Cities abhor a vacuum, so why create one?
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
