Vesper No. 9 | The Adversary | Fall-Winter 2023
Philip Goldswain
Adversarial Urbanism. Mining and Settlement in the Western Australian
Goldfields, 1897-1905
Keywords
Boomtown, mining, urban morphology, urbanization,
maps
In 1901, less than a decade after the
discovery of gold, Kalgoorlie, Boulder and the East Coolgardie Goldfield
(Western Australia) was depicted in a number of elaborately coloured and
detailed maps which illustrated the spatial, legal and territorial complexity
of the significant, and rapidly developing, urban industrial conurbation. The
contribution reflects on the interactions, tensions and conflicts between the
different land uses that constituted this settlement to explore the
‘adversarial urbanism’ that resulted from the speed of its growth.
Through the visual analysis of maps and the identification of formally distinct
morphological actors almost eighty aberrations in the cadastral grid of the
town are identified. Each of these has their own distinctive process,
temporality, and imprint on the boomtown. An understanding of this period of
contestation, with its arbitrary urban forms determined by the negotiations
between geological and metropolitan forces, complexifies urban history.
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