Gordon Monro — Bellmorn (any resemblance is purely coincidental)

Imagine a city with only two rules:

• If a road gets congested, they build a bigger road.
• Developers can build whatever they like, wherever they like.

That's Bellmorn.

Most Australians spend their lives in cities, and cities shape our lives. Some 78% of us live in cities with over 100,000 people. I am a case in point: I now live in Ballarat, which currently has about 119,000 people, and it is the smallest of the four Australian cities I have lived in.

Real cities are shaped partly by individual decisions and partly by plans generated by authorities at the different levels of government. The Bellmorn installation exhibits five stages of development of a simulated city whose evolution is shaped entirely by individual decisions.

In Bellmorn someone looking to set up a business chooses the best location they can afford; an employee looking for somewhere to live chooses the best place they can afford, taking into account commuting time. Developers are not bound by planning restrictions or height limits. Their only constraint is profit: they will build whatever achieves the maximum return on their investment.

Even Bellmorn's road builders follow the “desire lines” idea: see where the people are trying to go (signalled by a congested road) and enlarge the road. So the road builders do not follow any central plans either.

The installation is an experiment to see how such a framework would play out. It focuses on traffic, and in particular the morning commute to work. The simulation is carried out by a computer program written by the artist.

Contents of the installation

The exhibition is essentially all one work, so I consider it an installation.

The installation shows five stages of the city:

1. Early days
2. Growing fast
3. Boom town!
4. Major city
5. Gridlock

For each stage of the city, the installation shows a large 3D image, a 2D map of the city at that stage, and four smaller maps, showing the suburbs in the city, the socio-economic status by suburb, the average commuting time by suburb, and the slowest commute. In addition there are brief statements from businesses and residents about moving in and finding a place to live. And there are two advertising corflutes and some pseudo-press clippings about Bellmorn.

Link to a PDF of all the "press cuttings" about Bellmorn (1.2 MByte).

Some more images to come.