or at the urban edge, every ‘big box’ and ‘huge shed’ provided with dedicated
parking.
At a time before supermarkets and shopping malls, Plischke (1947) described
the beginning of a central business district for a New Zealand mainstreet in his
bookletDesign and Living. The hastily developed gridiron settlement with its
single-strip shopping centre was portrayed in a caricature of the informal expan-
sion of antipodean town centres as they appeared to him:A haphazard collection of all sorts of buildings and most of the
styles of the last two thousand years strung along the road without
regard to the size or character of the neighbouring buildings or the
appearance of the street. The old hotel, a survivor of quieter and
more settled times, is still there. The cinema is new...to glorify
the product of a country thousands of miles away (the USA of
course, and.. .) by far the most monumental building in the town-
ship is the bank. The end of the street leads up to a war memorial
(World Wars I and II) and its formal gardens. On the whole, it is
fair to say that this was a pretty true reflection of our civilisation.With the passing of time most North American and Australasian
small town centres have been rebuilt or retrofitted, with maybe the art deco
cinemas given over to bingo or warehousing, and the classically façaded banks to
a museum or craft centre. In the larger cities of wealth the demotion or replace-
ment of these quasi-cultural icons is now substantially complete, it being an irony
that the moreprosperous the city the lesseffective the preservation of its heritage.
With the further passage of time, coupled to an enhanced nostalgia for the his-
torical past, centres which have retained nineteenth-century and early twentieth-
century building stock are undertaking heritage conservation, not only for the
sake of the buildings, as much to hedge against competition from superstores. In
out-of-the-way small towns blighted by above-average unemployment, derelict
old buildings are converted into a modern building use – a former church or
meeting chamber converted into a museum or used for storage.
Town centre ‘heritage conservation’ has now been packaged and marketed to
appeal to commercial interests in the style of mainstreet improvement pro-
grammes, along the lines given in box 5.5 as Mainstreet guidelines. Small town
business-centre retrofits of the kind detailed had their origins in the United States
and Canada (National Trust Main Street Centre), initiated for Australasia by
Anglin Associates mainstreet projects in the 1980s. Commercial boosterism – not
really heritage conservation – is the principle motivation underscoring main-
streeting projects.^65
The following rephrasing, from a UK Department of the Environment docu-
mentInvolving Communities in Urban and Regional Regeneration(1995) usefully
supplements settler society experience with mainstreet projects:1 Clarify community participation objectives.
2 Identify interests and interest groups.
3 Enlist community support.252 Practice
Geoffrey Dutton (1964)
provides this parallel
Australian insight ‘we’ve
inherited the climate of
Greece, the light of the
Mediterranean, the
colour of Italy and Spain,
and we live in it with the
fearful expectation of an
audience gathered to
hear Knox or Calvin
thunder from the pulpit.’