Just when I was afraid the momentum for advancing Perth had slowed, last Thursday’s FORM event with Carol Coletta (pictured) and Charles Landry managed to draw a crowd of about 800 people even though it didn’t earn the mindshare of Landry’s previous visit.

It was interesting to hear Coletta connect Landry’s pet idea of creative cities with the kinds of urban change happening (very slowly) around Perth. As examples, she cited the American cities of Portland and Austin, which among other things have become active on the Web technology scene, and pointed to research that agrees with my anecdotal experience: young people generally prefer to live closer to the city.

Meanwhile I’m not sure I agree with Landry’s assessment of a change of attitude in our officials, but he did make an excellent point about how different creative groups around Perth tend to ignore each other, and that linkage happens more readily if there’s a network of high-density zones around the inner city. This was one of several suggestions that were more mainstream and urban-development-ey than his bigger-but-abstract goals of last time.

One of his more pragmatic recommendations involved demoting cars in the city centre — it’s silly, for instance, that pedestrian crossings are green for barely ten seconds at a time. But while that’d be a simple and cheap change, the entrenched problems in its way are highlighted by a page in today’s newspaper whining about longer freeway travel times, citing someone in Connolly who refuses to take the fastest urban railway in the country because of some quibble about bus timetabling. (Not that our public transport is perfect, of course, but so many of these oft-heard criticisms really aren’t valid.)

Landry summarised these thoughts in a column in last Saturday’s newspaper and there are some comments on their all-new blog (cough). I do hope change will come out of this, but I’m not confident there’s a strong enough will in the right places. There’s room for some lobbying here …