Liberty .

It is hard to convey how disgusted I am. With the idiots that started this because they decided violence was to their personal advantage. With the nationalists that escalated this beyond a juvenile clash. And now the NSW Government and NSW Police who are destroying the whole economic, social and cultural fabric of a wonderfully open city through their over-reaction. The government has managed to spread their coercive pollution up and down the coast - far beyond Cronulla or Sydney.

So who will be first to remember that liberty is more important than violent kids, nationalists, police or government? I am a Sydney-sider, and this is not the town I know and love.

I had never heard of the word euthenic . It is the opposite of eugenics which is biologically and genetically focused. Euthenics is environment focused. The nature vs nurture debate has opposing 'ics' . I wandered across the term in Paul Ashton's discussion of the Cahill Expressway .

From the article:

Prior to World War I, town planners spoke with passion and some authority about the pivotal role that planning would play in generating material and moral progress. Eradicating slums and urban chaos - and for conservatives, socialism - would improve the lower orders, while the transformation of obsolete infrastructure would generate wealth and happiness.

Both outcomes would contribute to social cohesion and progress. Town planning was thus euthenic; it was predicated on the notion that environmental conditions influenced or even determined human characteristics and behaviour. Euthenics was based on nurture; eugenics, its social engineering opposite, held up nature or biology as the key to human progress.

Ashton writes that after WWI euthenic town planning lost its influence and specialists such as engineers with utilitarian outlooks took over. The Cahill Expressway is a bit ugly, and Ashton notes that it was opened in 1958 prior to the development of skyscrapers in the Sydney CBD which happened through the 1960s.

From my own experiences in the Quay, it is dark and ugly in the stretch where the rail and expressway go over the top of the Quay. However, I lived for a time in Sydney southern beaches and it was the only way that the southern beaches were connected to North Sydney and the Harbour Bridge. Until the advent of the tunnel, and the improvement of the Great Western Highway, the Cahill Expressway was a transportation necessity.

Could it have been built differently so that it didn't run across the Quay? Most likely. There is nothing saying that Anzac Parade has to be entered at its most northern point, which is how the Harbour Tunnel tackled that problem.

Even though I grew up in NW Sydney and lived for periods in different parts of inner-Sydney and regional NSW, when I came across the northern side of Sydney and hit highway after highway as they fed into the Harbour Bridge - I would be faced with the rising structure of the Harbour Bridge, the figure of the Opera House and Skyscrapers across the harbour.

On seeing that sight, especially if I had been travelling, I would often utter, "I am home."

It was Sydney.

Sacha Blumen argues for a Greater Sydney Metropolitan Council [GSMC] which would be a supra-council body modelled along the same lines as the Greater London Authority. The GSMC would be responsible for "broad Sydney-wide planning and transport within the Sydney metropolitan region rather than for this to be done by the NSW state govt." Sacha expects there would be an elected mayor and approximately 25-30 councillors.

The Queensland councils are as a rule larger than the NSW ones. The Brisbane City Council [BCC] has a population of about 950,000 and a budget of close to a billion. The Sydney City Council [SCC] in comparison has a population of approximately 156,000 in its political borders.

There are numerous local governments in Sydney responsible for greater populations than the SCC including Blacktown, Fairfield, Wollongong, Sutherland, Lake Macquarie, Penrith, Liverpool, Gosford and Bankstown.

This is probably because those parts of Sydney are newer as well as being demographic centres of the Sydney suburbs. The SCC is mainly for the central business district of Sydney rather than the suburbs.

The BCC is also unique in Queensland politics because it has its own charter. If you look at the local government act for the BCC the Queensland state government lays out the charters for all local governments except for the BCC. Nearly every line of legislation has an "except for Mike clause" in it.

I am not certain a supra-council body would be a good idea for Sydney as it would be centered in Sydney proper which has urban issues rather than the suburban issues of Hornsby, Bankstwon, Liverpool, Campbelltown, Penrith and the Hawkesbury.

It may be that an inner-city and inner-west super council would provide the kind of urban leadership that Sydney requires, but I would be loath for such a structure to extend out to the Blue Mountains. That kind of consolidation of the urban councils would be better achieved by amalgamation of the urban councils than a Sydney-wide super-council.

Tangentially - Guy discusses the London congestion charge policy at polemica.

Republicanism is the political science expression of liberalism. As with democracy, they require the osmosis of interaction, deliberation, competition, discourse and openness for them to have any public legitimacy. When the polis is fenced and the arms of the state oversee - it ceases to be the political republic and instead becomes the state's exclusive executive garden. The polis is temporarily drained until the state leaves and the urbanites come back.

Photo from Sydney Daily Photo: Wrapping democracy in a 3m high fence

As Gary Sauer-Thompson noted urban space and urbanity are important concepts of freedom. Walling off the polis with fences, snipers, helicopters and police who delete photos from cameras is a state-led intrusion into that freedom.

At federation the national government was given a political playground of its own; called Canberra. No level of politics, even international, is worth the intrusion into Sydney's cosmopolitanism.

The politicians can have their meetings in Canberra and if they don't like that, they can set up a tent in a sheep paddock outside Tidbinbilla and stock it with local wine. They can wear Akubras and indulge in unintentional mockery of the larrikin myth.

Sally of Sydney Daily Photo has a sequence of posts on the differences between Melbourne and Sydney.

Trams
Hook turns
Fences
Train stations
Level crossings

Of the cities I have been to, Sydney and Melbourne are two of my favourites. Disclaimer, I am a sydneysider.

The original colony at Sydney used to dig large tanks next to the stream to protect against drought. The stream would fill the big holes or tanks up so that the settlers had basically small dams of fresh storage for summer.

I am guilty of not exploring the cities I am in enough and just haunting and re-haunting the same environments. A camera and a project is a great way to break that routine.

Louise Hawson's photos are in a wonderful format with two complementary images and themes running side by side. The image above is from her exploration of Cronulla.

In the foreground is Fort Denison with Sydney CBD and the Opera House in the background. This photo was taken from the Manly Ferry on the return trip. The island has a bit of an infamous history and is equated with the sub-human manner in which many of the convicts during the colonial era were treated.

For Denison got the name pinchgut from when convicts were dropped there for several days without food and water as punishment. It acted as a form of jail since it was impossible to swim off it and required a boat for access to and from the rocky island.

In the mid-1800s Sydney felt nervous about how vulnerable it was to warships coming into the Harbour and attacking the city. The main cause for concern was Russian expansionism but the nervousness began when American warships arrived unannounced and said hello much to the consternation of the local government who were unaware of the visit beforehand.

Consequently a fort was built on the island in the standard 19thC style of rock and brick defenses and fixed anti-naval artillery. The fort itself took its name from the NSW Governor of the time, William Denison.

The fort was never used in anger, and worse, the guns in it were of limited use as the tower was too small for the recoil, and the guns were too slow to be loaded. It probably served for soothing the concerns of the politicians and population of the time than any great military need.

This is another photo of Fort Denison taken from the Manly Ferry heading toward Manly. Nowadays tours are given around it and IIRC you can stay overnight as part of a ghost tour.