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Introduction
By mid-19th century, the European city in its colonial guise was unravelling and taking on a dawning informality in urban disposition. The repository of urban memory in this new context was vested in the imaginations of a few individuals charged with the task of founding and documenting the new cities. As a consequence, the city ceased to bear the marks of collective identity. A less hierarchical urban patterning resulted from the domination of commercial forces over institutional forces particularly in Australia and New Zealand. The British government by 1840 was not inclined to enforce territorial interests with a large and expensive military and naval presence, giving rise to a laissez faire attitude to urban development, which marked the beginning of the colonial free market city.
This process has some resonance with the work of Ellen Whittemore (1999) who discusses changes in the representation of the city over 300 years from Rome to Los Angeles. The Nolli plan of Rome represented the city as an object, dense and solid, as if hewn out of rock. In contemporary Los Angeles only public buildings are accorded an object status, with the context (a suburban blanket) disappearing. This de-materialisation of the block had begun in Nolli's day with a 'working version' of the famous plan, where the buildings of the figure/ground are not rendered as a continuous black mass, but show property boundaries for the calculation of tax (Whittemore, 1999, p. 86).
Whittemore further argues that the city has been portrayed in two distinct ways. The first was in figure/ground methodologies where the city is represented as a single continuous (black) object with 'ground' (white) being the voids of streets and squares. The second was the practice of 18th century cartographers who showed the field as an array of 'information bytes' that described both a physical topographical reality and a legally constructed pattern of urban relationships. Whittemore's argument highlights the overlooked interstices of modern suburbia, but her theoretical approach is useful as a basis for the interrogation of the representational conventions and intentions of survey plans in 19th century Australasia, and how these provide clues that the dense collective city of the Europe is beginning to be replaced by the physically discontinuous patterning of individual enterprise and ownership.