Past Programs
Lifestyle and Leisure - 2006
Best of ATB from 2006: Shopping Centres
18/12/2006
When we raised the question of shopping centres earlier in 2006, we were astonished by the wide range of perspectives on these spaces - from a wide range of ages, places, and levels of pleasure or irritation with these twentieth-century sites.
So on ATB we decided to hang out in a shopping centre and debate it as a site for development, as the new town square, as a young space and as an alternative community for the elderly. It's also been posited as a "third space" for women, where identity and escape come together, and demands of work and family can be escaped for a while, in the interests of window-shopping.
The Shopping Centre has often been debated as a site of exclusion, a place for development and consumerism, or a site reclaimed by the young and shaped by mallrats. But the latest research has found that the elderly hang out, too . . .
Paul Barclay spoke to a historian, criminologist and a business analyst - and voices from all round the country.
This program was first broadcast on 27 July 2006.
* Because we are presenting a special edition of the program, on Monday 18 December, we are unable to take any new callers. *
The New Town Square: Public Space
16/05/2006
From standing on the corner to promenading in parks; meeting in the town square to showing off at the local swimming pool: definitions and boundaries of public space in our cities and town have changed.
This program examines public spaces, and how we make and change them.
Public Space can mean a lot more than the occasional boardwalk or park with a giant chessboard, it can be defined and shaped by consumers, by governments, by planners and by historical imagination.
So from a range of analyses that covered the "fluid city" and new consumer demographics, to the ways in which cities are imbued with histories, stories and memories, we turned to you, as listeners, to ask what public spaces mean to you.
What, we asked, makes a good and useable and enjoyable public space for you. What is it, and what makes it special?
Is it a park, and a spread of green leafiness? Or maybe it's the supermarket that makes you feel most connected to the place you live? Or the swimming pool or ferry stop or a particular bench on the busiest corner where you can watch the world go by . . .
Or maybe it's the place that's no longer there. The shadow of a building where you met your first love; the place where your grandmother first stepped onto the dock in Australia.
And who makes these public spaces: urban planners and architects, or all of us when we say, "hey, I'll meet you under the Town Hall Clock"?
These questions (and others) are also being debated this week, when urban planners, historians and curators meet in Brisbane from all round the world for the Museums Australia conference, on "Cities, Cultural Spaces, Communities".
