Meet You At The Town Hall Steps
Guy from Polemica has wrapped up the Danish Solution to Sydney’s CBD ‘problems’.
Seeing how other countries have managed their urban areas has provided quite a bit of insight into what we do well in Australia, and what we don’t do so well.
I’d argue that the interpretation of Sydney’s geography suffers from constant comparison to European capitals, but that’s just me and my cultural cringe. Most of the European capitals we (and by ‘we’ I mean Paul Keating) idolise did get a bit of a head start in urban revitalisation. Paris had its communards and Prussians, Berlin the USAAF and Red Army. I admit that I wouldn’t mind directing Marshals Konev and Rokossovskiy to revitalise bits of Sydney, but would Elizabeth Farrelly enjoy the noise of rocket artillery flattening the Eastern Suburbs quite as much? Probably not.
I’ll just have to put that amphibious assault on Cronulla into a mental file marked ‘someday’.
The Herald seems to be in favour of the Town-Hall-Steps-Plus plan to bulldoze Woollies, but I’ll be interested to see how their tune changes when it’s inevitably used by gangly, frumpy teenagers to frump and gangle conspicuously, to chat each other up, try to smoke cigarettes without looking like they’re trying to smoke cigarettes, and make uncomfortable the tasteful baby boomers trying to enjoy a cosmopolitan inner city. Communication, bourgeois in black suit to future-bourgeois in black t-shirt: “Do you mind not congregating in large noisy groups? You’re impeding the public!”
Jahn Gehl himself runs a fairly typical architect’s argument about revitalising Sydney’s centre:
All great cities have a heart. They attract people to their centres - not just to work and to live, but to shop or meet people, to dine, to visit a library or a gallery, to be part of the life of their city.
I’m not sure how Sydney rates as ‘great’ on this scale. We’ve certainly got a very large number of suburban centres where these functions are either healthy or dysfunctional, so its suburbs might rate as ‘great’ or ‘kinda shit’, depending on the quality of the dodgy Thai. The CBD doesn’t really act as a city centre in a functional way, it’s been a business park on steroids since the slum purges of the 1930s. Geographical happenstance doesn’t make for useful centralism, even if the emos do flock like pigeons to sit on the sandstone bits of it.
Seriously, I’m all in favour of Europeanising the Sydney CBD. Let’s start with rent control and viciously protectionist tenant rights legislation, allowing for long-term (ie. ten year) tradeable residential strata leases. And then we can move the fight to roll back landlord property rights to the rest of the city.
Sydney has a heart, yes, a black greedy one fixated on getting the real estate agent to squeeze that $10 more in rent a week out of its suburban tenants, and we should rip that unholy organ out of its chest, and hold it dripping in front of its dying face. Let’s start with a thoroughly Continental approach to revitalisation of geographical space: land reform.
Guy wrote:
Like all somewhat radical proposals that don’t entail improvements for motorists, in all likelihood this one will end up heading for the dustbin.
And on land reform, you are of course correct. I also do like the “business park on steroids” synopsis. It is shamefully very much on the money.
arleeshar wrote:
Do you know, Liam, I think you should put these sentiments into a letter to Clover Moore and see what happens.
liam wrote:
Heh.
frankenreagan wrote:
You should put this in a letter. I’ve found that Councillor Moore MP’s office will respond to letters no matter how far-fetched the subject matter. When you build a career out of pretending to be everything to everyone you have to engage with this sort of thing.
liam wrote:
Far-fetched, frankenreagan?
I’m not sure you realise quite how comically eagerly I wish for a bit of fiery urban renewal. When I see crushed buildings, yuppies with wheelbarrows, flak jacketed bomb squads hunting for UXO in the ruins of Surry Hills and Bondi Junction, and when you see the Domain section of the SMH advertising the corner on the fashionable scorched-earth market, you’ll know that I’ve found happiness and gone to play with matches in Hell with the pétroleuses.
And I’m quite sure that the Lord Mayor would draw a line in the compassionate, progressive, articulate sand at canvassing my vote. There are standards even for community Independents, after all.
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