Talking Heads: “Gentrification has done more harm than good”

“Gentrification has done more harm than good”

MICHAEL GORMLY

There’s nothing wrong with gentrification. Middleclass people moving into mixed areas can preserve heritage and influence out-of-touch authorities. Yes, we push up prices but we have to live somewhere. We could be part of a rich diversity.

The damage comes when we start regulating “unsuitable” people and activities out of sight or out of our area: the NIMBY syndrome.

Jane Jacobs, fêted thinker on urban dynamics, wrote: “People travel to difference, not sameness.” People travelling on foot around a city was key to her recipe for strong community ‘ eyes on the street make safer streets while more people connect.

But if Glebe looks pretty much the same as Redfern, Kings Cross and the CBD, why walk over to have a look’ If designed monoculture has killed life and colour on the street, why go out at all’

An older local said to me in the pub: “Sydney used to be a place where you could arrive broke and make a quid.” He sold watches on the street in Kings Cross, swapping witticisms with the nearby fortune-teller. Now all that is banned and he exists on the pension, drinking only during happy hours.

These days the only people on Sydney’s wide granite footpaths hurry from point to point, eyes downcast. It’s illegal to paint portraits publicly (it’s “clutter”, you see). Buskers are squelched ‘ they even tried to ban them selling their cds (more clutter). Council tears down our ‘Lost Dog’ pole posters within minutes and paints over world-class stencil art commissioned by the property owner.

Businesses are urged not to use colour in their signage (seriously).

Every renovated building is painted dark grey, a non-colour stealing light from the street. Every bar is grey or brown. You can’t get a new venue approved unless you promise it will be “up-market”. New ‘temperance unions’ rail against our party precincts.

We are still driven by cultural cringe, trying to make the city impressive rather than welcoming.

So Sydney bores tourists after about three days, our brains are draining overseas and all my interesting friends are moving away. We suffer, in the savage words of Richard W. McNab, “a medium-roasted mediocrity.”

Michael Gormly is a writer, photographer and the publisher of kingscrosstimes.blogspot.com

ANDREW WOODHOUSE

MY 20-volume Oxford Dictionary defines gentrification as rendering urban areas middle-class. Well may she say ‘rendering’ because nothing can save us from over-rendered, over-wrought Sydney. Maintain the rage.

First fluted in 1964 by urban Marxists, gentrification means butchering our noble heritage for evermore rendered, brick veneer-eal disease, pointy apartments. Developers name their leach-like, soul-sucking structures after our lost heritage: Jenner, Potts Point, with its proposed, humped ‘barn’ add-on, Tresco, Elizabeth Bay’s DA for a kitsch balcony and Eveleigh railway yards, a whole new vanilla society, are examples. Developers worship erections.

Gentrification is location, location, location. Nothing’s better for the inside of the great ‘Middle-Class’ than the outside of a house. M-Cs have homogenised homes and live to eat while lower classes just eat to live. They’re a muddling-class taking the middle course. Theirs isn’t suburbia: it’s disturbia, lusting after a room with a view and a womb with a view. Yet they’ve been responsible for more social revolutions than my CD player. The Christian religious revolution, the American, French and industrial revolutions, the 1808 Rum Rebellion and the 1960s sexual revolution, all driven by M-C power, prestige and purses.

Now for an urban renaissance.

I want a new matrix. Gentrification is out. Urban matrification is in: more layers of interest than a lasagna, a crazy-quilt of discontinuities and more imagineering.

Like Oliver Twist, I want more please: more allegrettos and human musical mosaics making patterns on larger, greener landscapes, creating tangible, vivified communities like a huge chess board flung onto the earth with differently moving parts creating new games of life.

I want more urban texture than a silk, gold-threaded persian carpet and no kitsch, cloned designs, just human-scale architecture.

No more slum landlords, street sex, drugs, doof-doof cars, screaming pubs/clubs, drive-by shootings, homophobia, medically assisted injecting centres, wet or moist centres or other white-arm-sling mentalities. A community shouldn’t be sacrificed on the high altar of others’ health issues: treat causes, not symptoms instead.

More urban zest and joi de vivre please.

M-Cs will lose nothing apart from urban matrification apart from their aitches.

We’ll be happier and healthier.

Andrew Woodhouse is a Potts Point local resident and urban environmentalist