What is a city but its people, public spaces, politics and doughnuts?

If you live long enough in one place, you witness the grand saga of a city’s history unfold. Burwood Council recently celebrated its sesquicentenary, but my story begins in 1969 when my family moved into the suburb when I was five years old.

For a long time, Burwood’s logo featured the words “heritage, Progress, Pride” reflecting a tension that has often defined its history. This conflict is evident in recent events, such as the demolition of the AC/DC band members’ family home and the proposed Transport Oriented Development (TOD) around Croydon station.

In Burwood during the 1970s, I was thrilled to be able to go Thursday night and Saturday morning shopping. They were the only times shops were allowed open outside of 9 to 5 Monday to Friday. Yes, I know how uncivilised and archaic! I hung out at Westfields near the doughnuts shop (the cinnamon ones were the best) and hoped to meet girls. I was probably too mesmerised by the doughnuts machine seeing these pillows of delight frying before my eyes. Who could think of anything else but their warm, sugary soft unctuousness. 

I saw my first movie in Burwood The Lost Horizon a disaster film with a twist. The plane survivors find themselves in Shangri-La, a place of eternal youth, health, and happiness. Perhaps this set me on a lifelong quest for the utopian dream! I watched it at the Hoyts Cinema in the reconstructed Astor Theatre, accompanied by my mother, who spoke little English. I spent the film whispering translations to her and being constantly told to shush. To this day, I still have a habit of narrating films aloud.

I got a part time job to earn a few bob as many still do when they get to age 14. It was in a Franklins supermarket on Burwood Road, a cut price establishment that prided itself on keeping costs low by forcing customers to travel through a labyrinth of boxes cluttering the narrow aisles. I’m sure that was a clever strategy to force customers to go at a snail’s pace to induce extra purchases.

The working conditions at that time would now incite a social media storm. No such thing as air conditioning, unless you worked in the freezer and then you had to just worry about frostbite. I still feel the muscle and joint pain from trying to lift large slabs of Pal dog food cans up a step ladder to put them on the top shelf for storage. You may laugh but I was just a scrawny kid at the time. I still am actually!

I also have fond memories of lining up at the butcher with my parents to buy a side of lamb. No, my father didn’t throw it over his shoulder, it was cut up into sections and transported home via our two wheeled shopping trolley. We were horrified to eventually see a supermarket providing meat in sealed plastic portions, it seemed so unnatural. 

So here we are today and it seems that there is still a strong desire to engage in a life more slower and intimate in its rhythm.

Visiting a local market to find food that is not mass produced, seeing movies in a historic cinema and taking time to chat with your neighbours. Even the shopping trolley has made a comeback!

The digital world will still drive much of what we do and how we interact. But maybe the days of easy consumerism and artificial connection is not enough anymore to fulfil our lives. Perhaps nostalgia for analog and authentic experiences might be shaping a more humane, modest, and sustainable way of living. The things we kept reminding ourselves during COVID were important. 

We never owned a car when I was growing up. We walked everywhere so I got to see the fine print of the suburb and its many layers of history. You also got know people from streets away as people actually spent time in their front yards.

Burwood has witnessed various architectural periods (Victorian, Federation, Inter war, Modern and Post modern) with each having challenged their predecessors. At the time of each period, they were probably thought to have ravaged and destroyed the existing character of an area. However, over time their successful integration comes from an inherent design quality and the sensitive way every building contributes to a greater whole. I think it’s safe to say that the architecture of the first half of the 20th century did achieve a much more organic transition between architectural periods. The red brick block of flats that went up after the 1950s were designed as a gun barrel and due to the subdivision patterns of most of Sydney led to most apartments looking into each other. Whilst there were good areas of soft landscaping at the front, a large part of the rest of the ground plane was devoted to vehicular access and car parking. Today, we are trying to rejuvenate and refurbish these buildings to make them more liveable.

Then we saw the multi story tower buildings that were erected through what we call today a complying form of development if you met the numerical standards. You could build as high as you wanted if you could provide the required setback and site coverage. At least these buildings have been able to maintain significant trees and landscaping around them, something not often achieved in a contemporary context.

Yes, they met the housing needs at the time, but they are buildings that we look back on and don’t see as being desirable precedents. They generally have a poor aesthetic, intrusive scale and a dissonance of mass that ensues from being juxtaposed against the lower scale of neighbouring buildings. 

Burwood has gone through a revival in recent years by continuing to welcome immigrants and allowing its town centre to grow with many new mixed use developments. However, most of the development that has occurred has been away from the main street of Burwood Road creating a “doughnuts” effect. There I go again talking about doughnuts.

I watched the town centre decline in the 2000s as shop vacancies multiplied and redevelopment lagged due to the time to acquire sites and get approvals. A critical mass was eventually achieved that has led to a high levels of foot traffic and lots of hawker style food premises which have transformed Burwood into a lively hub.

Overall, Burwood has successfully integrated a new immigrant population and it feels like for the most part that the redevelopment has contributed to its urban setting.

Above all, it has managed to negate the monstrosity and squalor evoked by the “three ugly sisters”. 

This development is one of the absolute failures of the planning system. To be clear, we are all to blame; the architects, developer, certifiers, council, state government, a special mention to TfNSW (with its ridiculous requirements for development along rail corridors), the Courts and finally all of us citizens for not caring enough to get involved in planning policy and the decision making process. 

As more development is planned in metropolitan centres such as Burwood, it’s vital that we not just build the sterile and monotonous architecture that we see in international cities around the world. We need our built environment to be authentic. It should respond to the unique characteristics of a place and the values that we want to live by.

Our cities must be egalitarian, cohesive, and sustainable to withstand the increasingly severe climatic conditions we will encounter into the future.

The Burwood Chinatown food precinct that has been so successful is situated in a mostly post war building with the typical arcade of shops and frontage to a service lane. The adaptive reuse also converted the parking area for public to use for dining.

It’s questionable whether replacing this lower built form with a multi storey tower building will achieve the same level of interactivity at street level.

Unfortunately, these high rise edifices create so much dead frontage for services and vehicular access that they result in quite unfriendly and unattractive interface with the street.

I think there is too much emphasis on building high and jamming as much new housing in our town centres when there could be just the same density achieved through providing more midrise apartment buildings and smaller lot sizes in the surrounding areas. 

Whilst the NSW government’s approach to its midrise reforms is sound, without good strategic planning at the local level to craft envelope controls to respond to the particular infill opportunities and constraints of the existing patterns of development, there could be some very poor outcomes. 

A still dense but flatter city structure is preferable to a preponderance of very tall buildings which have significant environmental impacts through wind tunnels, overshadowing and poor street level interfaces.

Photo: ‘Chinatown’ Burwood 2025

Melbourne’s Fitzroy housing estate is a sobering example. The replacement of terraces with tower blocks achieved no greater density. This was highlighted in this Conversation article by Kim Dovey and Elek Pafka.

If high rise development remains part of the plan, they must create as much social amenity as possible, integrating active ground planes and meaningful public spaces.

Here are two examples of treatments to laneways in the Burwood town centre that could be more than they currently are. One of which has been lauded as part of the reclaiming the streets initiatives arising out of Covid. The move to improve our public spaces was a response to the isolation we experienced during Covid and the desire to create more places for social engagement. 

Deane Street Plaza is playful but needs to evolve into a true gathering space with planted trees for shade rather than being in planters, more comfortable seating, and perhaps a small kiosk for people to use and spend longer engaging with the space.

Does that remind you at all of any of the European plazas you may visited? There’s something very civilised about being able to buy a beer and an ice cream at the same time.

In a similar vein, the plaza at Victoria Street in Burwood has gone through many trials and tribulations. It was once lined with Crepe Myrtle trees that provided shade and colour in summer and let the light in during winter. With the area becoming popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s as an outdoor eating area, the trees were pulled out and replaced with an awning. Then no one wanted to sit under the dark uninviting space and here we are today a space that you just pass through quickly because of the heat load in summer.

As we enter another development boom with the haste and fervour reminiscent of what occurred some seventy years ago, let’s pause to consider what kind of city we want to live in, what many of these new buildings will mean for our quality of life, the way we use the space around them and the demand they will generate for new public infrastructure.

Burwood’s evolution reminds us that cities must balance the old with the new, embracing progress without losing their soul. Let’s strive to create places that inspire and generate a sense of belonging.