THE NAKED CITY – THINKING OUTSIDE THE SQUARE

There is something about those idolised visions of future development initiated by civic architects and Council planners that is highly seductive – an almost utopian visualisation of what life in this big crazy metropolis could really be like.

Check out this recent impression of what the planned CBD Square, long promised by the City Of Sydney Council, might eventually look like. There are buskers entertaining the crowd (gee, I hope they have their licences), two women walking five dogs (I assume they are professional dog walkers) and even a young couple, captured in a passionate embrace beneath a newly transplanted tree.

The only thing really missing is the beloved Woolies Building on the corner of Park and George, and the thousands of shoppers who throng there everyday. Of course it’s no secret that the City Council has been buying up property in the block for decades, with the eventual aim of demolishing it all to make way for an expansive town square facing the Sydney Town Hall.

It’s apparently at least two years down the track before the wrecking ball smashes mercilessly into urban icons like the Woolies emporium and the Coronation Hotel, making way for the massive expanse of concrete and inevitable water features that will become Sydney’s brand new city square – a facility to rival St Mark’s in Venice, Federation Square in Melbourne and Red Square in Moscow.

Like the current light rail construction, which has turned much of George Street into a construction zone, there will be no gain without pain and expect years of disruption, noise, dust and ugly hoardings as buildings are flattened and concrete poured. What is now very much a bustling hub in the centre of Sydney will effectively be comatose for at least a year or two.

When the new square is finally unveiled, at the cost of hundreds of millions, there will obviously be many who readily embrace the big open space, especially when it’s employed for civic functions and to welcome home our all conquering world champion underwater hockey team. Skateboarders and professional dog walkers will have a ball.

Others, like myself, will question whether vast windswept forums, synonymous with the monumentalism of history, contribute anything to the vitality of the modern, so-called ‘living’ city. Whether we end up with something like Melbourne’s much criticised Federation Square, often likened to a “bombed-out war-time bunker due to its camouflage colours”, remains to be seen.

When the weather is hospitable and the sun is shining, squares like this are sociable and welcoming, but when night time falls they often take on another dimension – dark, gloomy and the preferred precinct of the anti-social. No doubt Sydney’s new city square will be well illuminated at night and graced by alluring water features, but will it draw anything like the current bustle of punters that Woolies and its surrounds attract?

A few years ago and the City Council was all about duplicating Melbourne’s laneway culture and nurturing small cosmopolitan pockets of bars, restaurants, coffee shops and bookshops throughout the CBD – all trading into the late night hours. Now it seems they have embraced the North Korean philosophy that bigger is always better, especially when it comes to pouring tonnes of concrete, all in the so-called public good.

As the tumbling tumbleweeds blow through Sydney City Square (or whatever it’s called) on a cold winter’s night in 2020, there will still be that occasional pedestrian, bemused and disorientated, longing for that late-night purchase of a Woolies barbequed chicken or bag of Allen’s snakes. Bad luck there – it’s called progress!