Cities abhor a vacuum, so why create one?
- Author:
- Michael Gormly
- Posted:
- Thursday, 2 July 2009
EDITORIAL
The problem with Canberra is that, while it’s all very clean and orderly, it seems every tree is planted exactly where a public servant imagined a tree would ‘look nice’. When you get lost in its circular sameness you then can’t find anyone on the lifeless streets to ask for directions. It’s always a relief to get out of the uniform, planned sterility into anarchic Queanbeyan where a pub looks like a pub, a shop like a shop and a rich clutter of signage adorns sheltering awnings beneath which actual people move about.
The Canberra syndrome is enveloping Sydney, typified by plans for a big square opposite Town Hall covering a metro station – a folly upon a disaster.
No doubt the artist’s impression of the empty Square (pictured) looks good to the planner who planned it, and perhaps to North Korea’s Finance Minister, but in practice it flouts basic principles of healthy urban dynamics. Cities, like nature, abhor a vacuum. But in cities nothing comes rushing in to fill it.
What makes cities busy, safe, interesting and prosperous is human activity, not the impositions of town planners. Jane Jacobs wrote the definitive book on this in 1961. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she explains how all the best streets in her city enjoyed mixed uses of businesses, residents, schools, bars, small factories and the like, operating by day and by night.
She observed all of it interacting and sublimating into a community. More variety and activity created more complex people connections which made stronger community and safer streets, because more people were on them and anonymity, that precondition for crime, was less likely. Regulation created the opposite of this – what evolves is usually more functional than what is imposed. The less town planning and regulation, the more diversity appeared and the more reason people had to go out and take a walk. “People travel to difference, not sameness,” Jacobs wrote.
She explicitly warned against ‘civic precincts’, which essentially close at 5pm after which they become empty, boring and dangerous.
While one new square won’t by itself kill Sydney’s centre, demolishing a thriving multi-level block of businesses to build an empty granite square swept by wind, sun and rain can only push things in that direction.
Worse, this city’s proscription of almost all street activity will aggravate the effect. It is illegal to paint a portrait on Sydney’s streets. Busking is licensed and time-limited. Selling anything is ‘bad’, and even several of the identical kiosks dotted around the city are closed because the authorities charge too much rent and treat their tenants with bureaucratic inflexibility. Without such everyday activities a square will not generate life.
We should keep the economic hub that now thrives there – a three-level Woolworths where you can still get a fresh roll at lunch for $3.50, a pub to provide succour for foot-weary people, and a mix of businesses all providing services, jobs and street life in an attractive Art Deco building, surrounded by wide footpaths which are conveniently sheltered with awnings. That agglomeration evolved to serve the needs of people, whereas Town Hall Square would be merely the self-aggrandising vision of a self-referencing council with too much cash.
While ‘open space’ is accorded a kind of divinity in the planning bureaucracies, in Sydney open space risks becoming little more than an exposed void that people hurry across on their way to somewhere else. Australians don’t have the promenade culture of Barcelona with its Rambla, or Bogotá with its Greenway, so the notion of ‘build it and they will come’ will not necessarily apply.
If the proposed George St greenway is ever built, we won’t need the new square. We already have St Andrew’s Square and Hyde Park is close by – plenty of places to sit and eat lunch.
A greenway served by an extended light rail system is a good idea because it would replace cars and bitumen with trees and pedestrians. Town Hall Square on the other hand would sacrifice a thriving economic hub in favour of a sterile void.
Putting a metro station there would be another aggravation, especially given predictions the ghost metro will run 87% empty for some time. The mini-metro is another absurdly expensive, unneeded folly and it can only conflict with the far cheaper and more effective extended light rail system we really need.
Lord Mayor Clover Moore knows this – her Council and other experts have done the studies and she has spruiked light rail for years. So to see her now supporting the Metro as a way to fast-track an empty monument is disappointing. It also compromises her declared support for retention of the beautiful old terraces on Union Square which the Metro wants to devour for use as a construction site, along with a block of Martin Place and undisclosed alterations to heritage areas of Central Station.
by Michael Gormly
Council's plan for Town Hall Square -- impressive perhaps but economically dead.
July 4th, 2009 @ 2:36 pm
Some good points Michael – especially about high lively cities function. I think politicians like big empty spaces like this forlorn “city square” because they see themselves addressing huge rallies there, all of their political supporters of course!
I have been to such stirring functions, but not in Australia. The best was in La Paz, Bolivia, with 50,000 people and competing military bands playing discordant mariachi music, and multiple sound systems with politicians all speaking at once. It was amazing.
But that’s not our culture. In Sydney the best we can manage (and it was pretty good) was the rally in Union square to protest the Metro station site today (July 4). There were about 500 people, all well behaved – except a couple of the politicians like Jamie Parker and Barry O’Farrell, determined to highjack the event. And the convener of course – who was guilty of at least one bad joke.
But seriously, it was a successful rally. We can only pray for a positive outcome.
One of the signature gatherers was at pains to point out me that they were NOT opposed to public transport or The Metro. Good, neither am I. She explained that my signature did not mean that I was endorsing the Liberal Party, the nay-sayers who oppose EVERYTHING and would take us back to the horse and cart like Sylvia Hale, or opportunists like the Mayor of Leichhardt.
But there is confusion in the position City News is taking. With your continued opposition to the Metro, you are in danger of throwing the baby out with the bath water. Clover Moore is supporting it because she knows that once a more extensive system is operating, it will make the city and livelier, more vibrant and sustainable place. Just as the New York subway does to the city Jane Jacobs was writing about, all those years ago.
Thats the city of our dreams. I hope its City News’ too.
July 6th, 2009 @ 8:36 am
Good points too, Russell. But the cbd metro is one baby that needs to be thrown out. Even if its big brother to Parramatta is built, it still means that countless billions the state does not have will be blown on routes that duplicate existing PT routes. That means there will be no money to build the routes we do need in Sydney, ie the north- and south-west heavy rail links, ideally in conjunction with whole-city transport plans such as those designed by Gary Glazebrook and Ron Christie.
The current metro ‘plan’ leaves Sydney in the grip of the car and condemned to a future of ever more motorways, greenhouse pollution and congestion with its downward economic consequences.
Transport should go where the development is, and the need for transport. For heaven’s sake you can walk from Rozelle to Central and it’s a snap on a bike. But seriously, how many need to travel that route? An extended light rail would do the job for a small fraction of the price. The Metro also means all train travellers from the west have to change at Central from where there is no room for their trains to back out for the return trip. This would effectively decommission the City Circle. Even apart from the damage to the city while they build it, the plan is a case of dumb and dumber and should be scrapped.