A city has a Soul

Every city has a soul and a story. This fact is incontestable. 

And a soul can be destroyed, hardened, changed beyond recognition.

But a soul also develops; so parts of a city that might seem to be soulless when they are in their infancy will slowly become soulful. And become a part of the wider story.

This is why every aspect of a city's design must be carefully considered. This is not some elitist opinion or perspective, or a call to turn cities into museums, saving only the glorious buildings that spread the falsehood that our cities have always been wonderful places to live and work and exist. 

But it is a call to recognise that a city’s design is a story. Each building has its own part, its own paragraph, its own sentence in the wider narrative.

You cannot start at the end and expect coherence. Likewise, you cannot destroy the beginning and the middle and expect a full story.

But you can, of course, edit and even delete aspects of the story. You can form new stories from the oldest parts. So long as the narrative remains. So long as the soul of the story remains intact.

There are many who would argue that the story of a city such as Melbourne, as it has been written so far, is not worth continuing. That it is time for an entirely new story to start.

That it is time to burn down what has come before and start afresh. 

But to do so would be to destroy place and time itself. That is, it is an impossibility. It's far too late to start again from a beginning, because that beginning has already happened. We are already shaped by it.

No city's story can start again from nothing. If we even attempted that, the lie would show through immediately. We would feel out of place and out of time; listless, not knowing where we’ve come from or where we’re going.

And it’s important to remember that Melbourne’s story did not start in 1835, with Batman, with Pascoe Fawkner and with the rest. It started many millennia before that. And no matter how hard you try, those 60 millenniums cannot be discarded.  

Because we had tried to destroy that story. And we thankfully failed.

But how then do we make sure our cities develop so that we maintain place and time?

Our first option should always be to shape cities using what we already have. Repurposing, reusing and refurbishing are always preferable to destroying. 

Cheaper too.

Of course in many situations this is also impossible. To destroy something that cannot fit is not only logical, it is the only option. But what is put up in its place must have a place in the story of the city. It can't stand out on its own. 

What it can do is start a new chapter or section or book, depending on how far you wish to stretch this metaphor. 

So, save what can be saved and destroy what must be destroyed. So far, so easy. But what about those other buildings or precincts, which might be able to be saved and reused, but at great expense and great effort?

The answer is in the editing of a city; the employment and use of planners who know about the soul of a city. And how a city flows, and bleeds and survives. Where its choke points are; what can be lost and sacrificed to the god of progress and humanity. 

To put it simply, how can a city be improved while maintaining its story. And even, hopefully, if we can restore some of the soul that was once thought to be lost. 

That is how you build a modern city. Not through deregulation, not through passing the future of our cities to developers bent only on profit and on squeezing as many dollars of out, and as many people into, any available space. 

You don’t do it by interrupting and rewriting an already written story, pretending that that story is either worthless, or finished, or never existed. That can only result in confusion and a sense of loss. Of being in a place but not of that place. Floating out of time in a place no one belongs.

That’s what is at stake here. A future of belonging or a future where we are lost, not knowing where we come from or where we’re going.