Sadly, the future is
no longer what it was
Henri Roussos
Throughout the twentieth century the quickly globalising world experienced rapid technological and scientific advancements. The future was suddenly on the horizon. Humankind was able to imagine worlds vastly different from their own, utopian societies freed from the horrors of war, poverty, and inequality. Enthralled by their idealistic imaginations, visionaries endeavoured to flip the script and sculpt the world according to their dreams. These imaginations eventually started to materialise in architecture and urban planning. These are but two of the stages upon which we play out the drama of our lives.
Elizabeth, South Australia, designed and built in the 1950s as a satellite city to Adelaide, exemplifies modern designers’ visions for the cities of tomorrow. Sadly, though, these dreams never fully actualised as society was slowly awoken by the pervasive capitalist realism that would develop in the late twentieth century. We have become insomniacs, unable to dream again, so we remain trapped in the memories of the past. Spectres from what was once a collective dream now drift through the waking world. They are ghosts that haunt us of the ‘not yet’, of the futures that modernism trained us to expect but which never materialised. Contemporary Elizabeth exemplifies one of these ghosts. Its modern design speaks of a utopian promise never kept.
The South Australian Government devised a plan while suffering from the Great Depression following the Stock Market Crash of 1929. They would create the South Australian Housing Trust—the Trust, a non-profiting organisation tasked with providing and managing consistent, quality housing for the State. The Trust played a key role in South Australia’s industrialisation which heralded many social and economic changes from the mid-1950s onward. Post WWII saw a drop in industry and a boom in population, so the State and the Trust devised another plan. It aimed at housing the rapidly growing population as well as further industrialising the beginnings of the sprawling metropolis. The Trust decided on designing and building a self-sufficient satellite city, a City of Tomorrow, Elizabeth City.
For the Trust, Elizabeth was a fresh start. It was to be a place for the future with a clean slate, a tabula rasa not plagued by horrific wars and poverty. Elizabeth was to be built north of the capital, Adelaide, in the plains and farmland just beyond Salisbury. The open fields provided ample space for both the necessary housing and the industrial plants, attracting the influx of migrants who would make up a steady work force. In the Trust’s eyes, this harmony between industry and community would not only protect against future economic downturns, but also lay the foundation for Elizabeth as a utopia. The Trust’s urban planner and architect, Henry Smith, undertook the task of designing Elizabeth carefully and ambitiously. He borrowed design aspects from popular European and American modernism and urban planning, such as the garden city, modular suburbs, and abundant public and community spaces. Smith also improved upon the Trust’s failings when designing Salisbury by implementing more variation between suburbs, yet still retaining equal residential facilities.
It was Smith’s firm conviction that 'community’ should be the primary goal when designing Elizabeth, in which the social content of planning is most successfully expressed in an environment which is based on ‘human as a pedestrian’. Smith’s advocacy of a walkable city was central in the town’s design, because much of the place’s functionality relied on the population opting to walk from place to place. Aside from walkable cities promoting better physical and mental health, they also fostered community and supported local business. Smith intentionally designed each suburb to be modular, equipped to meet residents' daily needs on foot. Shopping, schooling, and recreational facilities were conveniently located within walking distance on protected pathways. Situated within a ring road, Fremont Park and the town centre would hold a wider range of community, religious, civic, and shopping facilities all within walking distance from one another. This would draw residents from surrounding suburbs to make short driven trips, creating a radial community focused on Elizabeth City as a hub.
Still, popular modernism was by no means a completed project and not without its bumps in the road. The materialisation of Elizabeth’s drawings had unforeseen consequences, for it is in representations that architecture finds the greatest abundance of ghosts. Drawings have always existed in a state of in-betweenness between promise and reality.
Elizabeth officially opened in November of 1955. The utopian experiment commenced. For a time, Smith’s urban design was successful, with the population growing from 78 to 15,000 families by 1960. Residents recalled that droves of migrants would come at weekends, just off the ship, dragging children with snow-white faces. The Trust’s hopes for a strong community were fulfilled. The urban planning embraced both the Fordist and gendered aspects of 1950s and 1960s society. On a typical weekday, as planned by Smith and the Trust, the wife, adhering to her societal role, would walk her children to the local school, walk to the shops for supplies and socialisation, then walk back home to manage the house. Women were not encouraged to drive, so having all the amenities within walking distance of the home was another way in which the Trust tried to sculpt their vision of a model world, a domain built upon strict gendered roles. The growing number of factories was established within a short drive from the suburbs, ideal for the men to commute for waged work.
Australia in the 1950s and 1960s saw the height of the Fordist production model, characterised by a large-scale local assembly line industry. It was not only respected, but viable for a man to work in a factory and comfortably support his family as well as contribute significantly to the surrounding community’s economy and prosperity. Elizabeth’s public saw the direct fruits of industry’s labour. This harmony between industry and society was dependent upon the stability of gender roles and a reliance on the Fordist production model. Fordist Elizabeth saw the establishment of many factories to support the growing population’s need of work. The most notable and influential of these factories, the General Motors Holden factory (GMH), would open in 1963, and would serve as a catalyst of optimism, immigration, and development in the city. The following year, Elizabeth received city status and separation from the Salisbury Council, solidifying its identity.
The mid 1960s saw the start of changes in strict gender norms, as the women’s rights movement gained more traction, especially in Western industrialised democracies. Even with this changing social makeup that normalised women driving, pursuing careers, and drinking at public bars, Elizabeth was able to grow and adapt to these newer social landscapes. Elizabeth’s urban planning, although designed with a now out-dated view of gender, was adaptable because the walkable and modular garden city design still provided many of the same benefits as before. Now, the design wasn’t gendered. This kind of adaptation would not have been possible without the ability to conjure up a better future. Up until the 1980s there were still, in name at least, political alternatives to capitalism. Some scholars argued these potential substitutes allowed people not only to imagine utopias, but also to begin the process of constructing them. Elizabeth is a prime example. This imagination and construction would be slowed down and eventually cut short by the rise of capitalist realism, the cultural belief that capitalism is the only alternative. Dreaming, imagining, and fantasising about all permutations of these futures was seemingly possible and allowed in the meantime.
The 1980s was the time when the whole world and its labels—social democrat, Fordist, industrialist—became obsolete, and the contours of a new world—neoliberal, consumerist, informatics—began to show themselves. Although Fordism involved long and laborious working conditions with little variation in work, it was a stable labour ethic, it had a definable purpose, and the trend involved the local community. These facets of social engineering were essential to the success of Elizabeth which would in turn benefit and reward the workers and their community, at least financially, and, at least for some time. The rise of neoliberal policies that drove an increase in industrial productivity to increase profits and the privatisation of public, cultural, and community spaces led to the downfall of industrialisation in Australia. The outsourcing of industry to countries with cheaper labour and, consequently, the decentralisation of the town’s workforce, would slowly rip apart Elizabeth’s industry-community bond and identity. For workers that did not face the large-scale redundancies, a single industry income per home was no longer economically viable to support a family’s needs. Both partners were now often required to work, with women habitually commuting out of Elizabeth to Adelaide and surrounds for better job opportunities. The result was a vicious cycle that saw the downfall of local shops and businesses that relied on a strong community based in old-school values and economic goodwill toward these establishments. The very fabric of Elizabeth’s identity was torn apart by neoliberal policy and the ever-growing capitalist realism.
By the end of the twentieth century governmental protection for the car industry in Australia had fallen significantly. Wealthier and more well-off residents started relocating out of Elizabeth and welfare groups began replacing them. By the early twentieth century much of the once prosperous town was now derelict and it was easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The once promised future vision of Elizabeth was slowly cancelled and. in 2017 the GMH factory was closed. What was once a symbol of the industry-community bond, an emblem of Elizabeth’s identity, and an icon of a better utopian future was now a ghost from a future that had never arrived. The rise of neoliberalism and capitalist realism had created a cultural shift: the public has been replaced and displaced by the consumer. The community has been replaced by the individual. This effect, most visible in architecture, is evident in Elizabeth’s optimistic yet eventually haunting architecture and urban planning, aesthetics of replication, and the incessant, contextless, consumerist branding plastered throughout public spaces.
Elizabeth’s town centre houses many evocative modernist ghosts. The Dancing Statue depicts two figures intertwined—a man and woman—different, yet in harmony. This was a representation of how 1950s society thought the actualisation of gender roles could help achieve utopia. In the present, the statue serves not as a symbol of what should be, but as a symbol of the ability to believe in a different and better future. The statue has now since turned from belief to aesthetics, a ghost frozen in time, its premature death marked and identified by the outdated gendered ideology. It is not only twentieth century architecture that haunts Elizabeth, but also the more recent. Much of Elizabeth’s contemporary architecture is tainted by modernism, because modernist forms in such a neoliberal society can easily be absorbed and commodified.
Replicating past aesthetics has proven popular and more financially safe than creating something new or experimental. Such cultural recycling strengthens capitalist realism and contributes to aspects of the twenty-first century’s cultural stagnation and our collective inability to imagine a different future. These new modernist-inspired structures can easily be and become deprived of any possible function or context. Instead, they are branded with relentless and disposable competing advertising. Public space in 1950s and 1960s Elizabeth was regulated and consistent; the modernist buildings a symbol of the shared community and utopian vision. This reliability and uniformity contrasts with Elizabeth’s public space of today, where private corporations compete with one another merely to maximise profits. The incessant branding, often relying on nostalgia from different periods of time, are smashed together, all symbolising the consumption of products as the salvation of humanity and the duty of the consumer.
To dream once again we must find the cracks within the seemingly impenetrable capitalist realism. One of these cracks is the ghosts of lost futures that from another world and from time to time suddenly break into our world where we are reminded that the possibility of utopia and other ways of living do still exist. These flickers are prevalent in the most de-socialised of spaces, such as present-day Elizabeth, and that they illuminate the possibility of alternate futures as something not distant, but obtainable. They can remind us of what was once possible, remind us of the shocking difference between what we thought might have happened and what actually has happened, one of the most common mismatches between modernism as an ideal and modernism as a reality.
The transformation of Elizabeth from 1955 to the present day reflects many of the social, political, economic, and cultural changes in South Australia and the Western World more generally. Utopian dreaming flourished everywhere in the mid twentieth century driven by the rise in hyper-rational, modern thinking, exciting technologies, real-existing alternatives to capitalism, and social issues requiring radical solutions. Post-WWII South Australia developed a modern industrial city, Elizabeth, to house the boom of migrants and increase the State’s industrial capacity with its new population of workers. Throughout the century Elizabeth was prosperous, peaking in the mid 1960s, then slowly declining. By 2000 Adelaide’s satellite city was a ghost of its past. The culprit was the rise in neoliberalism, which saw deregulation and privatisation of community spaces, the change to post-Fordism which decentralised the work force, and the onset of capitalist realism which limited utopian dreaming. Modernist futures, such as Elizabeth’s, were never fully actualised, resulting in both the original modern architecture and urban planning and their contemporary replications haunting the present. The architecture and the planning both became symbols of the ‘not yet’.