The city is conceived of radial opposites
Tramlines as sutures binding the city together
I illustrated the previous piece about Brisbane’s traffic systems with a quote from the lauded local writer David Malouf. He suggests that the city’s trams were a part of an imagined urban infrastructure, resonating long after their demise, as if citizens still perceived the city to be marked up with ghosted tramlines.
“The city is conceived of in the minds of its citizens in terms of radial opposites that allow them to establish limits, and these are the old tram termini: Ascot/Balmoral, Clayfield/Salisbury, Toowong/The Grange, West End/New Farm Park, to mention only a few; and this sense of radial opposites has persisted, though the actual tramlines have long since been replaced with ‘invisible’ (as it were) bus routes. The old tramline system is now the invisible principle that holds the city together and gives it a shape in people’s minds.” [David Malouf, ‘A First Place: The Mapping of the World’, Southerly, vol.45, no.1, 1985. Found in The Third Metropolis by William Hatherell]
I decided to draw this out, interested as to how that might be rendered. Taking a poetic rather than literal interpretation of the tram lines, as seemed appropriate to Malouf’s idea, those radial opposites across Brisbane can be imagined like this:
