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alling Shepparton a “village” maybe considered blasphemous.
However, a village is nothing but a conglomeration of people
and the supporting infrastructure upon which they depend for daily living, and
that is pretty much what Shepparton is.
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| An artist's impression of Shepparton's proposed new courthouse - it will be rather incongruous in the city's village-like atmosphere. |
It just so happens that more people have decided to settle
in Shepparton than in any other nearby urban area and so grasping at whatever
it is that will boost egos our village is now labelled a “city”.
Does that make any difference? Officially probably, but if
we dare take it too literally, it can distort our understanding of what is and
isn’t important in our village.
All urban areas have a heart and Shepparton’s has
historically been the central business district presently centred on the Maude
St Mall and its immediate surrounds.
Commerciality has driven a retail diaspora resulting in the
creation of major shopping centres on the city’s fringes, effectively driving a
dagger through the city’s heart.
Wounded, the city limps on, hindered by an administration
which sees solutions through a dated 20th Century prism that allows
only visions reliant upon ideas built around a fossil fuel-based economy.
Shepparton, and those who live here, need and deserve better;
they deserve innovative, bold and adventurous planning that will ready the
village for a future in which water reliability will be threatened and its
fellow “lifeblood”, oil will also be increasingly scarce becoming largely the
province of the few.
Our village once had a human-scale, evolving from times when
energy was scarce in that it was mostly human and animal, but then progress
came along and in just few decades we were being whisked around the Goulburn
Valley in steam trains and motor vehicles initiating the social erosion that
continues today.
Our communities have become socially shredded as the
insisted individualism of the corporatized world drives aspirational wedges
between us as we pursue various goals bringing on a perceived and practical
inequality.
A manifestation of that inequality, the collapse of values
that bind a community, is the plan to build an incongruous court house in the
heart of our village that is clearly out of step with the human-scale of its
surrounds.
Member for Shepparton, Suzanna Sheed, herself a lawyer,
correctly points out that the building will be more than somewhere to dispense
the law for it will also be the focus for a host of social services processes
that are presently sprinkled throughout the city.
That being the case, what is proposed appears to be a
distorted effort to contain blustering egos within a limited footprint and so
the building has gone up rather than out, disrupting and destroying
Shepparton’s beautiful low-rise skyline.
The preservation of Shepparton’s village-like atmosphere is
too important to sacrifice to such economic callousness and so rather than the
proposed glass-like shrine to vanity, we should be acquiring more property and
building a low-rise complex that reflects the human-scale of our village.
