• Today the City of Perth announced approval for two new office projects — a huge redevelopment to make Raine Square less boring, and an office block on the ground-level carpark between the Parmelia Hilton and the Busport.
  The Raine Square development, assuming it goes ahead, sounds very funky, but the Mounts Bay Road building isn’t nearly as awesome as the mixed-use projects that were previously approved for the site (man, we don’t have enough mixed-use in Perth). Then again, at least this one has a chance of going ahead and replacing that waste-of-space carpark. Now if only someone would do something about the waste of space carpark next door …
• Yesterday, my local government announced it was giving up its bid to get a stadium built at Cockburn Central, after being told the Premier wasn’t all that interested in their plans. Oh well, I guess WA football will be set back a few years as vested interests squabble over redeveloping Subiaco Oval. (Of course, East Perth is the better of the two remaining options, if only because it creates river integration opportunities … which almost guarantees that it won’t be accepted.)
• Also on the sporting front: earlier this week, new plans were announced for Perth Arena, the new indoor stadium for the Hopman Cup. When I first heard about the bold design I thought it seemed cool, but the most recent pictures suggest that everything on the site other than the stadium itself is a bit uninspired.

  

  Case in point: that carpark, which is way too big, hardly sympathetic to the design, and liable to end up like the Convention Centre carpark (i.e. overrun by commuters and useless to patrons).

The headline of my community newspaper yesterday: “Stadium bid sunk”.

The Major Stadia Taskforce announced, in its interim report, that its short list of sites consists of Mueller Park in Subiaco, and land near the old East Perth power station.

Never mind that the former is a perfectly nice park (and as yesterday’s West Australian points out, plenty of people like it that way) while the latter is already earmarked for fairly radical redevelopment.

When the Cockburn stadium bid was first announced, I thought it’d be an ideal way to encourage development at Cockburn Central — pubs, restaurants, and maybe a hotel or two — that would give the area a CBD flavour of its own, like a mini-Parramatta. This kind of development, after all, was decided as the most desirable outcome after the Dialogue with the City process (I should know, I was there!) with a stronger Cockburn helping to drive the growth of a ‘networked’ Perth. But the task force seems not to care about that, giving barely three sentences to the bid and focussing instead on fluffy guidelines about “sports entertainment hubs”. Heck, even the Belmont Park proposal is better than the sites in their short list.

P.S. Something else jumped out at me in yesterday’s newspaper: yet another anti-OBE letter, this time from some professor at that so-called university in Fremantle, arguing that “post-structuralism … is just that, a theory”. Now while it’s not surprising for an average newspaper-letter-writer to not understand the formal meaning of ‘theory’, for an academic I’d say it’s no less than inexcusable.