TRAUMA TOWN: “Humour is the precision tool of the monkey mind, the invisible energy, flowing through our cities, a way of prodding and asking, opening doors. Not getting sued? Cities are complex and if you get too serious you get bogged down in the detail,” says Philip Bull as he continues his series of responses to the eternal conflicts that inflame the world of planning in this new column.
There are confusing groups of issues out there for what I would call project people. You know who you are, the people out there that want to get stuff done.
So many barriers and obstacles. This column is about getting back to basics, the real things that drive projects. There’s so much confusion now about getting stuff done.
There is the NSW planning system and those who deny its stifling hand. They are worse than climate change deniers because they are so niche. What’s their contribution to getting stuff done? Pointing at the market and saying stuff like, “look over there, he’s not building those houses he got approved!” Well, if you were not pointing at me, I might be able to get on with it.
Then there’s also the Greens’ objections to someone’s renovation project. “Who’s going to kill the last tiger?” The applicants just wanted more space for their kids and now wonder what cosmic law they broke. A little seed of guilt has been sown that change, desire and ambition are bad. That’s not good for a real city.
I rebuilt the fences the other day with my neighbour Muhammad. We were running out of cement for the post footings. I suggested we just push a bit of dirt into the mix. Muhammad gave me a sly grin and said that’s just what his brother in Beirut would have done. Appropriation is everywhere, don’t confuse your dodgy building traditions with mine, I thought to myself, as I diluted the final batch of cement with some dirt.
It would have been good to have some sandy soil from Beirut too. The fence went up and I saw less of Muhammad and the three generations he lives with. He wanted the fence, I was happy with a broken fence and complaining about how good his BBQ smelled, and then watching a few kebabs come through the loose paling.
Tradition is like an approval from the council; it can empower you to do stuff or just bog you down with a whole pile of conditions (trauma).
There’s the need and there’s the why. Well, someone said my last article on Aquatic Centres was funny and I am very influenced by compliments. Humour is the precision tool of the monkey mind, the invisible energy, flowing through our cities, a way of prodding and asking, opening doors. Not getting sued? Cities are complex and if you get too serious you get bogged down in the detail.
There is how you look at cities. I see cities as organic places, expressions of desire – all that funky romantic stuff. The economists I like talk about agglomeration and exchange.
These are all forward looking ideas, businesses moving together, feeding off each other like corals on a reef in an ocean of transactions, moving things around. Buildings coming down, new ones going up. The outlook is a flow that can only go forward. It’s a prospective way of looking at cities. Not really carbon zero, I suppose.
Then you get to how cities, particularly this one, Sydney, works.
This town likes to take the agglomeration and exchange change out of it. The real heritage of the place tells the story. And it’s good to talk about it, you can document it a bit (not too much because that can become creepy) but it should not dominate our future.
Yes, but it does here via real estate-based zoning plans and complexity. I think it partly goes back to our birth trauma as a penal colony. I look to the Grimes 1800 plan as Sydney’s first planning scheme ordinance. (Grimes make sure you get the captains’ names right this time.) It was about who’s who, real estate and demarcation.
Sometimes I am interested in housing, because after getting up a decent fence, houses are like where you live. The Grimes Plans of today are now woven into complex statutory systems, the EPA Act and local environmental plans (LEPs) et al. The culture of our institutions. Stuff you must go through to get stuff done.
They got Grimes to do the map because he regularly washed his hands, his gait was about two feet and he was mostly sober and trustworthy. Grimes had a good vibe about him. It was simpler then and stuff got done.
Housing and change in Sydney is the sad old story of reform in a convict town. You’re sent to a recidivist colony if you pitch a tent not in accordance with the Grimes LEP.
Recent housing reform went a bit like the last attempt at local government reform in the 2010s – the real targets escaped (hello Hunters Hill, Burwood and Mosman hiding over there). Housing reform seems to be going that way. Change is in soft areas you would expect, on busy roads, Labor dumping housing in Rose Bay and Mosman for payback on Canterbury Road and Balmain Leagues finally commenced. Disaster diverted.
Urban reform in Sydney seems to be a process of constantly going back to the status quos as the most desirable position.
At university a lecturer asked everyone in the class what their positions was on a particular issue. I said as long as it was Grimes compliant, I was OK with whatever direction it went. Someone else said, “I don’t have a position, I am just for the status quo”.
The lecturer got excited and said “that’s the most powerful position you can have on any issue”. Maybe I thought… if they went through a Grimes upgrade and everyone else agreed. The individual promoting the status quo, looked crestfallen as he thought that answer would avoid attention.
It’s OK to build some urban housing on Parramatta Road but not near brand new metro rail stations.
The NIMBYs of our city are the Pauline Hansons of the mid-net worth. They want to exclude people, not by new migration laws but by heritage listing early 20th century project homes next to billions of dollars of collective investments in metro rail.
By being special and next to new infrastructure (and all the old stuff), that’s pretty good for your house price and you did nothing to offend anyone. Is that progressive or a form of passive theft? It’s the lack of “live and let live” that gets me. Not everyone wants the council to pick their roof form for them.
And there’s more – hidden amongst this are the Pink Ladies out there doing their business adding a bit of bother to it all. We will get to that later.
So rather than unroll all these layers, it’s time to ask what really drives projects, I call it trauma, family trauma, diaspora energy, father-son-stuff. Lost ambition handed to you. When a brother and a sister walk to a border, they shake hands on that border, one goes back, one goes forward. 10 years later she gets everyone out.
When you have that cold “gun” in your hand, nothing can stop you, other than a prohibition of some kind under a variety of pieces of legislation, subordinate policy, development control plans and if someone just doesn’t like you in the local council. The big ones for me are running out of cash and losing focus.
Passion is important and the real heritage driving our cities, was, is and always should be intergeneration trauma. When the actual heritage regulations stop that process, that’s weird.
Next week mid-century architecture of Sydney used to control people.
