Cities are dynamic entities – constantly growing and evolving. Without growth and change, a city stagnates and dies.
A vibrant city is one that supports a dynamic tension between heritage conservation and development, not a battle between heritage and development. It’s like a seesaw with a fairly evenly balanced partner at either end. Sometimes heritage is the dominant partner, and sometimes development – up, down; high one minute, low the next. One side cannot stay dominant, or the joy of the ride is curtailed, and the see-saw moves nowhere. Both sides need to work together, not in opposition.
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The binary of heritage versus development needs to be challenged and changed to a constructive and creative partnership with the two sides moving together as a working partnership.
Can this be achieved? And if so, how?
First, some heritage perspective
The two pieces of crucial heritage legislation – the NSW Heritage Act 1977 and Environmental Planning and Assessment Act 1979 – came about at the end of the 1970s as a response to a period of unchecked post-war development.
The two crucial places of contention were Kelly’s Bush at Hunters Hill and The Rocks. As no formal mechanism existed for halting development, the unlikely partnership of local dissidents and the Builders Labourers Federation brought the necessary halt to development and a re-think of the proposed developments. Eventually, at the end of the 1970s, legislation was enacted to formalise the heritage protection and development process.
In the 40 years of enactment and practice of this legislation, heritage listings have expanded to include conservation areas, and a formal means of resolving disputes in the Land & Environment Court.
Most local councils employ heritage officers to assist with processing development applications related to heritage items and areas and managing heritage listings. NSW Heritage’s role is to guide local councils on heritage listings and assessments.
NSW Heritage’s Statement of Heritage Impact Guideline, first issued in the 1990s, sets out the three-step process for balancing heritage significance with development needs:
- state the heritage significance of the item.
- outline the proposed changes/development.
- state the impact of the changes/ development on the heritage significance and why this may be acceptable and compliant with the relevant local environment plan (LEP) and Development Control Plan
Here, we have the seesaw of heritage and development set out formally. A SHI document should acknowledge the heritage significance of the item (heritage is up) and the fact that development and change are needed (development’s turn to be up). Then, a subtle process of give and take should ensue to achieve a mutually successful outcome. Game over.
Too often, however, heritage officers, at both local and state levels, latch on to superficial checklists for assessing development, leaving heritage permanently high and development always low, with no winners. Such checklists can encompass:
- no changes to be visible from the street or any public area.
- new roof lines to match existing or follow a traditional pattern.
- any new buildings in a heritage streetscape to be a close copy of the surrounding heritage buildings in form and materials.
- no increase in density or sub-divisions.
Such an approach to approvals of new work in conservation areas provides safe outcomes and certainty for owners.
If buying into a conservation area, one can be assured that new development will be conservative and that the area will continue to look the way it does now. However, it can also mean that the ability to change one’s own house to accommodate growing children or elderly or disabled relatives or to provide ad-hoc rental income can prove difficult, time-consuming, and costly.
For a developer to argue for an increased density close to a heritage conservation area can also be difficult, time consuming and costly, if not impossible.
A new group, Sydney YIMBYs, is currently arguing against Inner West Council’s plans to add 1300 properties to their heritage conservation areas (HCAs) on the grounds that HCAs “effectively prohibit any new density in the affected areas, meaning not just no new apartments or townhouses, but no visible extensions to existing houses either”.
Heritage listing has become the ignition point for sparking debate about the value of heritage listings, the need for new development, and the future character and amenities of our suburbs and cities.
The value of heritage listing
The heritage assessment process leading to formal heritage listings on LEPs has become very well honed over the past 40 years. A raft of highly skilled heritage consultants now provides excellent, well-researched, and expensive services to councils to assess their building stock to recommend final heritage listings.
NSW Heritage’s guidelines on assessing significance (a nine step process) provide a rigorous basis for such heritage work. Opportunities are offered to residents to argue against heritage listing of their property – but these generally need to be argued on heritage terms (lack of heritage significance) rather than needing to change a property. It can be difficult to argue formally against the heritage assessment process on the grounds of “design excellence” or “urgent accommodation needs”.
The heritage assessment process is generally a stand-alone process taken in isolation from wider planning needs or constraints.
The need for an area to include medium-density housing or other development is not part of the process.
A recognition of what needs to be protected and what needs to be allowed to develop is not generally included in the process. While it can be argued that introducing planning needs into the heritage process can contaminate the process, the fact remains that the heritage assessment process is not adequately linked to wider planning needs.
Planning for new development
Our short-term election cycles have necessitated that state governments find expedient ways to curtail heritage legislation to ensure that their promised new developments can go ahead in the election cycle. The most successful of these expedient means has been the creation of state significant development areas. A proposal can be considered state significant if it:
- is over a certain size
- is in a sensitive environmental area
- will exceed a specific capital investment value (can be as little as $50 million).
Rather than working with or altering existing legislation, the state government has decided removing certain potential development sites from the existing legislative process is easier.
State significant projects currently in the process of development and assessment include:
- Barangaroo
- Calderwood Urban Development (increasing dwelling yield).
- Sydney Fish Market
- Sydney Metro
- The Pemulwuy Project at Redfern
Contentions and recent protests around proposed developments at Barangaroo, Sydney Fish Markets, and Sydney metro stations demonstrate the problems of removing such large and important sites from the regular planning system.
Local residents and the wider Sydney community feel powerless to comment on or influence design outcomes on these sites.
Government authorities have sought to address this issue by appointing dedicated community liaison officers to deal with local residents on sites such as Barangaroo. But the tokenism of such appointments soon becomes evident when called for changes do not happen.
The community at Millers Point is now investigating the possibility of a world heritage listing for Millers Point, which will include the waterfront areas and views to and from Balmain and the Sydney Observatory, as an increasingly desperate option to gaining certainty of protection for the beloved heritage values of the area.
How can heritage conservation and development work together?
Clearly, the current process of creating heritage listings in isolation from wider planning needs and planning for new development without adequately considering the heritage values of an area is not delivering better cities.
A planning system that gives balanced importance to both conservation and development is needed.
A recognition that the dynamic tension between conservation and development can be a creative force leading to more vibrant city outcomes is a good starting point.
Some of the pedantic and extremely prescriptive requirements thrust on homeowners by Inner West Council on the grounds of heritage conservation are creating serious widespread negative sentiment towards all things heritage. I know this because I went through it myself and speaking WITH neighbours, builders, real estate agents, architects and numerous other people in the local community it has become apparent that people are fed up with the overreach into what they can and can’t do with their own homes to make them more liveable. Nobody minds a bit of a streetscape that has a certain character to it, but when council starts knocking back applications because their heritage team insists that a circa 1905 wrought iron front gate must be used as opposed to a wooden picket one, when they start insisting you go one shade darker on your brick colour, that you cannot put a roller garage door on the back of your garage that leads into a laneway that nobody can see and which will offer you more convenience and security, because the current wooden one (which is rotten) dates back to circa 1930 cannot be changed…..it’s these things that people are fed up with and the irony is that he heritage Philes who so love everything old are going to cost themselves jobs because and support because they’ve made too much of a nuisance of themselves. People are sick and tired of it.
“Cities are dynamic entities – constantly growing and evolving. Without growth and change, a city stagnates and dies. A vibrant city is one that supports a dynamic tension between heritage conservation and development, not a battle between heritage and development.”
Setting the tone of our article with ridiculous assumptions and weak arguments about what YOU think cities should be made me check out immediately. What a load of YIMBY propaganda. The APA would be proud of you though.
The Yimby’s and Nimby’s article was perfectly timed, the subject even reached the front page of Weekend Sydney Morning Herald (th Dec 2023 with a story on “ Rezoning overrides heritage protection” followed by an article on page 12 “Heritage area priority to slip with rezoning”. I remember working on policies on densification of development around railway stations at the Department of Planning a decade ago. I must say I had my reservations about the policy then and still have them now.. It was all focused on the 39 locations identified for transport interchanges and included a wide area up to 1200 metres from the interchanges mostly in inner city areas. I think Frank Sartor captured Planning and development best describing it as the “Fog on the Hill”. Most of the problems originate from Political corruption such as Gladeys Bijinisence or Glad Bags as the department staff nick named her.
However, things have moved on with the latest demographic forecasts and the imminent formation of the “millennium mountain” aged in the mid 40’s, who are willing to forsake the inner city in search of their forever home in lifestyle suburbs.
There appears to be a shift in priorities less demand for minimalist apartments, greater demand for life-style homes, with a front garden, backyard and Zoom room.
This is an important shift because it has the capacity to challenge the established planning orthodoxy that encourages densification of the inner city and more recently middle suburbs via the “missing middle” narrative.
The question is will peak income-earning millennial families with pre-teen kids gravitate to “density accomodation” in middle suburbia or will they pursue a larger lifestyle home on and beyond the city’s edge.
Such a move would take the pressure of the need to densify the inner city areas and help to protect established inner city heritage areas..
It is not as simple as two opposites ie Heritage or Development. There is a sliding scale from Absolute Heritage Conservation (World, National level) to State and Local levels of heritage and then an important area of Adaptive Reuse with a range of old and new built works, then new development. The adaptive Reuse approach has worked for the Sydney GPO, the Sydney Fire Brigade HQ, Walsh Bay Wharves and even new works next to Tusculum, of Bondi Beach Pavilion. The debate is better to start with Adaptive Reuse and then decide where a building / project sits on the scale. Even a World Heritage Item like the Sydney Opera House has recently adapted significant interiors and won multiple design awards for this.