Are local places important? How can assessors or friends gauge the significance of a place to people who may scarcely realise its value to them until that place is threatened? How, when a loved place is destroyed, should dispossessed people receive emotional support?

The concrete road which destroyed west Beecroft is a phenomenon of creeping international sameness, the victory of ‘universal civilisation, symbolised by the serpentine freeway and the free-standing high-rise office tower, over locally inflected culture’. The bulldozer has been described as the ‘agent of tabula rasa modernization, the technocratic gesture aspiring to a condition of absolute placelessness’. We have watched this tendency of Euro-American culture towards delocalising and devaluing the built landscape in many places: in eighteenthcentury Britain, at Adaminaby, Jindabyne, Cribb Island, Yallourn, Weetangerra, Goulburn, Darwin and now Beecroft. For several decades scholars have pondered the implications of the continued draining of particularity from regions and cultures and even from nations. Are we doomed to a uniform ‘megalopolis’, as one critic put it, proliferating until internationally inspired planners reduce cities to ‘little more than the allocation of land use and logistics of distribution?’

Not only cities suffer from creeping sameness, so do towns and suburbs. Cities like Darwin and Sydney can dominate as well as be dominated. We have seen bodies like the Sydney and Melbourne City Councils destroying Surry Hills and Carlton.