He said the revolutionary underpasses had become frightening and the inner ring road had pushed working class Birmingham into the periphery of the city.
The centre of gay life in Sydney is Oxford Street, an inner-city Victorian thoroughfare where once tough, working-class pubs have been transformed into the rowdiest gay drinking places in the world.
Yet the mayor realises where the proof of the pudding lies: whether middle-class parents en masse will feel happy to send their children to inner-city schools.
But it has not cracked the problem of inner-city poverty, nor the biggest social question of the age: how can an excluded social class find its way into the mainstream?