A new article commissioned by Inside Story, as a follow up to my earlier Making Space piece published during the first few months of the coronavirus.
The end of the city? No, not quite
Sydney and Melbourne, Australia’s two largest cities, are struggling to maintain their status as the economic powerhouses of the nation. For decades now, these two cities have attracted the majority of Australia’s new migrants, international students and speculative property investment. Liveable and diverse, they are are the places where increased density has become a necessary by-product of progress; where tall buildings, like quarterly profits, are a function of growth that must never cease.
Except for now. This quarter, there’s little growth to be seen, and the tall buildings are relatively empty. Many office buildings in the CBD report occupancy rates below 30 per cent. In Sydney, where much of life has opened up, it’s the suburbs that are bustling. The relative emptiness of the CBD means money is staying away, no longer coursing freely through shops, cafes and restaurants. Busy intermediaries weave through the suburbs on bikes or in vans, delivering goods and food to shoppers who remain closeted away with their devices.
If the relative emptiness of the central city feels like a shock, we’d do well to remember how relatively novel is the particular, pre-pandemic form of the city we’re familiar with. Skyscrapers stacked tight in the centres, with radial train networks transporting commuters in and out of dormitory suburbs, represent distinct configurations of home and work, domesticity and commerce, that might be slipping. Has the “age of dispersion” arrived? Will investors continue to capitalise on the empty air above certain streets, building more towers for more offices, extending the decades-run of speculative property investment centred around CBD locations — or will another urban form take root?
The AMP building, newly completed, in 1963 on Alfred St. Image courtesy: City of Sydney Archives
As it happens, the tall building wasn’t welcome in Australia’s biggest cities for many years. The City of Sydney’s first modern skyscraper, the AMP building on Alfred Street in Circular Quay, was only completed in 1961, well after the first tall buildings were emerging across American cities. When it arrived at its harbourside address, it was a gargantuan structure, towering twenty-two storeys over neighbouring buildings like some kind of alien life-form. It shattered the human scale of the street, delineating new sightlines for speculative growth.
The building was only possible because of the lifting, in 1957, of the Height of Buildings Act 1912, which had been used for decades to prevent the onslaught of American-style skyscrapers on Sydney’s city centre. The Act, known as the “anti-skyscraper law,” was driven by fears that tall buildings were particularly vulnerable to the ravages of fire. Sydney’s CBD had been scarred by the events of 1901, when a massive fire in an eight-storey department store resulted in five deaths, including a young man forced to jump from a window in front of lunchtime crowds.
Melbourne, too, moved quickly to limit its building heights to 130 feet, a constraint maintained during the interwar period. Architects, firefighters, fire insurers and politicians were united in their view that any building exceeding the range of fire-fighting technologies was unsafe. As a consequence, for many years our cities continued to grow outwards, not up.
Many Australian urbanists of the early twentieth century considered tall buildings to be ugly expressions of the unbridled greed of speculative capitalism. As skyscrapers spread across America, Australian architects, including those working abroad, worried they would sully the rare beauty of Sydney and its glittering harbour. A group of architects, writing from London, called for special consideration to be given to Sydney as a city of rare beauty: “the idea that such an enormous asset as this beauty… should be so recklessly undervalued as to be left at the mercy of private speculation” gravely concerned them.
During this era, the ideal form of urban progress — or what we might now call “innovation” — was to be found in the pioneering form of the suburb. Though it later became unfashionable, the suburb was born of public health crises and designed as a harmonious balancing of privacy, hygiene and social cohesion. Where English cities had been afflicted by ill-planned slums that spread death and disease, Australian cities could experiment much more freely with new spatial configurations. Ready access to nature spaces, whether public parks or private gardens, gave rise to numerous planning laws explicitly designed to protect citizens from ill-health.
This aspirational urban form emerged in the 1830s, when the wealthy and well-educated looked to the ideas of Scottish gardener and publisher John Claudius Loudon, who popularised the potential of the “suburban villa with garden attached” to create health and happiness. Another Scotsman, biologist Patrick Geddes, would devise novel ways of seeing the city as a “bio-social” unit, taking account of health, ecology and wellbeing.
Shocked by the overuse of slum clearance to eradicate disease in India in the late 1800s, Geddes, now credited as one of the founders of the urban planning movement, pioneered a different kind of public health response to city pestilence. Governments, he argued, should not only clear away slums, disrupting countless lives, but design more intelligently, placing large gardens and parks, offering fresh air and communal spaces, at the centre of communities.
Likewise, the influential idea of the “garden city,” which gained expression across English and American cities and suburbs after the first world war, was seen as a way of improving the health of the working classes. Devised by planner Ebenezer Howard, it aimed to better integrate the experience of town and countryside, doing away with the crowded and unhealthy experience of the inner city.
So, if today’s coronavirus sparks a rapid dispersion from dense urban cores, it certainly wouldn’t be for the first time. But nor would it mean an end to the city as such. If public health crises of earlier eras gave us suburban ideals of healthy living and generous urban parks for our leisure, the lasting changes resulting from this pandemic may well lie in the new spatial patterns that emerge from how we work.
Read the complete article (with more pics!) here.
Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.