Vitalnorthadelaide

07/05/2024

The Save the Cranker team has come up with a brilliant template to make it easy to make a submission to the State Planning Commission's SCAP regarding Wee Hur's proposed development at the Crown and Anchor site in our East End.

The template is here:
https://savethecranker.com.au/letters
It is due by Friday next the 10th May at midnight
Note that you or your rep can choose to speak at SCAP for up to 5 minutes.

The potential for a huge utilitarian building in our prime visitor precinct, the East End, is a ridiculous outcome enabled by our very clumsy planning regulations, which have the potential to wreck our visitor areas in this way until we can persuade government to rescind them.

Densifying a city need not destroy the vitality of visitor areas as they provide all the life and colour in a city. They also keep younger adults in town.

This is a heritage matter of considerable substance as the Cranker is deeply embedded in East End history. From the late 1800s it was a watering place for workers, and vegetable and fruit producers from the East End Market- from mid morning onward. It is a final remnant of the bustling East End of old, extraordinary in that it is still alive and being used for its original use but a substantial music performance space as well.

We are in a very important struggle to keep Adelaide authentic, attractive, amenable- and visitor friendly. Please help out as best you can by supporting Save the Cranker

28/04/2024

Excellent rally today, a lot of fun, plenty of music-on-wheels, exuberant. Thousands of participants. This has the potential to shift the goalposts in a substantial way on protecting our main streets and heritage and especially protecting music and arts venues. Everyone clearly feels they do not want to live in a beige vanilla city, but a lively, grainy human-scale one.
If you want to help please get busy writing to Upper House MP's before the motion is put on Wednesday details are here
https://savethecranker.com.au/

28/04/2024

27/04/2024

On the PlanSA Property and Planning Atlas website, both the Exeter and Austral hotel sites have the same height limit as the Cranker at 53m or 15 storeys. The Grace Emily site is only slightly lower at 43m. This means that under current planning regulations, all of these hotels could be replaced by towers tomorrow! There is nothing protecting them or the vibrant, human-scale streets around them that we love. It is absurd that the most functional and successful part of the city can be destroyed piece by piece, as is happening with the Cranker. Towers are suitable for dormitories and offices, but not for fun. They should be in dormitory or office zones and are completely incompatible with fun visitor zones. The government's own planning code is waging war on our most popular public spaces and threatens to kill off our city bit by bit.

26/04/2024

Clumsy State Planning rules put ALL our friendly human-scale hospitality precincts such as the East End under threat. Apart from taking out the Cranker, Roxy's etc, unbelievably this monster chops a big corner block off the East End! Send a message to government by coming to the rally!

15/04/2024

Letter to The Advertiser 11/04/2024

11/04/2024

Vibrant heart - The Advertiser 11/04/2024

Melbourne has Federation Square which is vibrant civic space day and night. Sydney City Council is buying up land opposite their town hall to create their own large civic space.

Meanwhile in Adelaide we seem to be in an alternative universe.

On the formerly run-down Festival Plaza we are getting a second huge tower on public land that should have been our own civic space.

Profound lack of ambition and cringe-worthy urban planning policies by government here and at the Crown and Anchor site are threatening to slowly turn once- visionary Adelaide into a cemetery.

Robert Farnan, North Adelaide

14/08/2023

Vital North Adelaide Inc are running an online raffle to attempt to raise the remaining $38,700 for a former resident who faced a $55,000 developer’s cost order as a result of bravely contesting the planning approval for the former Le Cornu site ($16,300 has been raised from donations).
The former resident was the owner of a single-storey cottage who was expecting City Council’s promised up-to 8-storey development but instead was to end up with three 14-16 level towers built just across her quite small street.
We hope you will support us wholeheartedly in this David and Goliath affair by buying a lot of tickets!
Please hurry though as this very special raffle of high quality glassware and ceramics at rafflelink.com.au/northad is drawn on 28th August 2023.

Vital North Adelaide Inc is residents, businesses and a network of planners, architects, and creatives, local and remote, with a vision for development that regenerates the street by respecting the famous North Adelaide Historic Zone on O'Connell St.

29/12/2022

This what civic imagination should look like in 2022! It uses the power of visitor attraction and not the simplistic options of increasing resident density and trying to fiddle the retail mix as the answer to re-generating a main-street !
Adelaide once applied this sort of thinking to its East End, Halifax depot, Leigh and Peel Streets and to the Central Market precinct to great success. Goodwood and Prospect main streets are other excellent examples.
Densification, wrongly zoned, threatens the natural attractiveness of Adelaide's human-scale visitor streets and, more seriously, the natural attractiveness of Adelaide itself as a destination.

NSW Planning Minister Rob Stokes wants to turn the state’s Central Business Districts into Central Social Districts with more al fresco dining to boost street activity and help local businesses.

23/10/2022

Our under pressure green belt:

A report has found Australia's cities are failing to live up to their much-celebrated reputation for 'liveability'.