Common Patterns: Narratives of 'Mere Coincidence' and the Production of Regions

Paul Carter

RMIT University

In this account of place-making in Central Australia, a contrast is made between creative community and regulatory authority. A creative community resembles a revolutionary council of the kind influentially discussed by Hannah Arendt (2000); it is convened to manage change. In contrast, a regulatory authority (represented in Central Australia, and elsewhere, by local councils and regional governments) is constitutionally opposed to innovation. At issue are different models of democratic governance. Associated with these differing models are different conceptions of place and place stewardship. In Alice Springs, which furnishes the case study of this article, those actively engaged in nurturing a new space of sociability, or meeting place, understood place discursively (as a talking place). In contrast, the planning culture sought to eliminate storytelling mechanisms for social innovation, associating a plurality of voices and histories with the undermining of administrative authority and the ideological status quo. My argument is that the discourse of creative place-making is mythopoetic in its purpose: by way of identifying cross-cultural narratives of place-making that display analogies, it seeks common ground between different cultural patternings of place. Mythopoetic, story-based strategies of this kind can overthrow fixed and often divisionist myths of origin, replacing them with co-devised narratives. The chapter concludes with an acknowledgement that the creative place-making process outlined here redefines what is meant by place, which ceases to be an administrative convenience (static and void) and becomes an analogue of the performative techniques that conjure it into being. Place may be reconfigured as a network of passages or creative regions, comparable to a string figure or network, whose governance, it is suggested, is vested in the creative communities that bring it alive and maintain it.

Talking Place

The relationship between storytelling and place-making is a strained one. While plentiful evidence exists to demonstrate the role that foundational myths play in building local and regional identity, public planning understands procurement of the public good in terms of service provision and design functionality. A 'meeting place' initiative in Alice Springs, Central Australia, in which I was engaged between 2007 and 2011, illustrates these points. A bifurcation occurred early in the process between a community interested in discourse and a professionalized culture of planning interested in project management and delivery. Different community groups concerned to rebuild Alice Spring's social and environmental capital were engaged in plotting. Engineers and managers were signed up to a narrative. While the famous distinction that E.M. Forster made in Aspects of the Novel between story and plot may be simplistic in a literary context, in the context of developing regional literacy it is strictly accurate. To discuss sociability in terms of the protocols, location and content of meeting is to plot relationships. It involves holding together a region of reciprocities. In contrast, the story of a new public space, which originates in a planning brief and concludes in the delivery of a newly designed precinct, is purely linear. Instead of holding multiple senses of place, it eliminates these in the interests of progress. While stories relate, plans connect, and connectivity, as will emerge, is not necessarily an unqualified good.

The novelty of our 'meeting place' project lay partly in the fact that it originated outside the planning departments. The Uniting Church's proposal to create a place of intercultural reconciliation adjacent to the John Flynn Church on Todd Mall had written into it certain assumptions about social planning; however, it was put forward circumspectly, as a catalyst of new dialogue rather than as a device to satisfy community consultation expectations ahead of building. For example, it was appreciated that the Indigenous landscape of Alice Springs did not resemble the centripetal construction of place characteristic of colonial planning. The physical expression of Indigenous song lines or dreaming tracks is enigmatic: while sacred sites and their connecting stories are marked in the Alice Springs landscape, the sense in which their linking tracks exist is unclear. Of these song lines, noted Alice Springs historian Dick Kimber writes irreverently, 'a plan of all of them would begin to look like a bowl of spaghetti!' (Kimber 2000). The labyrinth of interwoven passages and meanings conjured up here may not be susceptible to visualization in this way; however, the place sung, drawn and narrated into being is evidently centrifugal, radiant and active. In contrast with a centralized model of the meeting place, which has its origins in Europe, the Indigenous constitution of sociability focuses solely on relations at a distance. In this context, a new meeting place would not necessarily be an enclosure: it might be a place of disclosure.

Members of the Lhere Artepe Corporation alluded to this distinction when they suggested that what was needed was a 'talking place', not a 'meeting place'. The significance of this distinction is discussed in my book Meeting Place (2013). A meeting place cannot be assumed to exist apart from the discourse that produces it; therefore, ahead of meeting, an agreement to meet...