Podcast: the Pedalling Mayor
This post records an embodied interaction between me and Sam, the (then) mayor of Marrickville Council.
The Greenie mayor and I go for a bike ride around 3 of the sham’s borders (south, west, and north), stopping along the way to check out apartment complexes with locked doors, children pissing on trees, and parks where the kids smoke dope. And having a nice cup of tea.
I enjoyed the pace of this story: the dialogue follows the action, as we cycle from place to place, each location shaping the conversations we have about the workings of council and issues of environmental concern. The movement of our bodies through the suburb is woven with the movement of our ideas as we chat and ride.
Sam was ousted from his position as mayor last September, as a result of dodgy deals being done. To tell the truth, I don’t really understand the inner workings of these deals, and I’m especially bewildered by this report which contains details about a particularly tricky democratic process, in which the new mayor, Morris Hanna, was installed after having “his name drawn from a hat” (!). Huh?
Still, Sam should hang in there, cos those green issues are getting bigger and bigger. One recent public stoush he’s had with Hanna is over the use of electric dryers in apartment buildings. Byrne says new apartment buildings should be designed so that washing can dry in the sun on balconies, reducing the need for coal-powered clothes dryers. Often, the body-corporate of a building does not allow such activities, from what I can gather, on aesthetic grounds. Hanna follows this aesthetic line, interestingly linking the “look” of clothes punctuating the modernist grid of apartment buildings with the idea of “slums”:
Mr Hanna said he also did not want his local government area to be turned into a slum, with people hanging their laundry over their balconies. “I travel overseas and I see them doing that here and it’s quite shocking. I don’t want to bring that to Marrickville,” he said.
There truly is no accounting for taste. On my travels to southern China, Barcelona, Naples, one of my FAVOURITE things was the washing hanging from balconies, personalising what might otherwise be grossly alienating architecture.
A pretty good coverage of this issue is over here. Typically, opposition to Byrne’s idea has focussed on abhorrence for the the idea of “banning” something (undemocratic!) rather than the broader issue of “saving the planet” (which while a good idea, should not involve any inconvenience or loss of our rights, right?).
Oh, listen to this story here.
And read the original tale in textual form here.