Red Ways

2008-2010

Over three days in late February 2007 leading representatives of the Alice Springs community came together to discuss the revitalisation of their central business district. Expressing the view that the town’s future amenity, attractiveness and vitality depended on working together, they shared their experiences, their aspirations, and their solutions. Over those days we talked about what creates a sense of place.

We remembered connections that had been lost. We imagined reconnecting – to the past, to each other, to the river, and thus to the future. We did this by telling stories, drawing mind maps, recreating Alice Springs in our collective affections. We put our fingers on the pulse of the Red Centre, and found a vibrant, proud community eager to rebuild the town where it lives.

It was not hard to find out what people wanted: reconnection to the river, better east-west connectivity throughout the CBD, reconnection to country; a renewed sense of collective identity, expressed in a revived desert knowledge economy; an improved lifestyle and a renewed social cohesion. It was not difficult to find agreement about these aspirations. The hard part was to marry the spatial and the social, to ensure that the new connectivity of the CBD reconnected people as well as places - to ensure that through the process of reconnecting places, people might fulfil wishes of weaving a more cohesive social fabric.

The four projects described in this Strategic Summary mirrored what was learnt from Alice Springs communities over 18 months of formal and informal consultation. Discussions arising from this original intervention continued after our time; eventually, modifications were made to north-south passage along Todd Mall. The ‘meeting place’ remains an aspiration: resisting any ‘pre-emptive identification of improved opportunities for sociability with the redesign of urban hardware: Material Thinking’s ‘object throughout was to demonstrate how places are made after their stories, and meeting places occur where stories meet, find common ground, are exchanged and modify one another.’ (Paul Carter, Places Made After Their Stories, 2015, 123. Part Two of this publication (pages 89-147) contains a very full account of the human, environmental and cultural factors in play.)