Same Old New World Cities
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Politics, Urban Planning, Cities, Australia, Strategic Design

Same Old New World Cities

Or, the missing vision for Australian cities. Or, asking the right questions in the first place.

The Australian Commonwealth government’s Major Cities Unit recently released a National Urban Policy discussion paper. (Ed. This piece was first published at cityofsound.com on 20 April 2011. The Government’s Major Cities Unit no longer exists.)

I was part of Arup’s formal response, but I was also asked to write an individual response by Justine Clark, for Architecture Australia. That short AA piece was drawn from my original essay, posted below for the first time.

Even if you don’t know your Woolloomooloos from your Dandenongs, the essay’s core points may be applicable elsewhere to varying degrees. By way of a recommendation, an experienced Australian architect suggested that the essay has probably managed to “offend most of the people working in the urban planning space” here, and “with good reason”, he added. So there’s a reasonable chance it might at least offend people elsewhere too.

Offending people wasn’t the intention, though. As you’ll see from what follows I didn’t think much of the discussion paper, but I tried to offer a constructive critique nonetheless, outlining some recent thinking about ‘dealing with’ cities.

In this, I’m asking what is the value of using the traditional tools, processes and sensibilities of architecture, urban planning and related disciplines, to the processes and practices of producing contemporary cities?

In particular, I’m trying to focus on the idea of ‘identifying the right questions’, rather than letting discipline-based (un)thinking define answers to what may be the wrong questions. As usual, I owe a debt to Cedric Price there.

In spirit, it follows the various and ongoing discussions I’ve had with Bryan Boyer, Rory Hyde, the UTS crowd and various colleagues at Arup, Gerard Reinmuth, Tim Horton, Justin McGuirk, Jane-Frances Kelly, Mimi Zeiger and several others, as well as drawing from recent project work in Helsinki, Melbourne and Adelaide.

And in particular, reflecting on a project I’ve been conducting in the Melbourne suburb of Knox; an urban renewal programme centred on fusing new models of manufacturing and urbanism. There, the clients Ingo Kumic, Mark Holdsworth, and Kim Rawlings have shaped my thinking around assessing the primary drivers in cities, and attempting to create urban conditions rather than urban form.

It also follows some questions I outlined in my recent critique of Steven Holl’s Linked Hybrid in Beijing, or an earlier review of Sydney’s urban strategy, as well as my response to being caught up in the Brisbane floods.

It’s also partly the summation of almost a year’s worth of public speaking, particularly around the idea of ‘Big Australia’. This storm-in-a-policy-teacup emerged when population growth figures were announced by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, pointing to an Australian population of around 35 million people within the next 30 years or so. (Australia’s population is currently 22 million people.)

The national conversation, or what passes for it in Australia, rapidly polarised into ‘Small Australia’ and ‘Big Australia’ camps. There were some unlikely alignments here, but most were focusing on the abstract idea of a number—should it be 25 million people? 35 million? 45 million?—rather than any sense of what kind of Australia we want?

And so I would point out that the number itself doesn’t matter. In other words, a Big Australia does not necessarily imply a Big Social Breakdown, given that Germany can fit 81m people into 357,000 km², an area that easily fits more than a couple times over into the state of New South Wales alone (809,000 km²). And Germany manages that with a perfectly high standard of living. It just requires thinking through, and new approaches to planning. (Admittedly, the poor soil quality and high temperature levels of much of NSW means you wouldn’t actually want to inhabit it in the same way that Germany can be, but still.)

Equally, however, a Small Australia of 22 million could choose to punch well above its weight, as the Nordic Region, with roughly the same population base, demonstrates.

This is not to suggest that Australia should try to emulate Germany or the Nordics. Australia is an increasingly Asian country with its own traditions. But both analogies indicate qualitative possibilities.

So again, the question isn’’t what number of people should live in Australia, but instead what kind of country do we want? In other words, what is Australia for? Addressing that question would enable us to plan effectively.

And when it comes to Australian cities, the question becomes: what do we want Australian cities to be? That question is not stated, and so is not answered, in the National Urban Policy discussion paper.

At core, I’m suggesting that, without considering these and other fundamental strategic questions, few if any approaches to planning and designing cities can work, certainly on any meaningful, systematic scale.

In Australia, it’s sometimes difficult to tell, until you look at the numbers, that things are not working. At first glance what could possibly be wrong with these cities? The sun is shining, the food and drink is good, people seem well-fed, well-housed, well-educated, and well-off, and the cities themselves are often beautifully-sited amidst stunning terrain. (Hence their high-placing in urban quality of life surveys, alongside Canadian and middle-European cities. It’s of course worth noting that most of these rankings are often designed with a highly-specific agenda and judged by non-residents, and so they bear little relation to actual life in the cities in question.)

What do we want Australian cities to be?

Equally, the economy, again on the surface, is outperforming much of the ‘Western developed’ nations. Or ‘over-developed nations’, as some might say. Powered by an unprecedented resources boom, it’s not even in full gear yet apparently. But even The (laissez-faire) Economist recently outlined the dangers in not being able to strategically take advantage of this boom, suggesting a sovereign wealth fund. I’d wholeheartedly endorse this, alongside various strategic taxation measures, but also argue for an innovation-focused fund in particular, after the Finnish SITRA or Norway model perhaps. As the Future Fund indicates, it’s not enough just to grow money, but it’s necessary to direct it strategically too. (Ed. Written almost a decade after this, here’s a good piece outlining what such taxation could have brought into Australia, to what end.)

Defensive structures being built in Sydney’s western suburbs

However, in a bit of Sydney that doesn’t look like the gleaming harbourside suburbs — which is to say, the bulk of Sydney — some people are taking architecture into their own hands and creating self-defence structures which presumably would not look out of place in Tripoli or Abidjan about now. This is one kind of warning light on the dashboard, and albeit highly unrepresentative, it is at least viscerally memorable.

But there are numerous others less obvious but perhaps even more substantial issues, well-known in Australian urban planning, architecture, and policy circles. They revolve essentially around climate change, poor health, extremely high carbon footprint, ageing population, car- and oil-dependency, largest, most over-priced and increasingly unaffordable housing in the world, monopolised retail sectors, crumbling infrastructure, diminished surrounding food basins with nutrient-poor soil, falling productivity, resources-dependent economic base, rising income inequality and so on.

And yet these cities and this culture often do work, in the almost effortless, small, quotidian sense as well as through the occasional grand gesture. I’ve learnt as much about what makes good cities tick from Australian cities as anywhere else. There’s the paradox. And a national urban policy requires an appetite to engage with the everyday complexity of this position.

So while there’s a discomfort in addressing a strategic question or national conversation in a culture predisposed to letting these things just emerge, for better or worse, my response is written with this core thought in mind: can we pull focus on the question of what cities are, and on how they are produced, and so create better patterns for urban development, and ultimately, a better Australia, punching above its weight rather than below it?

And within all this, given the context of AA, I’m trying to suggest a repositioning of architecture and other design disciplines, moving with strategic, creative influence, rather than the increasingly marginalised, beleaguered position it’s currently occupying.

It’s a big question, and this is in no way an answer, but this essay is in the spirit of asking the right questions in the first place. Comments are more than welcome.

(Ed. This is the original, previously unpublished version of the essay. A snappier version was published in the Architecture Australia.)