“I’ve got a good
idea,” a friend said brightly the other day. “Why can’t Sydney
just not expand? Why not just throw a cordon around what we’ve got, and call it a day? Make a law that all new
development must be brownfield development, consolidating existing stock? Has
anyone ever thought of that? Ever tried it?”
Good question. And the answer is, yes. Yes, it has been thought of – for a
century or more. Yes it has been tried. And no, it has not succeeded. Why?
Because the requisite qualities – uncompromising vision, strong political
leadership, self-discipline and other-than-suburban values – are still seen as
threateningly un-Australian.
After decades of consciousness-raising about the environmental disaster
that is sprawl, there are respectable academics still arguing people should
have suburbia because they want it. Straight out of the total-indulgence manual
of modern parenting, you might think.
And that is the point. Sprawl-on-demand is not especially Australian.
Suburbia as we know it is the great American dream; fantasised by the British,
but realised by the Yanks. Suburbia, like total-indulgence parenting, is
another piece of cultural baggage.
Early on Australia
was in fact largely urban. The colonists, moving into a hostile land, quickly
circled the wagons. Cities always had a citadel role, and early Sydney was no exception.
For the first 100 or so years of white occupation we lived, broadly speaking,
in a huddle.
Profligate, it may have been, but not exactly sprawling. Not until 19th
century reformism did things start to change. City squalor, argued the
reformers, produced not only physical degeneracy but its moral equivalent as
well. Rickets and tuberculosis were the outward signs of a deeper moral malaise
exacerbated, even caused, by one thing: density.
Thus did the train, the car and the quarter-acre block become the tools of
righteousness in this divine crusade to scatter the urban poor into the
sunlight. Thus did the suburban movement acquire its largely spurious moral
glow.
Why spurious? Because beneath the so-called reform agenda lurked, then as
now, the primitive urge to grab land. From the viewpoint of the power elites,
dispersing the indigent of Chippendale and Surry Hills to the ‘burbs not only reduced the likelihood of
insurrection but also bulldozed a path for lucrative inner-city redevelopment.
All in the holy name of slum clearance.
Little has changed. The Carr Government’s
new “State Significant” listing of the Aboriginal land on the Block
runs precisely parallel: dispatch the disadvantaged to areas where they have
less access, less cohesion, less profile, less voice. Say it is for their own
good, then redevelop their land and reap the applause as a beneficent
slum-clearance landlord.
So nothing has changed. Government still talks public interest and acts
property interest.
Can sprawl be curbed? It is 50 years since a green belt was last mooted for
Sydney. The
then local government minister, Pat
Hills, began flogging it for housing before the planning ink was dry. These
days the political pressure for expansion is, if anything, greater, so an
absolute ban is unlikely to do the trick.
Which is where design quality comes in, since if it is market forces we are relying on, rather than
thou-shaltism, people will have to want denser living. They will have to see
its benefits: less traffic, cleaner air, cultural frisson, Manhattan vibrancy and (potentially)
fabulous, to-die-for, aesthetics. Only then will we feel free to jettison the
great American suburb from our cultural backpockets.
Fifty years ago we would have welcomed such change. Now the timidity of the
times is against us, but I’m siding
with Helen Keller: “Life is either a daring adventure, or it is
nothing.”
Elizabeth Farrelly is the Herald’s
architecture writer.