TO BYRON SHIRE’S MAYOR AND ALL COUNCILLORS
I write to you from my current HOMEplace in Launceston Tasmania and to you as the elected representatives of the community of my HOMEplace in Nort East Australia. That age old saying that goes ‘you can take the boy away from ‘The Bruns’ but you cannot take ‘The Bruns’ out of the boy’, that I imagine will resonate with many of you in the context of your HOMEplaces.
That said, I’m now writing to you as a cultural producer, cultural geographer, and researcher who spent my past 20 plus years researching cultural identity, cultural landscaping and placemaking.
Each of you as Councillors are fundamentally cultural landscapers. When you meet as a ‘planning authority’ you are making determinations that shape and make ‘places’. Each ‘development’ determination you make, shapes and makes a place, not making some space into a place if it happens that in bureaucratic terms it is an ‘undeveloped space’ with that terra nullius subtext. In Australia we have come to know the sheer folly attached to the ‘terra nullius’ assertion!
I submit that when your narrow majority determined that ‘WULLUM’ should become a housing estate, you did so without considering this place’s multifaceted, multilayered Community of Ownership and Interest (COI) to whom collectively you all have an obligation so to do – consider those to whom you represent and are accountable to.
On the evidence I do not believe that you have considered that, nor seemingly have you consulted meaningfully with the COI or even considered the need to do so.
It turns out that ‘governance’ the world over is engaging in ’participatory governance’ in order to arrive amenable outcome in highly contested circumstances. The mechanism used is typically ‘Citizen’s Assemblies/Juries’ . In Australia there are a number of ‘bodies’ that facilitate such assemblies with the newDEMOCRACYfoundation being a prominent provider.
As a Council, I submit that if in this instance if your council’s determination were to turn out to be mistaken, it is worth knowing that if we are not making mistakes then quite likely we are not attempting to achieve anything that is important.
]
In this context I submit that, albeit that a determination has seemingly been made, the opportunity to empanel a Citizen’s Assembly has not evaporated.
I fully understand Council’s acknowledgement of Byron’s housing crisis but at what cost do we trash important cultural landscapes to build a few houses when if sought other options and opportunities actually exist. The situation Byron Shire finds itself in is the same Australia wide and not the least here in Launceston and Tasmania.
I further submit that IF Byron Shire were to embark upon an exercise of ‘participatory governance’ you might well succeed where so many up to now have failed. We only do good work when we’re taking risks and pushing ourselves. When we take risks, we learn that there will be times when we succeed and other times when we fail, and both are equally important.
If there is a win-win where WALLUM continues to be a treasured component of a cultural landscape and Byron’s housing crisis is mitigated, it’s an outcome your constituents are most likely to welcome.
Yours sincerely,
Ray Norman
Cultural Geographer
No comments:
Post a Comment