The elephant in inner Sydney

EDITORIAL

Let’s drill a little deeper into the malaise besetting Sydney, as seen in letters columns week after week: you know, the ‘alcohol-fuelled violence’, residents vs revellers or if you prefer, yobs vs nobs stuff.

What if the 2am pub lockout idea, and similar attempts to regulate away cultural phenomena that annoy some people, are not treating the problem but merely prodding at symptoms’

This would explain why the same issues are perennial in Sydney’s history ‘ from the days of the temperance movement that kept pubs out of Annandale and created the 6 o’clock swill, to successive futile attempts by councils over the past 50 years to ‘clean up Kings Cross’. It might even explain to some extent the flight of gay culture west from Oxford Street, a shift which now threatens to move the Mardi Gras out to the Olympic Stadium.

Jane Jacobs, celebrated author of The death and life of great American cities, also inspired Richard Florida, author of the more recent The creative class. Both examine the role of diversity ‘ true diversity, not the empty slogan bandied about these days ‘ in creating culturally rich, safe, satisfying and economically thriving urban communities.

Jacobs began simply by observing what people did in her Greenwich Village street, back in 1961. It was a diverse street with shops, factories, dwellings, restaurants and pubs etc. This created a great deal of people-traffic at most times of the day and night, which in turn created a sense of safety because there were so many ‘eyes on the street’, and strengthened community because the many opportunities for interaction meant lots of people knew each other. Potential mischief-makers were constrained because they lacked the cloak of anonymity.

Jacobs also observed that other precincts were dead and dangerous. Civic precincts with a Town Hall, the library and similar buildings killed street life because everyone went home at 5pm. Big parks were a problem, in fact anywhere a well defined boundary divided precincts and prevented pedestrian cross-access. Such precincts were less lively along their boundaries, reducing safety and amenity. Worst of all were motorways cutting through communities and Jacobs became the first anti-freeway warrior.

The villains creating these problem areas were often Jacobs’ bête noir, town planners and their intrinsic top-down authoritarianism. You cannot ‘plan’ without control. And in her eyes, a heavily policed community was a failed community.

Segue to Sydney 2009 and we see a heavily policed and regulated community being forcibly reshaped by town planners. Funny that.

So how does this affect our amenity and the fabric of our communities’

Richard Florida’s research suggested the cultural diversity of a city related to the numbers and vitality of its ‘creative class’ and also its economic vitality. Simply, funky interesting well-paid people want to live in a funky interesting place. He cites Austin, Texas, whose civic authority makes T-shirts saying ‘Keep Austin Weird’ in sharp contrast to our council whose tees might say ‘Keep Sydney impressive, understated and respectable.’

Once you get past the holy trinity of the Bridge, harbour and Opera House, Sydney’s streets are not interesting. Shopkeepers are rigidly controlled in the number, size and positioning of their signage; where they can put things; and businesses are actively discouraged from using colour in their signage (yes, colour!). This hurts small unique owner-operated businesses more than big chains with a media budget, because their street signage is their only advertising. Skysigns on tall buildings are heavily restricted. Our streets are planned with the same trees-species and tree size, the same banners endlessly repeating, the same poles and the same paving in every so-called ‘village’. This is sold to us with the idea that a neat city is an orderly city. If this is so, whence the street mayhem upsetting the mild-mannered’ Clearly, upgrades are not the answer.

Fine stencil art, applied with the permission of owners, is eradicated within hours or days. Too much colour and form, you see. In fact our town planners use ‘uniformity’ as a prime rationale whenever they present a new upgrade to a stage-managed community meeting. This is the opposite of diversity.

So it’s very difficult for anyone to create a sense of place. You can’t arrange to meet someone at the little café on the corner with the art by Numskull or Mini Graff under the jacaranda tree because another tree species is decreed for that area and the artwork has been painted grey. No, we have to meet under the 235th smartpole banner at 568 Broadway. Got that’

Without unique places, the city becomes a little disorienting. Long uniform boulevards are also disorienting, says Jacobs, and we may not notice it but disorientation is one of the most disturbing emotions and is especially distressing for new arrivals who don’t know their way around (like tourists with their foreign currency).

This contributes to an underlying tension, exacerbated by the frustration of creative people who cannot express their imagination by making unique public spaces or advertise a one-off theme party or their garage sale on a pole.

Many of them simply move out to somewhere less regulated and more interesting ‘ Melbourne or Barcelona ‘ further homogenising our city.

Not only are posters banned from our poles but the city has gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent communities having functional public noticeboards (no, you won’t read about this in the Council newsletters that regularly appear under your door). So the only way we can communicate locally is by purchasing expensive advertising. (Electronic networking is by its nature not local.) Without pole posters, grassroots ventures such as plays, bands or new interest groups are strangled unless they have a big budget ‘ and official approval.

So grassroots culture, the source of all great cultural movements, is stymied. Even current attempts to get live music into small bars benefit only those who can afford bottles of wine starting at $30.00.

It’s against regulations to paint a portrait, tell a fortune or even sell a dodgy watch in public. Newsracks are banned, so is anything that might cause people to congregate, meet and talk. Busking is forbidden after 10pm on News Year’s Eve for ‘gorsake’.

All this because our council is fixated on removing ‘clutter’ regardless of the impact on community function.

Jane Jacobs addresses this specifically, seeing clutter as evidence of individual action, an organic expression of empowered citizens, possessing a beauty greater than that of imposed order. Uniformity on the other hand conveys its own subtext: ‘This city is under control; only official actions are valid; YOU are nobody.’ Monoculture is being created even as multiculturalism is touted.

A city that fines a bill poster far more than someone caught speeding through a red light is in serious trouble. Contented, mainstream middleclass values might be comfortable but they never created anything new. Enforced, they suppress counter-cultures, drive the imaginative people out of the city which then climbs to the affordability level of the moneyed professionals who remain, forcing yet more people out.

At night, the great unwashed pour into the vacuum, the suburban drunks with their ugly, ignorant macho confidence.

But the truth is: there is little left to do in Sydney except get drunk. And the damage is not only cultural but, as Richard Florida says, economic. The elephant in inner Sydney that no-one’s talking about is fast-creeping uniformity.

Next week: Part two, The other elephant in inner Sydney ‘ prohibition and how it warps our lives.