Review
We are at a point in our evolution as a nation where a paradigm shift is needed in how we model our urban environments. Household sizes are shrinking and aging, the relationships between work and habitation are less structured with proximity more highly valued as a consequence, and our consumption of both renewable and non-renewable resources continues at great pace and at great cost to our environmental future. Car trips have doubled in twenty years and our trips are on average longer, our air quality in the two largest cities remains dangerous to health on more than 10 days per year, and our suburbs are becoming more demographically homogenous with the privileged occupying those areas with access to good services, public transport, schools and employment opportunities while others become more marginalised.
As Paul Keating, one of the few national leaders to comment on the emerging crisis, noted in 1991, “In a vast country where the notion of limitless space has prevailed, the policy has been to fill it up, no matter how inefficient, no matter how wasteful, no matter how callous to those, usually young and low income families, destined to live at the urban frontier”. Our approach, Keating said, “has invariably been to provide the cheapest block of virgin land wherever it can be located regardless of efficiency and social amenity or the consequences for our environment. In Australia, where we occupy a continent, our cities are now testing the limits of our geography and topography. The unthinkable is starting to be thought. In some places we are running out of space.” ›› These private-sector delivery models, utilised across the nation, have struggled to find the mechanisms by which they might respond to these new imperatives. Their best results have been characterised by solutions targeting wealthier, narrowly defined demographic groups. New Urbanist-themed ostentatious enclaves, underpinned by resort-style golf courses, have lured baby boomers around the country with great success. In Victoria, the private delivery system has demonstrated a preparedness to invest in design, environmental initiatives, security and the needs of the aging, yet the results remain largely the province of the wealthy, healthy and childless and are rarely able to successfully deliver integrated services and communities.
The battle, though, is greater than simply a matter of urban mix. More intrinsic is a need to win the hearts and minds of the population. Peter Bowtell’s contribution to Urban Solutions, “The Need for Human Re-engineering”, outlines the challenge and the imperative. The twentieth century has seen large population movements from rural to urban areas, with Australia typical of this trend. Urban centres are now home to 75% of our population. In first-world countries, this statistic compares with just over 25% of the population in 1900. These cities are now the major consumers of our planet’s resources.
Lesser-developed nations are now experiencing these same urbanisation pressures.
With 41% of their current population living in urban communities, time is running out to share the lessons learnt from our development and assist others to avoid similar cycles of waste, resource depletion and pollution. Major changes are needed in respect to investment, expectations, and cultural values. For Bowtell, changing expectations of how we conduct our lives is fundamental to the delivery of sustainable outcomes in the built environment.We have to be prepared to interact with our environment, becoming an active participant rather than a passive accomplice.
Discernable conflicts are emerging between the need for change to meet these new needs, and the desire to preserve the post-war familiar and known methods of urban development and expression. The societal values ascribed to life in the suburbs and its attached family and wealth creation attributions have been a century in the making and will not easily be altered. The status ascribed to the big car, the big block, the big house and the air-conditioned office fiercely defend the class and cultural systems that underpin them. Similarly, private entrepreneurship that, for many years, has reliably delivered a predictable product is being challenged by the increasing needs of our cities to work with collective purpose. The case exists, as never before, for design and policy leadership.We need to articulate the need to repropose the future city in sustainable terms and we need to define what Eli Giannini describes as the “still unexplored poetic potential in the city’s present form to connect significant new interventions to the existing history, make up and legend of our cities”.
In our search for relevant models, much can be learnt from the sediment and armature left by our predecessors. Leon van Schaik, in his 1989 essay “Code City 89:1”, suggests that Victorian cities give us “the emblems around which we could write our collective history”, while early towns contributed to our nation building through their “sheer urbanist ambitions”. For Urban Solutions contributor Ian McDougall, an important attribute of these early cities is a kind of metropolitanism found not only in International Modernism but also attributable to Australian city life before 1920. Both the Australian state capitals and the regional cities of the late nineteenth century contained a model of city life that, as he says, been forgotten as legitimately ours. McDougall suggests that these beginnings contained, “the potential for an urban and cultural existence, sustained through a level of density far above that which is provided in the suburban donut of our cities”. This intensity enlivened the public realm, and ensured that the public institutions and spaces were well patronised.
For other contributors, notably Helen Gibson, Stuart Niven and Michael Keniger, there is a collective imperative to redefine the city on more intense lines. They see the re-emergent, “back-to-the future” role and experience of street, square, park, public institution and a range of new and hybrid typologies and relationships as essential to the spiritual heart and liveability of future cities. These connections, spaces, programs and places will, they believe, enable new codes to be written that articulate cities that describe the aspirations, concerns, needs and organisational structures of our contemporary civilisations. Chris Johnson sees new hybrid housing models emerging that combine proximity and environmental concerns with the contemporary concerns for space, privacy and identity.
So what has occurred in our cities that has resulted in such calls for reprogramming? Van Schaik laments that the planners and designers of our cities had, post-war, “caved into the atomists who no longer give us images around which we could write with civic and civilised action”. Peter Corrigan, in his paper “The Federal City”, is justifiably critical of a succession of national leaders who have progressively diminished the quality of our national symbols through, at best, neglect or, at worse, cynical statebased allegiances (depending on your perspective). Other contributors offer positive observations of our contemporary circumstance and see potential in its diversity for new interventions in the city.
Carey Lyon’s proposition, outlined in his paper “Unreal Estate”, seeks to extend and enrich our reading of the contemporary city.While acknowledging the change from the distinct compact geography of the industrial city, to a post-industrial state, he sees in the emergence of technology, mobility and global consciousness, a series of ephemeral forces that provide some source of future optimism for the Australian city where new forms of urban development based on development of new “place mythologies” will emerge. These ephemeral influences, he says, will require a reading of the city where virtual global communities replace tangible regional identifiers of place. Giannini’s paper sees the potential for architecture to continue its normative role in our cities. For her, this process, “dictates that we bring into play the existing physical context, heritage values and technology to connect them with the current cultural and political milieu”. She cites numerous successful contemporary interventions in the city – including the work of Edmond and Corrigan,Wood Marsh, LAB and ARM – as examples of tactics and methodologies that suggest that we still have the ability to write new architectural expressions of our time. With Nigel Bertram, she shares an interest in the continual, incremental, and often uncelebrated amendments, modifications, rearrangements and negotiations that collectively describe an important characteristic of the city. This fluidity is a key attribute of a dynamic metropolis and a demonstrable element of our cities’ evolution. Overseas examples put forward by French project manager and architect Giles de Mont Marin and by Bowtell, and the local example designed by Peter Williams for the former council depot in St Kilda, point to the continued value and potential that might be drawn from government intervention in the delivery of our cities. Their message is particularly relevant when we consider the diminishing levels of inclusion, the shrinking space for cultural institutions, and the optimisation of access to government services and cultural facilities proposed through market forces.
Clearly, Australian urbanism is at a crossroads with a series of prevailing paradigms being questioned via a number of emergent environmental, demographic, societal, and economic and workplace imperatives.
The strategic basis for our systems of planning and the audit of our environmental assets is pointing both to the gaps, and to the implications of inaction, between needs and enabling physical, environmental, cultural and economic environments. Yet, in some of this planning work there is a further potential threat. Graham Jahn and Geoffrey London warn of the excessive value placed on often-dubious neighbourhood personality, used with the negative aim of stasis or social exclusion. They also warn of models for New Urbanism that are written too narrowly, or written through an idealised fiction of our past, based on a cultural DNA of less diverse genesis. McDougall shares these concerns and points to the threat these powerful groups pose to our ability to respond to the new imperatives and opportunities – in particular our ability to maintain a rich diversity of cultural expression and the freedom to express concerns and circumstances of our time.
The influential groups that oppose change have an obvious underlying concern that we are unable to define a coherent language of expression by which we might write the story of the twenty-first century Australian city.
The contributors to Urban Solutions, however, suggest otherwise. Together they suggest that a collective vision and institutional and professional leadership is essential in determining appropriate responses to broad environmental, social justice, infrastructure, and public transport issues, in maintaining the quality of our civic spaces and cultural emblems, and in ensuring that our collective endeavours are optimised and that the benefits are fairly shared. However the contributors also acknowledge and celebrate the ability for a hybrid range of approaches to be utilised in writing our new stories. These stories arise from the values that come from the armature of earlier generations and the means by which incremental manoeuvres, dramatic new narratives and mythologies, careful incisions, brave interventions, degradation and obsolescence, experimentation, compassion, cultural inclusion and addition, new technologies can enrich our urban experiences and represent the aspirations of our contemporary circumstance.
Rob McGauran is a principal of McGauran Giannini Soon. He is editor of Urban Solutions: Propositions for the Future Australian City, the inaugural issue of the journal Take. Published by the RAIA, Urban Solutions is the outcome of the newly restructured R
References
Denise Elias, “Environmental Indicators for Metropolitan Melbourne”, Australian Institute of Urban Studies & City of Melbourne Bulletin 4, (September 2001). Elias notes that registered vehicles increased from one million in 1947/8 to 12 million in 1999.%br% Paul Keating, “Housing Choice and the Future Australian City”, an address to the ANU’s Public Policy Seminar, Canberra, 10th July, 1991.%br% Leon van Schaik, “Code City 89:1”, Transition (Summer/Autumn, 1989) pp. 98-104.
