Abstract
When one ventures into the CBD of Adelaide, South Australia, he or she might be surprised to find snuggled in one of its quiet corners, set back from the hubbub of the street, Australia’s first inner city eco-community. Situated in the CBD’s south west quarter, Christie Walk is a medium to high density eco-housing development comprising 27 dwellings on 2000 m2 of land (around three average residential blocks). It is a development which achieved a number of firsts: Australia’s first inner city eco-community; and the first urban development to build with straw bale. In addition to considering the history and motivations for Christie Walk’s construction, and the trials and tribulations of undertaking this participatory ecological development, this case study aims to map its social and ecological characteristics.
The UEA vision is the transformation of conventional cities into Ecological Cities—vibrant, equitable, socially supportive, ecologically sustaining and economically viable communities.
Urban Ecology Australia (For more on UEA, see www.urbanecology.org.au).
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- 1.
Richard Register would be the first to use the term ‘Eco−city’ in his book Ecocity Berkeley (1987). The group Urban Ecology would later become Ecocity Builders.
- 2.
The Halifax project was named after the street, Halifax Street, on which the development was to take place.
- 3.
See Downton (2009, pp. 228–52) for a detailed examination of HEP.
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Cooper, L., Baer, H.A. (2019). Christie Walk: An Urban Eco-community in an Increasingly Hot City. In: Urban Eco-Communities in Australia. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1168-0_5
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