In the first decade of 2000 I revisited Bowden and walked around this old industrial suburb including along the Torrens River where I used to walk Fichte, the standard poodle. It was good to see that Torrens River in Bonython Park near the West Terrace/Port Rd corner had been cleaned up. Bowden-Brompton was a brownfield site was to become Bowden Village in 2008, when the state government purchased both the old Clipsal factory site and the Brompton Gasworks site.

My return was to briefly reconnect to the old Bowden-Brompton that I knew before it disappeared with the forthcoming urban redevelopment of residential apartments and terrace homes.

The suburb was looking even more tacky and run down that I remembered it. The shops, factories and the Greek community centre were in the process of closing down, and there were less people on the streets. It was a suburb in transition and so some of the buildings of the old industrial Bowden that I knew were still standing.

I was pleased to see how the street trees had grown since the late 1980s. It was a struggle to plant them as the old Hindmarsh Council was opposed to street trees, and it’s staff would pull them out if residents planted them to soften the industrial harshness of the street.

Bowden’s redevelopment was an example of the shift to a post-industrial society–ie., a a transition from a manufacturing-based economy to a service-based economy, in which knowledge production and brain power override the importance of industrial production and machine power in the economy with this process being shaped by “intellectual technologies” such as computers and new telecommunications. The world wide web or internet had emerged in the mid-late 1990s and social media took off somewhat later, in the second half of the first decade of this century.We are in a networked socity.

Hence the idea of the network society that centres on knowledge generation, information processing, and symbol communication. The network society is global, it is based on global networks and the rise of the network society is a specific type of social structure and a new historical terrain. We are in a networked society.