Whilst not saying that everything in our cities is crass - we have a fine tradition of making great public monuments, in what Leon Krier calls the ‘Res Publica’ - it is the vast bulk of the ‘Res Economica’, the everyday built environment of housing and commerce that makes our cities so mediocre.
On the upcoming Australia Day we are going to hear a lot about how great Australia is; a lot of ‘fair go’, ‘mateship’, and ‘community values’. Any contrary view will be called ‘un-Australian’, but those old rubrics no longer hold. The evidence says we are heading in the opposite direction: increasingly selfish, unequal, and racist; whether it’s amongst the elites or the hoi polloi.