The River is a Portal: unpacking Maitland Levee as a public space

Once a neglected part of the main street of a regional town, Maitland's award-winning Riverlink and the Levee Precinct now form a welcoming and sustainable drawcard for cultural and everyday life activities in the area and the wider Hunter region.

The Levee precinct, and its success, is made up of many parts, all of which connect to and honour the river itself.

In this storymap, you'll learn how the precinct's design cares for and creates an innovative public space by:
*transforming what was formerly the 'backstage' of the town's commercial infrastructure
*inviting people instead to engage with the riverbank as a 'frontstage' for civic life through new seating, shade and pedestrian areas
*activating a series of walking paths and street connections to Maitland CBD, especially the buildings and laneways that border the Levee along High Street, as well as High Street itself
*creating thoroughfare, utility, performance and shelter spaces within the Riverlink building
including public art closely articulated with the environmental history of the site

To better understand how these elements combine, this storymap is told in three parts:
1. a brief exploration of the history of flooding in settler-colonial West Maitland through visual and published archives of the nineteenth and early twentieth century;
2. an account of how, during the last part of the twentieth century, citizens, landscape architects and council planners created a new vision for regeneration of the main street, including selecting the site for a new Riverlink building; a project that would reconnect the CBD with the river;
3. a map tour based on interviews with one of the principal architects of the Riverlink building