point to the effects of doing research in a small city. The term is used here to begin to
summarise the introduction to this study and more clearly orient the chapters that will follow. What this section does not attempt to do is reinstate ‘small’ and ‘large’ as markers of
innovation, progress or usefulness in research. While Hobart is a small city compared to many others, under a symmetrical approach no ‘place’ is naturally behind or forwards unless in a specific relation that makes it so. This study did not set out to first contextualise a small city or to assume it would matter, but was prepared to describe it mattering if it did. It was through undertaking the research that it became clear that this bigger picture was important precisely because it is not very big.
Welcome to one of the great small cities of the world.
Tasmania's capital city, Hobart, lies nestled between the brooding peak of Mt Wellington and the banks of the Derwent River. As Australia's second oldest city, Hobart provides a picturesque and evocative setting for a lifestyle that is both relaxed and welcoming.
There is easy public access to sections of our working port, Salamanca Place and other areas of the Sullivans Cove waterfront allowing you to view the fishing fleet in Victoria Dock, watch the Antarctic supply ships come and go, buy fish from the fish punts in and around Constitution Dock, shop at the many unique stores in Salamanca Place or simply enjoy the food and drinks
160 served up in the various hotels and restaurants (Tasmanian Information Centre).182
Sullivans Cove is the birthplace of Hobart in the same way that Circular Quay is the birthplace of Sydney. Both cities developed from these early ports and fresh water rivulets and they both still play a part in the present day ‘pulse’ of each city. However this is where the similarity between the two cities starts to end because as Sydney continued to grow and outgrow its beginnings into the fast-paced, ‘world city’ it is today, Hobart remained a small and comparatively slower city so that part of what still characterises it today is an old worldliness by Australian standards, and the continued proximity of the city centre to the docks and a working port filled with boats.
Source: Tasmanian Postcards and Souvenirs (Launceston, Tasmania).
Hobart is described as a small city set between the Wellington mountain ranges and a deep water harbour on the Derwent River and these initially characterise what follows as the ‘richness’ of this place and also somewhat fortuitously, a rich place to begin research.
To find richness, one only has to turn toward the world itself, to the wind, the foam, the sun, the snow-capped mountains in the back, the earnest miniature city behind the harbour (Latour 1997a: 170).
161 The earnestness of the city is in part a provision of a population of approximately 202’200 people, making up just under half of the island’s total population. Based on figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics fifty year projections the population is not forecast to increase. This means Hobart is not only a small city in Australia’s smallest state, but one of the few Australian cities that anticipates remaining small.183 Consequently Hobart is not subject to an ‘acceleration’ clause like other growing cities so Hobart plans to remain small and expects less development. This means that every time development happens it is comparatively new and noticeable to those who live there.
The advantage of doing this kind of research in a small city like Hobart was that it was not difficult to identify and locate most of the important actors and to learn very quickly of their relation to each other. Architects, urban designers and property developers are among the relatively mobile professions and yet the furthest I would need to travel to get among these people was Sydney University. All of the other important human actors were relatively near, easy to find and accessible. Access in this sense was directly related to the visibility and relatively local nature of those involved in the development of Sullivans Cove. Furthermore, cities can be hazardous objects of symmetrical analysis because they are not only
heterogeneously replete but also consist of multiply concentrated orderings. While there is an ‘excess’ in the city (Latham and McCormack 2004:718), the smallness of Hobart offered a methodological virtue when it comes to understanding process and this is even more
pronounced when the relation of size to speed is taken into account. As Davis explains of Los Angeles, “twenty years in the life of a metropolis […] is an entire historical epoch” (1990: viii), whereas twenty years in the life of Hobart does not reassemble things to the same degree and the so the ‘timing’ is of a different nature (Chapter Six). This means when things are reassembled it really does make a difference and this exaggerated sense of change and difference is also helpful for tracing out orderings that ensure a city, regardless of size, ‘keeps resulting’.
183 Australian Bureau of Statistics
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/[email protected]/mediareleasesbytitle/7BC2291979320950CA2570C7007DA2D7?Ope nDocument, and http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/[email protected]/Lookup/1307.6Main+Features6Jun+2008, Both accessed February 19th 2010.
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7.8
From controversy to the laboratory
Since a tourism place cannot guarantee the limits of tourism ordering, orderings themselves are fields. Consequently it is important to get onto the trail of a tourism ordering, and a more traditional field like Sullivans Cove was made useful for this. Access to tourism ordering in a more specific way was then gained through the controversial apartment hotel Zero Davey. From here ‘how this development happened’ and ‘what this development did’ became orienting principles of the study.
Starting with a handful of objects, texts and people associated with the development of Zero Davey lead to those involved with planning Sullivans Cove, the planning scheme, the design framework and an extended network of actors associated with these. In making sense of this part of the task of this chapter has been to introduce some of the actors and how they came to be actors. However this became intriguing to report since actors were both sources of
information as well as actors who made a difference to this information. Similarly this chapter has started to ‘tell the story’ while also telling the mechanics of it.
Through the writing of this chapter a symmetry emerged between my own quest to articulate what I had done, and the request I had made of those I had spoken with to do the same. They were asked to describe ‘how’ they do whatever they do in relation to my inquiry, as I was now asked to describe how I did whatever I did in relation to the same. In the same position as ‘them’ it became clear how all of our motivated actions corresponded to early shipwrights who were ‘guessing, modelling, building and learning’ (see p. chapter 5). Garfinkel (1967:77) calls this part of the ‘troublesome properties’ of motivated actions through which a researcher “does not and even cannot ‘know’ what he is doing prior to or while he is doing it”. That said, attempts can be made to make sense of the doing before and after it is done and that is what this chapter has set out to do.
As the following chapter will continue to show how as bodies mingle among non-humans who are serious contenders for the action, ‘the doing’ of this research closely mirrored what the human actors themselves did since none of us could completely dispense with chance, nor completely comprehend all that was going on. Nevertheless attempts were made to dispense
163 with chance and to comprehend and this began to become evident when the controversy that was Zero Davey lead to an ‘urban design laboratory’.
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