School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemThe itinerary of our days: the historical experience of the street in Melbourne, 1837-1923( 1993)By the 1920s, the automobile had radically altered the social experience of Melbourne’s streets, and an apparent demise of social vibrancy together with the marginalising of traditional street culture have been attributed to its impact on the function and use of public space. The increased regulation of public street life, as enforced particularly by municipal authority, can however be related to broader motives dating back to the city’s earliest days. The planning of the colonial grid in 1837 established a physical and symbolic template for social organisation, and developing spatial hierarchies characterised the street as a social zone. Aided by technological developments, the interface between the footpath and the carriageway gradually became more distinguished, the space of the footpath being allocated not simply in terms of circulatory function, but on the basis of moral, gendered, and aesthetic interpretations. A range of street facilities and municipal ordinances combatted a variety of nuisance definitions, effectively enhancing the physical and sanitary experience of the urban setting, but at the same time creating more rigid surveillance over public social behaviour. The function of the street as economic space for the itinerant hawker and fixed-stand vendor was regulated in the face of growing concerns not only about circulatory congestion, but about class respectability, noise, race, litter, and municipal self-image. The street as the setting for urban public ritual was by the 1920s limited on the grounds of both congestion and cultural homogeneity, where once a diverse range of social groups actually and symbolically claimed the space of the streets for public display. The street is seen as an increasingly regulated urban form, a setting for complex negotiations over public social behaviour and the instrument of a detailed regulatory apparatus demanding conformity to particular conceptions of class, aesthetics, etiquette, convenience, nuisance, race and gender. While nostalgic images of nineteenth-century street life often edit out its negative aspects, the legacy of the first century of municipal authority over public urban domain has been the limitation of the very social diversity which may be an antidote to more contemporary urban ills.