The highway of civilisation and common sense : street regulation and the transformation of social space in 19th and early 20th century Melbourne

Abstract

The introduction of the automobile at the turn of the century and the swift regulatory phase that ensued marked the line between two discrete eras of the city before and after the car conquered the street. The urban morphology of the twentieth-century city is notable for the atomisation of space into more and more discrete units. The shopping mall, the department store and the office block have subsumed many of the activities once the domain of the street. The interstitial space between home, workplace and shop was annihilated by the growth of dormitory suburbs and the cult of privacy. By 1920, rush hour at Flinders Street Railway Station was a hallowed institution of urban life , as the crowds of city workers flowed out to their suburban retreats, and by midnight, after the pantomimes, theatres, musicals and reviews had disgorged their audiences in time for the last train, Melbourne was ‘a city of dreadful night’; indeed, ‘Had Cindarella been a Melbourne girl she would have needed no promise to a fairy godmother to remind her that midnight was at hand.’