"I Live here. Who are you?"

Abstract

The emergence in 1990 of the controversy over the proposed Grattan Street Car Park in the Middle Parish area (see O Tuama, this volume) has once, again highlighted the tension between the Resident and the Planner. The Planner attempts to mould a city into the most efficient or beneficial shape for city users or city inhabitants as a whole, the Resident declares: 'I live here, my neighbours and my children live here. How dare you ruin our home!' The arguments are as old as the marsh area itself; the insider versus the outsider; the layperson affected by the expert's proposal; the individual against rationalizing bureaucracy. The poles have been expressed on one side by Henrik Ibsen’s character Dr. Stockman in A Public Enemy.