White Bay: Why not trust the community? It works

BY GAVIN GATENBY
They say Sydney real estate is about location, location, location.

And it doesn’t get any better than White Bay and Glebe Island ‘ state-owned foreshore land offering prime development opportunities, and one of the only deep water docks in Port Jackson.

With the 2003 decision to move all car-carrier docking to Port Kembla, car imports have left Glebe Island and its role since 1973 terminated. The last cars were offloaded in November.

With the car import role running down, the NSW government began attempts to lease or sell off chunks of the strategic precinct, which is four times larger than Darling Harbour. Since then, plans for the bay have snuck in and slunk off like clients at a cheap brothel. A year ago the government had top-secret discussions with the Disney Company which had expressed interest in developing a theme park, and in October last year there was talk of making Glebe Island the site for the Australian Open.

Sacrificing a critical waterfront site on the altar of sport would surely be crazy, although after the Rees Government decision to allow V8 car racing at Olympic Park, nobody would be surprised. For reasons unknown, Disney’s Mickey Mouse proposal fortunately went belly-up. And these weren’t the only goofy ideas. In 2007, with the support of local MP Verity Firth, residents beat off a proposal for a cement terminal on the site.

The latest plan is to locate a cruise ship terminal at White Bay. Sydney has 60-70 passenger ship movements annually, and not all can be accommodated at Sydney Cove Overseas Passenger Terminal or the Navy’s site at Garden Island. As the government originally spun the story, an overseas passenger terminal was to be an integral part of the Barangaroo/Hungry Mile redevelopment ‘ cruise ships currently dock at the wharf there ‘ and the relocation to White Bay was only temporary.

It now seems the move will be permanent. Before Christmas there was a low-key announcement that use of the docks for this purpose would begin immediately. Planning Minister Kristina Kenneally talked of spending $30 million on a terminal building and facilities at White Bay and you don’t spend that sort of money on something you’re going to abandon after two or three years.

The government’s new gloss is that the White Bay terminal would double as an ‘event centre’ and entertainment venue ‘ functions already well covered by the centrally-located Darling Harbour Exhibition and Entertainment centres.

Complicating all this are the government’s on-again, off-again plans to use either Glebe Island or White Bay as a major worksite for the $4.8bn ‘City Metro’ plan or even the underground M4East. This scenario turns over a large part of White Bay or Glebe Island as a worksite until at least 2015, with the Rozelle goods line used to remove tunneling spoil. In the fantasyland of metro rail proposals, the White Bay terminal and event centre would be ‘served’ by a metro station a kilometre away, deep under the junction of Victoria Road and Darling Street, Balmain. This is ridiculously distant.

Light rail could be connected to the terminal very quickly, since the port’s now-disused goods line runs right alongside the site. A light rail connection would need to be spliced into the existing tram line with a Y link north of the Rozelle Bay stop. This scheme would provide a cheap, high-capacity link to the city, and if the light rail extension to Dulwich Hill goes ahead, to the Western line at Lewisham and the Bankstown line at Dulwich Hill.

But while light rail extension is wildly popular with the public and supported by virtually all sides in Leichhardt politics, the Rees Government hasn’t yet screwed up the courage to buck the Ministry of Transport’s pathological opposition to the mode to give a go-ahead to such a scheme. Without it, a passenger terminal will simply worsen existing traffic congestion.

The cavalcade of contradictory rumours and semi-official announcements is the hallmark of a government in confusion and paralysis. It reflects the competing priorities, schemes and ambitions of various departments and ministers. Ironically, many of these agendas have been made redundant by the economic crisis and the spectre of peak oil.

Leichhardt’s Green mayor, Jamie Parker, put it this way: ‘Year after year, minister after minister, we have implored the government to properly plan for the future of our precious waterfront. For several years the government has promised a master plan with genuine community consultation but all we’ve got are ad hoc proposals that demonstrate their inability to plan strategically for Sydney Harbour’s future.’

The chaos and uncertainty doesn’t bode well for Labor’s Verity Firth who already has the Greens breathing down her neck. In March 2007 Morris Iemma promised a White Bay master plan with community input to be completed by October that year. The plan never arrived and in November the stillborn initiative was superseded by a Bays Precinct Taskforce ‘ an old-style interagency group under the chairmanship of long-time Labor courtier, Dr David Richmond, coordinator-general of the Premiers Department and an architect of the metro muddle.

Since then no plan has emerged and the records of the Carr and Iemma governments and ‘ so far ‘ Rees, don’t fill one with confidence that the taskforce is more than a cynical cover for bureaucratic turf wars and Labor factional infighting setting the agenda, followed by a brutal exercise in what is known in planning circles as ‘DAD’ ‘ decide, announce, defend: the government settles on a plan behind closed doors, spins an announcement and then defends the plan against a firestorm of protest from an outraged community.

Highly politicised government agencies have become hodcarriers for any developer who has donated generously to the ALP and then approaches the government with a plan. The results have typically given planning a bad name. While few would dispute the need to accommodate an increased population close to public transport, no inner-city resident wants to see urban consolidation at the expense of local character, facilities and amenity. That the government intends to continue in this manner is shown by the sweeping powers of the new Metro Rail Authority to impose high-rise development near planned metro stations. Similarly, the ‘working harbour’ concept was once widely supported by Leichhardt residents, but the government’s White Bay machinations are poisoning the whole notion.

There is another way, one that is winning government acceptance and community approval elsewhere. It’s called ‘enquiry by design’ (EBD).

Solutions to complex problems of urban design must be crafted together. EBD begins with the idea that widespread consensus on potentially controversial developments can be won by bringing all parties ‘ councils, private developers, government departments, and community groups ‘ together in a transparent exercise that examines how problems and disagreements can be overcome in the choice of design solutions. EBD has won wide acceptance in Western Australia and Victoria.

The Western Australian Planning Commission states that Enquiry-by-Design workshops are typically non-binding to encourage participants to think creatively, to step outside the sometimes limiting constraints of formal roles, and to provide the flexibility to consider and debate a wide range of options.

The Perth experience shows that trusting the community works. At places like East Perth and Subiaco it has produced urban infill redevelopments far superior to those in Sydney. NSW government agencies have been so consistently wrong, and their work so unpopular, that trusting the community and recruiting its experience, expertise, and love of place could hardly do worse.