Brian Howe must have bitten his tongue as his leader weighed into urban planning during the week.
The Prime Minister’s prescriptive foray neatly illustrates some of the frictions in Australian urban planning and some of the frictions in Australian politics.
Keating has a list of about 10 points that make his vision for central Sydney. For our purposes the most important are: demolishing the Cahill expressway; relocating the casino project; and bringing affordable quality housing to the water’s edge.
Removing the expressway is visionary.
Coincidentally, the Keating vision statement came the week after launch of the 1994 status report on the Better Cities program. The Better Cities is Brian Howe’s baby which was born in 1991 with budget of $816 million over five years to upgrade inner areas. Better Cities along with Howe getting the Deputy Prime Ministership have been seen as a sop to the Labor left so the right could get on with privatisation and other reforms the left might otherwise veto.
Howe, however, has now linked Better Cities to investment in public infrastructure which in turn means less or no privatisation, especially for transport. This has got him into strife with his Cabinet colleagues.
With Better Cities, Howe has succeeded where Whitlam failed with his gandiose Department of Urban and Regional Development. One of the main reasons is that Whitlam did not work as well with the states. Whitlam preferred Commonwealth bureaucracies doing the work.
Howe, on the other hand, has strategically got each state and territory to have one or more Better Cities projects (unlike Whitlam’s border-straddling Albury Wodonga project). And the glossy 1994 Better Cities report has nice colour photos of each of the territory and state environment or lands Ministers _ six of the eight of them Liberals.
So what does Keating do: aggravates the Premier of the biggest state which has Australia’s biggest city requiring the biggest urban renewal agenda.
He described the Fahey Government as being unfit to hold “”stewardship of the fortunes of this great city” and being “”focused solely on money without the slightest idea of the vision or sense of grandeur that Sydney now needs.”
Keating might be right, but in a federation it was the wrong way of going about things. The vision of getting rid of the expressway so the city could be connected to the water is noble, but expensive. Local interests would spend the money on other vote-buying schemes (railways to marginal Parramatta) and be sensitive to voters who only think of “”me and my car”. To achieve the vision requires a different approach than attacking a state government with a letter which seriously under-estimates the cost.
The Better Cities program has defects, but at least the states have come to the party, more than doubling the federal commitment.
Now to the casino. Keating condemned it as “”hideous, a blot on the landscape”.
The casino’s architect is Philip Cox. As it happened Cox gave a speech at the Better Cities launch. Oddly enough, his theme was very similar to Keating’s. It lauded the visionary. He said the great urban designs of the past were those of individuals: Peter the Great’s St Petersburgh and Pericles’s Athens. Committees could not design cities.
Of course, the two disagreed on one essential matter: which individual’s vision should be executed, Cox’s or Keating’s, or perhaps someone else’s.
This is one of the great frictions of urban design: one person’s vision is another’s eyesore.
The other point about the casino is the state of architectural criticism in Australia. Cox threatened to sue over statements by some of his colleagues about the casino design. He later withdrew, but the threat had its effect because, until Keating’s statement, further criticism was quite muted. Architects have silly ethics rules requiring them to support their colleagues. Heavens, who better to attack an architect informatively than another architect.
If we are to have better cities, architects must stop running off to courts and ethics committees. Wider debate about architectural merit must take place in public forums. To that extent Keating’s foray into the urban-design debate have been constructive.
The question of affordable quality housing illustrates another urban-design friction. If governments refuse to have a population policy, then we have to have more compact cities because infrastructure costs and environmental questions will make continued sprawl unacceptable.
But just packing people in can create a worse environmental and social problem than the sprawl. When densities increase, the need for quality design and building increases. Noise, sunlight, parking etc become greater issues. If they cannot be dealt with by space, they must be dealt with by good design which respects rights of existing residents.
That requires co-operation by all three levels of government, not bullying. And it requires consultation and persuasion in the community.
In the past demagogues with vision in Europe and visionaries with vacant land in Australia have been able to create some wonderful urban designs. The world has now changed: demagoguery is out and there is no more vacant land.
Vision has to be executed in a different way.