I spent 5 hours walking Adelaide’s CBD yesterday. It is part of my training for walking in Japan which includes 5 days walking in Tokyo. It was wet and windy with a sou’westerly cold front with occasional periods of sunshine. I couldn’t help notice how dirty the city was, especially in those side streets and alleyways away from the main streets. These are where the run down, decaying buildings of the 19th century city are.

They are tucked away behind the new buildingsand you have to walk around the old lanes or alleys to come across them.

Sure some of the rubbush was caused by the strong winds knocking over the rubbish bins, but that wasn’t the case for the junk in some of the alleyways behind the shops. These areas were squalid and dirty —the junk had been slowly accumulating over some time and had became part of the urban fabric. There are no plans to green these laneways so that people are attracted to walking in them. If the Adelaide City Council and state government want people to be actively using our CBD spaces during the hotter months of the year, then they are going to need to be actively cooling them.

It wasn’t just the rubbish lying in the streets. Areas of the CBD are quite grungy. There are large pockets of grunge. Sure some of these are development sites awaiting development, but there were so many of these. One of the most notable was the development on the old Balfours factory site on West Franklin St that is known Balfours Square that has been sitting empty since around 2014.

The old Balfours factory had been knocked down and two apartment towers have been built: the Gallery Apartments and Altitude Apartments. The plaza is windswept and devoid of people despite the Brazilian cafe. Further east across Morphett St there is a vast car park adjacent to the Central Bus Station. This is the site of the former Franklin Street bus depot which has been a carpark since 2008. The current plans are for an apartment tower that will include affordable housing and a hotel, which will be built in the late 2020s.

I used to think that Adelaide was in a slow transition from an industrial to a post-industrial city but the rubbish and grunge coupled with both the empty cafes, shops and offices and people sleeping on the street indicate that there is a general sense of decay in the CBD. Is this decay the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic? The decay stands in such a marked contrast to all the new buildings—mostly high rise apartment— that are going up. The latter indicate the post-Covid shifting demographic nature of city centre away from office workers who prefer to work from home. I suspect that the Covid-19 has shaken the city to its core.

The above proposed development indicates that notion of the city as a place to live has survived the pandemic and is flourishing. If the city will continue to function as a place where people gather to work, do trade, to learn and to have fun, then more affordable housing and accommodation is something that really does need to be considered. Will this shift in demographics include the conversion of the empty office towers to residential use? Has the CBD changed permanently?