Chinatown

For a legitimate urban conversation to take place, a pre-requisite is ownership. It is possibly true for most things that involve economics or politics: if one does not have a share of the pie, it doesn't matter what you say. Things like anti-war petitions are a good example of false ownership, which believe that just because one has a vote for the election of the prime minister, the same authority can extend towards its decision making, slightly misinterpreting the context of democracy.

An interesting phenomenon along similar lines in Melbourne is that, again and again, grand big gestures of urbanism would be taken, which will be proven to be huge mistakes, which will then take the academics and related professionals, decades and thousands of essays and studies to discuss and fix: south bank, docklands, that new tram interchange in front of uni. It's rather sad, and hopeless, really.

Now imagine if Kim Dovey, Darko, Justina, Miles Lewis and Jianfei each owns part of Docklands. There is no guarantee that something magnificent to will come up as a result, but at least there will be relevant discussions before any dramatic action is taken. The reality, however, is that they don't have a share and hence it is only natural for the developers to maximize their own interests: if you need to finance a few billion dollars to do a project, I don't think social and cultural responsibilities would be top of your list to consider?

But now think about an alternative, what if a block of land is owned by multiple owners, each owner's character and education background carefully selected, and the building provides minimum interference so that each owner can have maximum authority on the area that he or she owns, would this work? In fact this model has been in use for over a century, the building form is high-rise, owners' profile is indirectly controlled by rent and purchase price, the building style that allows maximum freedom is, obviously, modernism. It works, it really works, only to the extend of the perimeter of the collective ownership, but nothing to the most immediate urban context. That's why modernism is accused of being irresponsible. But inside the building, let's be honest, the worst of Foster's high rise office buildings is more user friendly than any of Venturi's houses.

t.b.c.