specifying the direction and program of the public city. The realisation of a just and sustainable urbanism, surely the core ideal, will not happen ‘naturally’ and must be socially gained. We share Mees’ view that progressive advocacy and scholarship must strive relentlessly towards ‘opening a window for change’ (2010, 197).

This four-part book makes a start on the project of defining and deploying the Meesian notion of the public city. It does this by examining the ideal through some of its major institutional and political parts—public intellectual endeavour, or the role of the ‘public urbanist’ (centred on the story of Mees himself); ‘urban publics’, focusing on the role of civil society; ‘public movement’, including questions of mobility and access; and ‘urban governance’, including the contested role of Australia’s federal state in urban affairs. This is not the only way to decompose something as complex and overarching as the urban process, but it reflects the broad emphases of Mees, to whom this book is dedicated. The aim of this book is to present new Australian scholarship on these themes that will cohere to offer an enriched account of the public city in concept and in prospect. Each chapter takes as its touchstone the Meesian ideal, outlined above, to interrogate and advocate different aspects of government and civic endeavour in the Australian city.

The book’s contributors include his beloved wife Erica, friends, colleagues and former students, united both by sadness at his passing and by shared commitment to the ideals he evoked. These ‘comrades’ (as he would say) are a diverse assemblage that reflects the varied human and professional interests of Mees himself. He was deeply committed to pedagogy and to those he taught, and would be glad to know that two of his doctoral students (Tim Petersen and Muhammad Imran) are among the contributors to this book. Two of the chapters are edited versions of works produced by Mees shortly before his death, one with Lucy Groenhart (Mees 2014; Mees and Groenhart 2012). Lucy has recrafted both as chapters for this book. The cast of contributors reflects the spectrum of urban scholarship that Mees engaged in his life work, including those with strongly theoretic interests and those more inclined to policy and social application. The reader should not be surprised, nor, we suggest, disconcerted, to encounter a variety of styles and inclinations in this diverse volume. While all authors broadly share Mees’ progressive values, some present divergent perspectives that critically engage with his work.

Finally, Paul Mees, activist-scholar, was more aware than most that transition to a better urban order was ‘going to be a lot of work’ (2010, 200). As he was acutely aware, the first work of social transformation is that of imagination. Mees closed his final book by stating, ‘Before we can provide public transport solutions for suburbia, we must stop telling ourselves that the task is impossible’ (2010, 201). In the vast legacy bequeathed by Mees’ intellectual and practical contributions we can discern many tales of the possible. The Public City honours his belief that a better world is necessary and possible.

References

Al-Dubikhi, S, and Mees, P (2010), ‘Bus Rapid Transit in Ottawa, 1978 to 2008’, Town Planning Review, vol. 81, no. 4, pp. 407–24.

Bauman, Z (2011), Culture in a Liquid Modern World, Polity, Cambridge. Beck, U (2009), World at Risk, Polity, Cambridge.

Beck, U, Giddens, A, and Lash, S (1994), Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, Polity Press, Cambridge.

Beck, U, and Beck-Gernsheim, E (2001), Individualization: Institutionalised Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences, Sage, London.

Brenner, N, and Theodore, N (2002), ‘Cities and the Geographies of Actually Existing Neoliberalism’, Antipode, vol. 34, no. 3, pp. 349–79.

Fainstein, S (2010), The Just City, Cornell University Press, Ithaca.

Fincher, R, and Iveson, K (2008), Planning and Diversity in the City: Redistribution, Recognition and Encounter, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke.

Glaeser, E (2011), The Triumph of the City, Penguin, Harmondsworth.

Gleeson, B (2010), Lifeboat Cities, UNSW Press, Sydney.

Gleeson, B (2012), ‘The Urban Age: Paradox and Prospect’, Urban Studies, vol. 49, no. 5, pp. 1–13.

Gleeson, B, and Low, N (2000), Australian Urban Planning: New Challenges, New Agendas, Allen & Unwin, Sydney.

Harvey, D (2000), Spaces of Hope, University of California Press, Oakland, Calif.

Harvey, D, with Wachsmuth, D (2012a), ‘What is to be Done?’, in N Brenner, P Marcuse and M Mayer (eds), Cities for People, Not for Profit, Routledge, London, pp. 264–74.

Harvey, D (2012b), Rebel Cities, Verso, London.

Harvey, D (2014), Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Hodson, M, and Marvin, S (2010), World Cities and Climate Change, Open University Press, Milton Keynes.

Kahn, M (2010), Climatopolis, Basic Books, New York. Lefebvre, H (1968), Le Droit à la Ville, 2nd edn, Anthropos, Paris.

Low, N, Gleeson, B, Radovic, D, and Green, R (2004), The Green City, UNSW Press, Sydney, and Routledge, London.

McManus, P (2005), Vortex Cities to Sustainable Cities: Australia’s Urban Challenge, UNSW Press, Sydney.

Mees, P (2000), A Very Public Solution: Transport in the Dispersed City, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.

Mees, P (2003), ‘Paterson’s Curse: The Attempt to Revive Metropolitan Planning in Melbourne’, Urban Policy and Research, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 287–99.

Mees, P (2005), ‘Privatisation of Rail and Tram Services in Melbourne: What Went Wrong?’, Transport Reviews, vol. 25, no. 4, pp. 433–49.

Mees, P (2007a), ‘Can Australian Cities Learn from a Great Planning Success?’, in C Forster (ed.), Proceedings of the State of Australian Cities National Conference 2007, Causal Productions, Adelaide, pp. 1110–16.

Mees, P (2007b), ‘Franchising and Performance Based Contracts: Lessons from Public Transport in Melbourne’, paper presented at the 10th International Conference on Competition and Ownership in Land Passenger Transport, Hamilton Island, Queensland.

Mees, P (2008), address to meeting held at Glengala Community Centre, Sunshine (Melbourne), 12 August, <www.youtube.com/watch?v=urpUMI0gLjo> (accessed 11 April 2014).

Mees, P (2009), ‘Public Transport Policy in Australia: Time for a Re-think’, Australian Options Magazine, vol. 58 (spring), pp. 5–7.

Mees, P (2010), Transport for Suburbia: Beyond the Automobile Age, Earthscan, London.

Mees, P (2012a), ‘Transport Planning’, in S Thompson and P Maginn (eds), Planning Australia, 2nd edn, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 357–80.

Mees, P (2012b), ‘Fifty Years of Transport Planning in Canberra’, in S McCarrey and R Waldock (eds), Proceedings of the 35th Australasian Transport Research Forum, WA Department of Transport, Perth, September, pp. 1–22.

Mees, P (2014), ‘A Centenary Review of Transport Planning in Canberra, Australia’, Progress in Planning, vol. 87, pp. 1–32.

Mees, P, and Dodson, J (2007), ‘Backtracking Auckland? Technical and Communicative Reason in Metropolitan Transport Planning’, International Planning Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 35–53.

Mees, P, and Groenhart, L (2012), Transport Policy at the Crossroads: Travel to Work in Australian Capital Cities 1976–2011, RMIT University, Melbourne.

Mees, P, O’Connell, J, and Stone, J (2008), ‘Travel to Work in Australian Capital Cities, 1976–2006’, Urban Policy and Research, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 363–78.

Morton, A, and Mees, P (2010), ‘Too Good to Be True? An Assessment of the Melbourne Travel Behaviour Modification Pilot’, World Transport Policy and Practice, vol. 16, no. 2, pp. 8–23.

Peck, J, Theodore, N, and Brenner, N (2009), ‘Neoliberal Urbanism: Models, Moments, Mutations’, SAIS Review of International Affairs, vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 49–66.

Peck, J, Theodore, N, and Brenner, N (2012), ‘Neoliberalism Resurgent? Market Rule after the Great Recession’, South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 111, no. 2, pp. 265–8.

Pusey, M (2003), The Experience of Middle Australia: The Dark Side of Economic Reform, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Pusey, M (2008), ‘In the Wake of Economic Reform … New Prospects for Nation-building?’, in J Butcher (ed.), Australia under Construction: Nation-building—Past, Present and Future, ANU E-Press, Canberra, pp. 17–31.

Rudd, K (2009), ‘The Global Financial Crisis’, The Monthly, February, pp. 20–9.

Sandercock, L (1998), Towards Cosmopolis: Planning for Multicultural Cities, John Wiley, London.

Self, P (2000), Rolling Back the Market: Economic Dogma and Political Choice, Macmillan, Basingstoke.

Troy, P (2012), Accommodating Australians: Commonwealth Government Involvement in Housing, Federation Press, Sydney.

PART 1

Public Urbanist

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2 An Activist and Scholar in the Making

ERICA CERVINI

Before we can provide public transport solutions for suburbia, we must stop telling ourselves that the task is impossible.

Paul Mees (2010, 201)

Paul, the scholar and activist, loved old movies. He appreciated the artistry of sets and the stylish Edith Head costume designs. He used to say that movies from the 1930s to the 1960s had real dialogue, unlike today’s films with their quick grabs. Paul always paid attention to movie credits so he could read where scenes were filmed and decipher the Roman numerals that told him when the movies were made. A sense of place and time was always important to Paul.

A favourite movie of his was the 1959 production of On the Beach, based on Nevil Shute’s book of the same name. It tells the story of the end of the world in the aftermath of World War III, where nuclear bombs crushed northern hemisphere cities and spewed their lethal radiation into the atmosphere. Melbourne is one of the last cities to survive, and the movie portrays the final days of an eclectic group of Melburnians and one American as they wait for winds to carry the radiation south.

On the Beach appealed to Paul in many ways. When he was a teenager living in the south-eastern Melbourne suburb of Glen Waverley with his parents Tom and Roma and his three younger brothers, he watched disaster movies, and in the 1980s and 1990s Paul was involved in anti-nuclear groups. He also admired the movie’s cast, which included Hollywood greats Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck, whom Paul always liked as an actor and for his commitment to Roman Catholicism. Paul was a practising Catholic.

But for Paul the real stars in On the Beach were Melbourne and the blue Harris-class train that slides into Frankston