Adelaide’s post-Covid CBD appears to have overcome its empty streets and empty shops. People are gathering in cafes and walking the streets. The old buildings are being pulled down, there are lots of fenced off empty blocks, new buildings are going up. and there are festivals and cabarets aplenty. The city did not appear to have been hollowed out.

Was Covid-19 an interruption — a one-off pandemic —- to the emerging urban renaissance? Covid -19, with reminder of the i fragility of life has been forgotten, paid hybrid work continues, and though real estate proves continue to rise and the rents surge , face-to-face contact is attracting people to the city. The possibility of more troubled times from deadly pandemics is seen as not being on the horizon. People are just getting on with their lives..

I walked around the Hutt Street precinct this morning just after 7am. It was a fine autumn morning — blue skies, a warm temperature and little to no wind. People were returning from wailkng their dogs in the eastern parklands, the coffee shops were open, and people were gathered in groups having their morning coffee after their exercise. I was pleasantly surprised to see the outdoor tables so full that early in the morning and they weren’t all cyclists. The street scape along Hutt Street is full of outdoor cafe tables.

So the lure urban life is strong and it appears to be without the pervasive sense of melancholy about the transitory of urban life. There does not seem to be a re-thinking of the public spaces. Life has returned to the pre-Covid patterns with the cafes with their outdoor seating forming a mesh of small, safe, intimate places where people enjoy each other’s company.

What I noted on my walk this morning was that in contrast to people walking the streets the cafes were spaces where people were engaging with one another in a spirit of civility, community, and goodwill. It appears to be a more convivial city that it was in the 2-3 years after Covid-19. The intensity of urban life has increased.

The post Covid city of Adelaide was now a post-industrial city; albeit one that is part of a society that is incredibly expensive in terms of housing and education coupled with insecure employment for young people (millennials). Generational equality is increasing, education leaves them saddled with student debt whilst homeownership has pretty much become a distant mirage as soaring property prices outpace income growth. ‘Work hard and get on’ no longer cuts it.

Under the conditions of market liberalism market forces are pushing us towards a society of increasingly entrenched and inherited inequality with inheritance becoming the first and most reliable way of gaining wealth. This wealth inequality is like a return to the nineteenth century economy that was based on inherited wealth. The future of our social order is delineated by going back to the past. This is Thomas Piketty’s political economy argument in his Capital in the Twenty-First Century. He also argued that the decrease in wealth inequality experienced between 1914 and 1970 is exceptional, due to the long-term effects of capital destruction during two world wars, as well as to the high levels of taxation introduced during this period.

a post-Covid city

Keswick Creek

Grungy Adelaide