Walking and performing 'the city' : a Melbourne chronicle

Perhaps it's the fear that Richard Sennett and Zygmunt Bauman are right that drives the City of Melbourne to host a regular International Arts Festival in which all and sundry (and especially those who can't afford the ticket prices of the undercover shows) are enticed out on to the streets of the central city with the offer of free entertamment - street theater, food stalls, fireworks, and displays. The tinted glass is wound down, automobiles, security locks and burglar alarms abandoned, respectabies and 'deviants' intermix and the luxuriously wide (automobile, or was it cart, determined) streets of Bauman's Melbourne are reclaimed and enlivened becoming home, for a brief few weeks, to flaneurs and flaneuses momentarily released from their otherwise largely suburban experience.