ARTICLES

CITY AS SPACE, CITY AS PLACE

SOURCES AND THE URBAN HISTORIAN
Carla Pascoe
Dr Carla Pascoe is a Melbourne-based historian involved in a range of research, teaching
and curatorial projects. She conducts research for colleagues at Macquarie University and
for the University of Melbourne, where in 2009 she completed her PhD, Spaces Imagined,
Places Remembered: Childhood in 1950s Australia. In addition to teaching at Victoria
University she is also involved with the creation of educational history videos. Carla is an
Honorary Associate at Museum Victoria and recently helped create an exhibition for the
City of Melbourne called Over Paid, Over-Sexed and Over Here? U.S Marines in Wartime
Melbourne, 1943.
Correspondence to Carla Pascoe: ecpascoe@unimelb.edu.au

As historians, the sources that we use affect the way we view the city in the past. Documentary sources
composed by experts on the city such as urban planners are generally useful ways to understand urban
‘space’: the city viewed as an abstract physical entity. But we need human stories also to understand
urban ‘place’: the lived experience of a locality. This paper draws upon research into Melbourne’s urban
environment in the 1950s which compares the ways in which urban planners viewed the city and the ways
in which children experienced the city. Urban planners tended to talk about the city in quantifiable terms,
mapping school locations, administrative boundaries, traffic routes and recreational spaces. People who
were children in the 1950s were more likely to describe their neighbourhoods in social, emotive and phe-
nomenological terms, for these are the types of associations which embed memories. For urban historians,
our choice of sources fundamentally shapes the ways in which the historical cityscape can be remembered
and recreated.

This article has been peer-reviewed.

Cities are complex environments. Spatially, they are composed of many different layers of human
usage. Socially, there are an infinite number of vantage points from which inhabitants view the
city around them. Clearly there is no single way to tell the story of a city’s development. Urban
historians have utilised a range of sources to chart changes in the urban landscape, from demo-
graphic data demonstrating socioeconomic shifts to maps plotting land use, from the policies of
statutory bodies to the reports of journalists. The sources that historians consult inevitably shape
the kinds of histories they construct. Here I want to argue for the importance of oral history for
understanding patterns of urban change. Whilst macro shifts in the economic, geographic and
political facets of the metropolis are important aspects to consider, personal sources are a crucial
means to access the city as a lived place.
To illustrate the ways in which the nature of sources makes possible different types of urban
history, this paper draws upon research into the historical geography of childhood in 1950s
Melbourne. I have studied how adult spatial experts such as urban planners conceived of the
city and its neighbourhoods, and compared this with how post-war children viewed the urban
landscapes they inhabited. Two case studies were central to the research: the working-class, inner-
city suburb of Carlton built largely during the mid to late nineteenth century and the middle-
class suburb of North Balwyn which was still under construction in the eastern region of Mel-
bourne in the post-war years. My analysis of expert and children’s perspectives utilises a broad

HISTORY AUSTRALIA, VOLUME 7, NUMBER 2, 2010 MONASH UNIVERSITY EPRESS 30.1

set of sources, but has drawn particularly upon the writings and policies of planners and upon
the oral histories and memoirs of post-war children. For the oral history component of the project
I interviewed people who had grown up in North Balwyn or Carlton during the 1950s. Their
memories therefore do not offer unmediated ‘evidence’ of the perspectives of post-war children
but are rather layered with a nostalgia for childhoods vanished and a consciousness of the half
century of individual and social changes that have since taken place. By contrast, the planning
sources used were authored in the immediate post-war years and are steeped in the intellectual
and professional assumptions of their day. These planning documents were also composed by
individuals with the express purpose of solving the urban problems of the time, as opposed to
the interviews co-authored by myself and my participants with the intention of reflecting back
upon the past. This juxtaposition in authorship and genre of sources raises questions of how
different source material shapes history-making. In this article I tease out some reflections upon
how oral history enriches urban history, and how a place-based focus can enhance understandings
of oral history.
Variant viewpoints on the city stem largely from the differing motivations underlying the
creation of these sources. As Mark Peel has observed, urban planners generally viewed the city
as composed of problems and offered their expertise as a solution (Peel 1995: 14–15). The Mel-
bourne Metropolitan Planning Scheme of 1954 (MMPS), for example, was consciously created
to identify and remedy the challenges facing the city in the post-war era. Indeed, the Report
commences with a list of Melbourne’s perceived deficits in the 1950s and proceeds from there.1
By the close of World War II, a range of professionals concerned by the deep inequities of Aus-
tralia’s urban centres had been agitating for reform for several decades and were hopeful that
the time was finally ripe to re-structure urban space and hence urban lives.
But whereas the MMPS was created in the 1950s to address contemporary problems, the
oral histories which I draw upon were created fifty years later in order to remember, reflect upon
and describe what it felt like to grow up in post-war Melbourne. The construction of these oral
histories in the early twenty first century means that they are as closely connected to present day
concerns as they are to the past.2 As personal memories they are therefore framed in relation to
individual life narratives and heavily coloured by nostalgia for childhoods long gone. It is the
deeply subjective nature of these oral histories that makes them crucial for appreciating how
post-war Melbourne functioned as a place for its youngest inhabitants.
Documentary and personal sources offer access to very different ways of speaking about
physical environments, due partially to the inherent nature of the sources. Memory tends to
prioritise emotion and experience whilst official documents privilege rationality. Particularly in
the mid-twentieth century there was a sense in which urban planning was still trying to ‘prove’
itself as a discipline and the ascendant spatial discourses of the time, such as modernism, placed
emphasis upon scientific abstractions and empirical validation. The MMPS, for example, was
based upon an ambitious program of research carried out over several years and the final report
was fastidious in backing its claims with graphs, tables and maps.
This is also a distinction typical of the difference between professionals theorising about space
at some remove and the views of people embedded by residence in those same places. A similar
distinction is described by Peel in his classic work Good Times, Hard Times, comparing the views

30.2 CITY AS SPACE, CITY AS PLACE ARTICLES

of planners with the experiences of people living in the town of Elizabeth, South Australia, in
the second half of the twentieth century:
Those who used the landscape created different Elizabeths within the same
space ... The model landscape splintered according to conflicting conceptions
of who, and what, the town was for. That is precisely what the new town
model could not countenance: that residents, and in particular working-class
residents, were spatially and socially creative, that they would use planned space
in their own ways. The momentum of Elizabeth’s history would not be plan-
ning’s victory over disorder, but the re-emergence of collisions and conflicts as
people made sense and made use of their place (Peel 1995: 56–57).

Like Peel, I have found that post-war planners tended to speak about urban environments as
spaces to be quantitatively studied and rationally organised. But reflecting upon childhood
memories, interviewees spoke of these sites in more qualitative ways that emphasised the phe-
nomenological experiences, emotional associations and social interactions that these places em-
bodied.
One way to understand this distinction between personal and expert sources is by reference
to geographical literature concerning the difference between place and space. For human geo-
graphers, space is a more abstract concept than place, referring to a realm that has not been be-
stowed with personal meaning (Cresswell 2004: 8). For geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, space is about
moving and place is about pausing and abiding. He writes in his classic text Space and Place
that: ‘what begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow
it with value’ (Tuan 1977: 6). To some extent, this may be characterised as the difference between
how a detached expert and an embedded resident view the same physical environment. Tuan
writes that
A planner looking at the city may discern areas of distinctive physical and socio-
economic character; he calls them districts or neighbourhoods and assigns them
names if local ones do not already exist. These neighbourhoods ... have meaning
for him as intellectual concepts. What would be the perception of the people
who live in such areas? Will they also see that in their area the houses are of a
similar build and that the people are mostly of a similar socio-economic class?
The answer is, of course, not necessarily. Local inhabitants have no reason to
entertain concepts that are remote from their immediate needs (Tuan 1977:
169).

Whilst post-war planners tended to study Melbourne as a series of spaces, children intimately
inhabited these sites, transforming them into place. This is essentially the distinction made by
geographer Tim Cresswell that, ‘while space is amenable to the abstraction of spatial science and
economic rationality, place is amenable to discussion of things such as “value” and “belonging”’
(Cresswell 2004: 20).
In many ways it is not surprising that urban planners working in the 1950s viewed the city
as space. In The Fate of Place philosopher Edward Casey traced the intellectual history of the
concepts of place and space throughout western thought. He argues that the prominence of space

CITY AS SPACE, CITY AS PLACE ARTICLES 30.3

– which especially imbued Enlightenment and modernist thinking – was linked to the rise of
universalism. Whilst place is local and particular, space has been understood as absolute and all-
encompassing (Casey 1997).
The universalising tendencies of a space-based perspective complemented the social and intel-
lectual milieu in which post-war planners operated. Across the western world from the late
nineteenth century, concerns had emerged about the ways in which urbanisation and industrial-
isation exacerbated inequality within the metropolis, creating conditions of substandard, unsan-
itary and crowded housing for those at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. Urban planning
grew from a desire to create more equitable and liveable cities. Initially championed by a loose
affiliation of social workers, architects, engineers and others, such reform agendas were only
partially implemented in the early twentieth century due to a failure of political will on the part
of Australian governments. But the interwar period saw the rise of a centralised, welfare state
and such urban reformers gained new professional standing. They set about measuring the precise
extent of urban problems such as ‘slum’ living, often through extensive social surveys. Oswald
Barnett’s surveys of Melbourne’s inner city, for example, were motivated by a Methodist desire
to help the disadvantaged but sought legitimation through methods of empirical validation. Re-
formers like Barnett aimed to ameliorate the ills of city life by surveying the extent of the problem
and radically reworking its spatial dimensions through the irrefutable logic of modernism. From
this perspective of viewing the city as ‘space’, social problems could be solved through changes
in the physical environment (Brown 1995: 126–165; Davison 2003; Howe 1988). But reformers
generally failed to appreciate that urban landscapes can have meanings that are not so readily
quantified, such as the emotional and sentimental attachments of residents to their neighbour-
hoods. Such perspectives can only be garnered through a view of the city as ‘place’.
Like space, place is a broad concept with many different permutations. Place theory often
builds upon phenomenology and the work of philosophers such as Heidegger and Husserl. On-
tological priority is accorded to the human experience of dwelling in place through the argument
that to be human is to be in place. Casey writes that,
We are never without emplaced experiences ... We are not only in places but
of them. Human beings – along with other entities on earth, are ineluctably
place-bound. More even than earthlings, we are placelings, and our very per-
ceptual apparatus, our sensing body, reflects the kinds of places we inhabit
(Casey 1996: 19).

Here Casey speaks of the authenticity of immediate place experience. By contrast many memoirs
or semi-autobiographical novels of childhood draw upon the nostalgic power of places past.
Tony Birch’s evocation of 1960s Fitzroy, Shadowboxing, is a coming-of-age tale in which human
lives and relationships are inseparable from the local neighbourhood in which they take place
(Birch 2006). Similarly, in Scraps of Heaven Arnold Zable recreates the 1950s Carlton of his
youth (Zable 2004a). In both books, cunningly etched descriptions of these physical environments
create an intimate backdrop to the interactions of the main characters in a manner that suggests
that these humans and their places are co-productive, constantly creating and re-creating each
other. Reflecting upon his relationship to his childhood neighbourhood, Zable wrote:

30.4 CITY AS SPACE, CITY AS PLACE ARTICLES

 In the 1950s when I was growing up, Carlton was undergoing one of its many
transitions. It was a time when the older working class neighbourhoods were,
once again, transfused by new blood. Carlton was an ideal place to live for
newly arrived immigrants. It was close to the inner city, to the factories of
Brunswick, and to the homes of fellow countrymen who had preceded them.
While the newcomers rented homes, and embarked on their lives we, their
children, ran free. Our parents were so busy making a new life, we were able
to roam the streets, the backlanes, the vacant lots and median strips. Our lives
revolved around defined neighbourhoods. For me the boundaries were Lygon
Street to the west, the Edinburgh Gardens to the east, and the railway lines on
Park Street to the north. The southern boundary was marked by ‘The Dome’
as we called the Exhibition Building in the Carlton Gardens (Zable 2004b:1).

Whereas planners studied the city in objectively verifiable terms, Zable’s reflections reveal a
contrasting characteristic of place: it is subjectively appropriated by the assignment of personal
meaning. Such meanings can be individual (such as the creation of a private cubby house) or
collective. Interviewee George Boubis recalled how for his group of friends a Carlton park was
socially constructed as a meaningful place:
I suppose the Carlton Gardens were our favourite place ... Everybody knew
each other and we had plenty of room to play football and not be in anybody’s
way or interfere with anybody’s privacy. So that was why it was special to us.
It was our ground, as we called it.3

Place can also be transitional. Indeed, the work of Michel de Certeau demonstrates that the
meaning of place is never finalised but is constantly being performed and re-formed (de Certeau
1984). One of my interviewees described vividly how the meaning of his neighbourhood changed
as he aged. As a young child, Richard Gillespie was comfortable living in North Balwyn, where
he knew his local streets intimately, knew the best short-cuts and play places, and found everything
he needed in his own suburb: sport, school, church, friends and Scouts. But increasingly as
Richard grew up he felt bored with what he perceived as the complacency of suburbia. His sec-
ondary school friends all lived in different suburbs and his childish satisfaction in his local parks
or local shops had dissipated. It wasn’t so much that the spaces of North Balwyn changed dra-
matically, but rather that Richard’s interests, personality and social circle shifted, lending differing
interpretations to what the neighbourhood could offer and transforming his understanding of
North Balwyn as a place.4
Just as oral history is important for understanding place, so too is a place-based perspective
well suited to oral history. For Casey, body memory connects us inextricably to places we have
known, making memory ‘naturally place-oriented’ (Casey 1987: 186–187). He perceives
An elective affinity between memory and place. Not only is each suited to the
other; each calls for the other. What is contained in place is on its way to being
well remembered. What is remembered is well grounded if it is remembered as
being in a particular place – a place that may well take precedence over the time
of its occurrence ... Where memory is at stake, to be fixed in space is to be fixed

CITY AS SPACE, CITY AS PLACE ARTICLES 30.5

 in place. If memories are motionless, this is the work of the places in which
they come to inhere so deeply (Casey 1987: 214–215).

Memories associated with specific places have a particularly strong immediacy and potency.
Dolores Hayden’s explanation for this relates to the way that places are experienced sensuously
through the body. She writes that ‘it is place’s ... assault on all ways of knowing (sight, sound,
smell, touch, and taste) that makes it powerful as a source of memory, as a weave where one
strand ties in another’ (Hayden 1996: 18).
In analysing why childhood places are remembered so vividly, Clare Cooper Marcus explains
that we often hold a kind of sacred reverence for our early years. In memory, places act as a
‘psychic anchor’ for powerful childhood experiences (Marcus 1992: 89). Whereas Hayden em-
phasises the sensory power of place, Marcus insists that place memories gain potency through
their emotional associations.
Feelings occur in space and inevitably become associated with various highly charged places;
feelings cannot occur ‘out of space’ any more than they can occur ‘out of time’. Thus, any discus-
sion of emotion and place must return to the observation that the two are inextricably connected,
not in a causal relationship, but in a transactional exchange, unique to each person (Marcus
1992: 111). For Marcus, feelings are always remembered in relation to the places where they
were felt.
My research has found evidence for the viewpoints of both Hayden and Marcus. Place
memories were often remembered through their effect upon the physical body, but they were
also particularly vivid when bound up with strong emotions. In addition, places were recalled
in relation to their interpersonal connections or their social context. In other words, oral history
participants generally recollected childhood environments when they were associated with intense
sensory experience, depth of feeling, or significant social relationships. If these are some of the
characteristics associated with the subjective, experiential nature of place expressed through
personal sources, the planning perspective on the city as space was more characterised as objective,
abstracted, rational, visual and impersonal (see Table 1).

Table 30.1 Characteristics of space and place

Both views of the city are important. The MMPS, for example, is a report based upon thorough
research and surveys, offering the historian a wealth of precise data concerning topics such as
traffic flows, housing density and the distribution of health care. However, it tells us very little
about the lived city as an experienced place. Documentary sources constructed for official purposes
generally frame the city in abstract, quantifiable terms. For planners and government officials,
cities are spaces to be divided into municipal districts, zoned into appropriate land uses and

30.6 CITY AS SPACE, CITY AS PLACE ARTICLES

planned for the most efficient transport routes. Personal sources such as oral history generally
view the city from another angle, because there is no professional distancing or utilitarian purpose
to such a perspective.
Visual examples help to illustrate differences between the objective nature of space and the
subjective characteristics of place. The MMPS is composed of precisely drawn maps of Melbourne
in the 1950s (Figures 1 and 2). Such bird’s-eye views of the city can be independently assessed
for their accuracy, for how closely the representation mirrors physical reality. By contrast, mental
maps drawn by interviewees remembering their childhood neighbourhoods are highly idiosyn-
cratic (Figures 3 and 4). Mental maps are internal, cognitive maps of a locality that have long
been utilised by geographers.5 Although based upon physical geography, their features or relative
proportions are influenced by personal emotions and values. Whilst the space of the city may be
an objectively measurable phenomenon, neighbourhood as place is a subjective concept in which
different routes and landmarks offer varying significance depending on one’s perspective. For
example, interviewee Pat Brown’s map of North Balwyn differs from Doug Beattie’s because
different aspects of the neighbourhood held varying importance for them. The scope of their
maps and the streets and landmarks that they chose to include reflect the geographic range of
these two interviewees as children and the places which held particular meaning for them. Pat’s
map is framed by the waterways of her local area because creeks were much-loved play places
for her. She also marked her home, her church and her local tennis courts because these were
sites where she spent significant amounts of time as she grew up.6 Doug’s mental map highlights
his home, kindergarten, primary school, high school, local shops, scout hall and cricket ground,
giving us some clues as to the places of meaning in his local neighbourhood and the types of
activities in which he was involved as a child. Roads that were not yet bituminised were labelled
because to Doug these dirt roads contributed to his sense that North Balwyn was a semi-rural
environment in the 1950s. The inclusion of Kew and the city at the top of the map gesture to
the fact that whilst Doug knew his immediate suburb intimately through daily interactions,
weekly visits to Saturday matinee film screenings in Kew or occasional trips to downtown Mel-
bourne extended his geographical boundaries.7 Although Doug and Pat grew up in the same
suburb at the same time and lived not far from one another, the inherently subjective nature of
place means that their oral history accounts and mental maps of North Balwyn are different.
The perspective of the city as space similarly values expertise over experience. Most post-war
urban planners considered their professional training in ordering urban environments to be su-
perior to the everyday interactions of local residents with their neighbourhoods. Particularly
during the immediate post-war years, the stridency of planners’ pronouncements may be under-
stood as an assertion of their professionalism at a time when their expertise was still on shaky
ground. Walter Bunning was Executive Officer of the Commonwealth Housing Commission in
1945 when he wrote his influential tract Homes in the Sun. Like most planners of the day, he
situated his framework for the future development of Australian cities in a denunciation of the
problems of the past. Bunning argued that problems such as ‘slum’ areas had their genesis in the
fact that Australian cities had been largely unplanned. Despite the fact that he encouraged Aus-
tralians to seek planning and architectural solutions which took into account particular historical,
cultural and climactic conditions, Bunning was still firmly of the belief that city dwellers needed
the assistance of planners to develop a sense of community:

CITY AS SPACE, CITY AS PLACE ARTICLES 30.7

 The small town has a character, a community sense, which the larger metropolis
lacks. These vast amorphous masses of people engender a spirit which is often
decried as barren, unfriendly and selfish. This is due in large measure to the
confused community pattern. There are often, in the city, no clearly defined
communities which can develop a sense of cohesion. The suburbs are too fre-
quently merely an overall pattern of houses with no recognisable centre. They
lack individuality and character. Contemporary town planners and sociologists
seek to create the small town community spirit within the great metropolitan
area. This is done by sorting out the numerous small communities which exist
within the city, helping to restore their identity and individuality by separating
their boundaries and surrounding them with a green belt. Natural centres would
be chosen and provided with all the necessary community facilities (Bunning
1945: 87).

Ironically, Bunning’s commitment to the professional, distanced methods of post-war planning

meant that he was unable to discern that community spirit often already existed in Australian
cities, particularly in ‘slum’ areas by virtue of their rich historical fabric. Oral history accounts
of life in post-war Melbourne recall that a strong sense of neighbourhood flourished within dif-
ferent suburbs. Interviewees who grew up in North Balwyn overwhelmingly recalled that the
street play of local children contributed to the feeling of community. Doug remembered:
In the 1950s, as a child, it was pretty free from morning ’til night. The doors
were always open. All the neighbourhood houses down the street were fair
hunting grounds for kids. We used to have quite a few kids in the street, so
there were always little mobs of us roaming around.8

In Doug’s recollections, a double nostalgia for both the freedoms of childhood and for the safety
of post-war suburbia produces a narrative of a community bonded by trust.
Community spirit was also remembered in 1950s Carlton. Despite its ‘slum’ reputation, Zable
recalls a flourishing community spirit in the post-Carlton of his youth:
On warm summer nights, my parents could sit on the verandah, after a day of
work, and quietly chat with their old-world friends. It is my most affectionate
memory of my Carlton childhood. I recall the cigarettes glowing in the dark,
the murmur of quiet talk, the sounds of a Greek folk song drifting through an
open doorway, the strains of an accordion on the median strip. As for me, I
was out on the streets, roaming free and untamed with my pack of friends
whose ancestors had arrived on these shores from many lands (Zable 2004b: 6).

This embedded experience of life in a particular locale offers a perspective very different from
that of a removed expert. It also helps to explain why, to the surprise of planners, inner city
residents were often reluctant to move to spacious, modern houses in the suburbs when the
Housing Commission of Victoria offered to raze and rebuild inner areas (Barnett and Burt 1942:
46–47, 60).9

30.8 CITY AS SPACE, CITY AS PLACE ARTICLES

 Urban places are often remembered by reference to particular emotions. Whereas planners
felt professionally obliged to relate to the city in dispassionate terms, oral histories map an emotive
cartography of place. For Vivienne Nicholson, suburban North Balwyn was a neighbourhood
where she felt safe and secure as a child, though she also occasionally craved the excitement of
the city.10 Joan Broadberry remembers a particular street in Carlton by reference to a shameful
routine associated with it.
My sister and I – for some reason or other – were singled out as to having poor
posture ... We were sent down to this strange gymnastic programme. We had
to walk down to Queensberry Street to – it must have been the Queensberry
Street Primary School, where they had it set up. It was sort of like a shameful
thing. We were hideously embarrassed by it.11

If Joan recalled embarrassment in relation to her school experiences in Carlton, Elaine Dav-
idson associated her Carlton home with deeply painful events. In describing her childhood terrace
house Elaine led me metaphorically through each room, but it was only when we got to her up-
stairs bedroom that she told me she had been abused as a child by a boarder. For Elaine,
memories of that room in that house were inseparable from the horror and trauma that she faced
there.12
If places are recalled in relation to intense emotions, they are also remembered phenomeno-
logically. Understanding sensory interactions with the urban environment is a relatively new
scholarly interest. After the lengthy hegemony of visual modes of experience, Sense of the City
is a collection edited by Mirko Zardini which seeks to resurrect interest in sensory engagements
with the cityscape. Zardini argues that:
City planning has long privileged qualities of urban space based exclusively on
visual perception. Whether the aim was to define a regular space through control
of alignments and heights or through definition of materials and colours, or to
accentuate contrasts and differences in a picturesque vision of the urban envir-
onment, the eye has always been privileged. The same consideration has not
been given to the ear and nose (nor the sense of touch). Above all, sounds and
odours have been considered disturbing elements, and architecture and city
planning have exclusively been concerned with marginalizing them, covering
them up, or eliminating them altogether (Zardini 2005: 20–21).

But although planners have tried to deodorise, sanitise and neaten the streets, pungent and
noisome elements emerge nevertheless. Cities continually assault the senses. Places impact upon
human bodies, causing sensory experiences that leave vivid impressions upon the mind. Oral
histories often recall place through the senses, describing the touch, taste, sound or smell of
childhood landscapes. Recalling her suburban childhood on the outskirts of Melbourne, Vivienne
said: ‘I can remember the vivid green of the grass. And the smells. The smells of the horses.’13
If smell can linger in the mind, so too can sound. Growing up in Carlton, Elaine was a
member of a local gang called ‘The Carlton Kids’. Even after fifty years, she can remember the
words and tune of a song that they used to sing, evidence of the power of aural memory:

CITY AS SPACE, CITY AS PLACE ARTICLES 30.9

 ‘The Carlton Kids,
The Carlton Kids,
The Carlton Kids,
The Carlton Kids are we,
Always up to mischief,
Wherever we may be.
Standing by the station,
A copper said to me,
“If you’re one of the Carlton Kids,
You better come along with me.”
Ham and eggs for breakfast,
Ham and eggs for tea,
A lump of bread as big as your head,
And a bloody cold cup of tea.’

There was another verse and I can’t remember it.14

Touch is an equally powerful sense and tactility can be pleasurable or painful. Doug’s ability
to recall the surface of his school grounds relates to the impact that it had upon his physical
body. Thus he remembers quite clearly that it ‘was all dirt early and then stones. If you fell over
in a footy game, you really knew it. So bloody knees were just so common, it wasn’t funny’.15
Similarly, he remembers that the classroom floor of his new school was unfinished when he
commenced Prep because he sustained a splinter in his backside from sitting on the rough wood.
Finally, place is also experienced in terms of social relationships. Whilst planners strove to
adopt an impersonal relationship to the city, residents were deeply enmeshed in interpersonal
networks which criss-crossed their neighbourhoods. In describing the street of his suburban
childhood home, Richard could remember with clarity the names of his neighbours and their
relative intimacy with his own family.16 Livio Belia’s memories of Carlton in the 1950s are
overlaid with his understanding of the gang loyalties that dissected the neighbourhood. Livio
recalled that membership of a gang was based upon the street in which one lived, with sectarian
inflections.
And that’s ... where the separations came. The ones that lived the Rathdowne
Street end. The ones that lived Elizabeth Street end. The ones that lived at
Canning Street end. All went to the same school. But once you walked out of
school, they formed their own groups. And then there was a separation between
the Catholics and the non-Catholics … You wouldn’t go in the Exhibition
Gardens of a night-time. That’s where the fights would occur.17

Place memories are social in another sense also. Often, recollections of childhood places are
closely connected to memories of the companions with whom these places were explored. This
is partially because older siblings often play an important role in extending the geographic scope
and spatial competency of their younger brothers and sisters (Pooley et al. 2005: 98; Ward 1979:
217). So, for example, John Sinclair’s recollections of long bike rides from North Balwyn to

30.10 CITY AS SPACE, CITY AS PLACE ARTICLES

Warrandyte will always be associated with spending time with his little brother.18 George Ah
Yick remembers walking to Rathdowne Street Primary School through the laneways of Carlton
with his brothers and sisters, and the memory of that daily walk through well-known local routes
is inseparable from memories of his sibling companions on that journey.19 These oral histories
rarely described childhood environments in isolation from the friends or siblings with whom
they were experienced. If place is subjective, experiential, emotive and sensual, it is also very often
interpersonal.
This paper has offered a series of different windows onto the historical city, and suggested
that multiple perspectives are important for the urban historian. The view of the city as space is
generally the view of the detached expert, commonly found amongst official documents in the
archives. In the example of the MMPS that I’ve used here, seeing the city as space allows us an
overarching vision of Melbourne as a whole and provides carefully researched data on infrastruc-
ture, transport routes, land uses and more. Without this perspective, historians cannot appreciate
how large-scale political and economic shifts impact upon the metropolis and individual urban
lives lack a contextual framework.
Yet if we only view the city as space, we will never comprehend how it felt to live in the
houses, streets and neighbourhoods of post-war Melbourne. It is interesting to note that urban
planners from the 1960s began to realise that they were neglecting a fundamental piece of city
life in their research, and gradually sought to discover how ordinary residents viewed their
neighbourhood.20 From the 1970s, planners and geographers even attempted to study how children
viewed, moved through and experienced the urban landscape.21 Historians have largely followed
this trend towards the incorporation of lived experience into the meta narratives that are con-
structed about cities. But the ways in which sources differ and the implications of this for urban
history are still, I argue, under-theorised. In particular, it is still possible for historians and
planners to tell macro stories about the metropolis without reference to any kind of localism, or
to the complex and slippery nuances of individual urban stories. Within this context, this paper
has contended that written and oral memories allow us a privileged glimpse of everyday urban
life in the past, as well as how these remembered slices of the city shape the present. These
emotive, sensory and social engagements with the urban landscape enable the historian to access
the city on a more personal scale: the city as place.

CITY AS SPACE, CITY AS PLACE ARTICLES 30.11

Figure 30.1 Residential density, from Melbourne Metropolitan Planning Scheme, 1954

30.12 CITY AS SPACE, CITY AS PLACE ARTICLES

Figure 30.2 Age and condition of housing, from Melbourne Metropolitan Planning Scheme, 1954

CITY AS SPACE, CITY AS PLACE ARTICLES 30.13

Figure 30.3 Pat Brown’s mental map of her childhood neighbourhood

30.14 CITY AS SPACE, CITY AS PLACE ARTICLES

Figure 30.4 Doug Beattie’s mental map of his childhood neighbourhood

CITY AS SPACE, CITY AS PLACE ARTICLES 30.15

ENDNOTES
1
Melbourne Metropolitan Planning Scheme 1954, 8.
2
This is now well-established within oral history scholarship. See, for example Thomson (1998: 28).
3
Interview with George Boubis in Truganina on 14 November 2007.
4
Interview with Richard Gillespie in Carlton on 17 August 2007.
5
Geographer Kevin Lynch pioneered the use of mental maps in the 1970s to comprehend subjective
perspectives on urban landscapes. See for example Lynch 1977.
6
Interview with Pat Brown in Carlton on 19 November 2007.
7
Interview with Doug Beattie in Richmond on 3 December 2007.
8
Interview with Doug Beattie.
9
Other examples are described in Darian-Smith (1990: 105).
10
Interview with Vivienne Nicholson in Parkville on 2 August 2007.
11
Interview with Joan Broadberry in Carlton on 12 December 2007.
12
Interview with Elaine Davidson at Chirnside Park on 29 November 2007.
13
Interview with Vivienne Nicholson.
14
Interview with Elaine Davidson.
15
Interview with Doug Beattie.
16
Interview with Richard Gillespie.
17
Interview with Livio Belia in Thornbury on 3 August 2007.
18
Interview with John Sinclair in Parkville on 9 July 2007.
19
Interview with George Ah Yick in North Melbourne on 10 December 2007.
20
Largely, this was the result of the critiques of non-planners such as Jane Jacobs. See Jacobs 1961.
21
Some prominent examples include Hart 1979; Moore 1986; Ward 1979.

SOURCES
PRINTED SOURCES

Melbourne Metropolitan Planning Scheme 1954.

INTERVIEWS

Interview with George Ah Yick, North Melbourne.

Interview with Doug Beattie, Richmond, 3 December 2007.
Interview with Livio Belia, Thornbury, 3 August 2007.
Interview with George Boubis, Truganina, 14 November 2007.
Interview with Pat Brown, Carlton, 19 November 2007.
Interview with Elaine Davidson, Chirnside Park, 29 November 2007.
Interview with Richard Gillespie, Carlton, 17 August 2007.
Interview with Vivienne Nicholson, Parkville, 2 August 2007.
Interview with John Sinclair, Parkville, 9 July 2007.

30.16 CITY AS SPACE, CITY AS PLACE ARTICLES

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Cite this article as: Pascoe, Carla. ‘City as space, city as place: Sources and the urban historian’. History
Australia 7 (2): pp. 30.1 to 30.18. DOI: 10.2104/ha100030.

30.18 CITY AS SPACE, CITY AS PLACE ARTICLES