REVIEW
Killing Sydney, The Fight for Sydney's Soul
Philip Drew gives his response to Elizabeth Farrelly's new book.
posted 01/02/22
THE RISE AND RISE AND EXPLOSION OF SYDNEY
Elizabeth Farrelly, KILLING SYDNEY: The Fight for Sydney’s Soul
Picador, Pan Macmillan Australia, Sydney, 2021
$34. 99, 375 pp.
Elizabeth Farrelly needs no introduction to readers of the Sydney Morning Herald. Until recently she was a hard-hitting columnist and untiring critic of planning malpractices and collusion by the government with powerful developer interests. Killing Sydney assembles a lifetime engagement as a Sydney city councillor initially, activist and columnist on civic affairs. A New Zealand architect trained in philosophy, Farrelly brought intellectual rigour and expertise to reporting and her latest tract collects many examples or political interventions, interference and planning law subverted, observed first-hand, which will infuriate the honest.
While Farrelly poses the question “Is Sydney Full”, she seems unwilling to challenge the prevailing consensus that city size is not a problem, and thereby complacently sets aside all the troubling issues of resources and environment, instead confining herself to how best to accommodate an ever larger population. This is a subject sensible demographers worry about—the ongoing absence, indeed avoidance—of a sustainable population plan for Australia, dealing with its geography, ecology, environmental degradation, and climate change inaction. Analysis of Australia’s distorted urban structure established during colonial times which has resulted growth being concentrated in just two capitals, and absence of second-tier medium-sized cities under two million to alleviate the distorting effect of high immigration levels is never addressed. Island Australia, it has to be said, is a veranda country with its population confined to a narrow 10 km deep coastal strip or land-veranda in a few capital cities inherited from colonial times, and an empty, hot, furnace-like, largely arid desert interior.
What drives the insatiable population growth, who are the population boosters, and who profits? Australia is founded on immigration, of that there can be no argument. Why must migration go on indefinitely unquestioned as a central sacred plank of national policy? Is there a responsible or sustainable size or limit, in view of Australia’s peculiar geography? Wouldn’t it be wise to manage immigration when danger signs arise and throttle down rapid urban expansion and thus regulate the pace to avoid catastrophe as has happened all too repeatedly throughout history. Australia has no population plan at the present time that would set a limit according to what can be sustainably managed. Not even a target! It was recently noted that two-thirds of our population growth is from net overseas migration and our population expanding at the rate of another Canberra every year. A single year’s increase exceeds the estimated number of First Peoples in 1788. It has taken a century for Canberra to establish itself, which is a measure of how slow and costly it is to create self-sustaining new cities away from the coast inland. Most people think we have a problem.
What must we expect if Kevin Rudd’s target of a Big Australia numbering 50 million is achieved, how great will the damage to the environment will there be and what will Sydney and Melbourne, Australia’ two largest cities, look like? Where will all the new arrivals live, and where will the funding to build 12 new two million sized cities come from, failing that, to reconfigure Melbourne and Sydney to hold 10 million. Has anyone considered the details, impacts and costs of Big Australia and the rise and rise and final explosion of Sydney north and south along the coast or leapfrogging over the Blue Mountains. Is there a plan—has anyone considered the quality of life, water, loss of habitat, energy consequences?
Earlier in the year, E. Lippmann, an architect keenly interested in such questions, published Sydney XXXL. The title invokes clothing size to highlight the current crisis of Sydney, which like Topsy, is a size XXXL bursting at its seams, over-weight, and debilitated by an inefficient metabolism. Lippmann considers the ecological consequences, the price to daily living of an unfit spread-out metropolis with a failing heart. Why big anyway? What is the attraction of big - it certainly cannot be quality of life for the average citizen or improved standard of living, much less creativity. Livable cities enjoy populations less than two million, a few, to name Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo and Stockholm, are much less. A large population tells us nothing about the quality of life, happiness, and creativity of a city. Size is a meaningless abstraction, a number. Big equates with carelessness, loss of control, chaos. Who benefits from runaway population growth? The rich, certainly not the poor, not the workers who cannot afford sky-high real estate prices and galloping cost of new infrastructure? Bigger is little more than an empty government slogan to appease business and developers who are its subscribers. Where will the new arrivals live? Has anyone thought about that? What are the costs of a soaring population on Sydney, is the cost even in terms of declining living standards, overcrowding, congestion, pollution, power and water supply and basic services? To wellbeing? Sydney is stressed to breaking point now, what will it look like with double that population. Rapid unplanned growth will result in a steeper decline. Farrelly sets out the present day planning ills: “Minimised government intervention, hear-total reliance on markets instead of planning, the substitution of contractual relationships for professional trust, the repudiation of development control as ‘red tape’, developer-funded self-certification and upzoning as a way to fund public infrastructure have dramatically energised the wrecking ball and diminished the city’s sense of public trust.” All of which is true.
Immigration was a key engine of colonisation which over time has established itself as a sacred feature in the national psyche. Multiculturism disguises and distracts attention from its distasteful colonial origin and addiction. Colonisation entailed the seizure, displacement of the native people. The polite word used was ‘extirpate’. We today would probably substitute genocide as being more accurate. It was never represented as such but that was the reality, under the misleading term terra nullius, or, more accurately, terror nullius. Having emptied Australia of its native population it was necessary to re-populate it with a new labour force, a measure fulfilled by immigration, initially a punishment for convicted felons, afterwards incentivised and replaced by the offer of free land to settlers and selectors
.
Why have colonial administrations and later state governments not ended migration at some point, but rather have enshrined it as a permanent policy fixture? Australian immigration is driven by an abstract economic rationale that endless growth and great size represent an uncontested good in and of its own right.
What is ignored is the actual cost incurred by rapid population increase in building additional infrastructure to accommodate the new arrivals even when no effort is taken to build new cities or invest in the housing, roads, transportation and the myriad basic services needed for to accommodate them. The worst feature is the lack of preparation in advance, placing an enormous burden on Australia’s two largest cities Melbourne and Sydney, with a lesser impact on its other colonial capitals around the coast. The Commonwealth government which controls the throttle simply passes on these costs to the states which lack its taxing powers, thus leaving the Commonwealth in control while ignoring any following responsibility to deal with the consequences. Immigration is a convenient back door, if frequently abused lever, inherited from colonial days with which to lift economic growth. Should anyone doubt it, immigration is a ready if mindless substitute for a national economic plan. The over-reliance by the Commonwealth is a telling measure of its economic incompetence as a recent comment points out, ‘Business and states depending on large population growth are facing a coronavirus shock with the Morrison government expecting a fall of up to 300,000 moving to Australia over the next two years’. Immigration is a colonial hangover and not unique to Australia, but was universal, beginning at first with Ireland where plantation culture practices were initiated before spreading to the West Indies in concert with the slave trade, then the USA, Canada, Africa, and Taiwan, to name just a few examples.
Rapid population growth in Sydney and Melbourne is accompanied by a series of ills. A race to see which is the most expensive and unliveable city is entrenched bad policy, and a hangover from colonial economics that has no place in a proper sensible economic policy for a richly diverse value-adding economy which has matured and moved on from selling rocks.
Australian desperately needs to develop decentralised initiatives to take the pressure off the two major capital cities so the backlog of infrastructure can catch up and adequately meet the needs of these desperate metropolises, which, if anything, need to shed population.
Farrelly has supplied a troubling and utterly believable history of greed, willful ignorance, and corruption in the state of NSW and deserves our undying gratitude for her courage in taking the unpopular stand as a whistle-blower.
Lewis Mumford has largely been forgotten but had strong opinions on what he termed ‘the slavery of large numbers’, which promoted ‘sprawling giantism’ that in turn caused greater and more intense congestion. We today are witnessing the global phenomenon of the removal of quantitative limits on urban growth. Under the pressure of population, the metropolitan economy is forced to grow inorganically, indeed cancerously by a continuous breaking down of old tissues, and an overgrowth of formless new tissue. Mumford noted that the farther one moves away from the centre, the urban growth becomes ever more aimless and discontinuous, more diffuse and unfocused. Because the national government refuses to plan ahead and take responsibility for the population growth it has initiated, in the absence of intelligent economic planning Australia faces in the immediate future urban chaos - fuelling rising social tensions with the potential to tear it apart and explode multiculturalism.
Farrelly nowhere examines the danger posed by giantism per se, or where this could lead. The Washington Post dubbed Australia the ‘poster child for climate change’, a deserved criticism taken on board by the international media which asked aloud how long Australia will continue to be habitable. Killing Sydney should be read by everyone who loves Sydney and is conscious of the damage the Commonwealth and NSW state governments have mindlessly wrought by egregious policy failures and the political abdication of responsibility.
Sydney Harbour resembles Marilyn Monroe; it is beauteous and wonderful, seductive, and everyone wants a piece of it. Therein lies the danger of extreme exploitation and greed shutting off visual access behind a continuous wall of towers as has occurred at Surfers Paradise, or should one say, paradise-no-longer. Like so much else in Australian life and culture, any individual with a vision aspiring to greatness will be cut down, the work bowdlerised and rendered second rate. Farrelly recommends the public get ‘involved in making this city into its best, kindest and most generous self—Sydney could easily be every bit as loveable, a century hence, as when I first breathed its air. Such an outcome in 2122 is extremely unlikely, however desirable, whilst Australia continues to use high immigration as its prime instrument to drive the economy, while at the same time, refusing to plan for and build essential infrastructure ahead of time, supported by a national ecologically sustainable plan.
A 1930s children's history of architecture offers the following advice to those of us who walk ‘carelessly by, with hardly a glance, just because we have never been introduced to them [buildings]…If you read it very carefully , a curious thing will happen. You will find yourself looking at every building you meet, and will discover, to your joy and surprise, that the streets of the city, which you used to think dull and uninteresting, are full of a new and wonderful interest.’ If we hope to save Sydney from ending as a chaotic ugly mess, we could do no better than taking this advice to heart.
Philip Drew is a Sydney architectural historian and critic. His most recent book is New Tent Architecture, published by Thames & Hudson.
Philip Drew gives his response to Elizabeth Farrelly's new book.
posted 01/02/22
THE RISE AND RISE AND EXPLOSION OF SYDNEY
Elizabeth Farrelly, KILLING SYDNEY: The Fight for Sydney’s Soul
Picador, Pan Macmillan Australia, Sydney, 2021
$34. 99, 375 pp.
Elizabeth Farrelly needs no introduction to readers of the Sydney Morning Herald. Until recently she was a hard-hitting columnist and untiring critic of planning malpractices and collusion by the government with powerful developer interests. Killing Sydney assembles a lifetime engagement as a Sydney city councillor initially, activist and columnist on civic affairs. A New Zealand architect trained in philosophy, Farrelly brought intellectual rigour and expertise to reporting and her latest tract collects many examples or political interventions, interference and planning law subverted, observed first-hand, which will infuriate the honest.
While Farrelly poses the question “Is Sydney Full”, she seems unwilling to challenge the prevailing consensus that city size is not a problem, and thereby complacently sets aside all the troubling issues of resources and environment, instead confining herself to how best to accommodate an ever larger population. This is a subject sensible demographers worry about—the ongoing absence, indeed avoidance—of a sustainable population plan for Australia, dealing with its geography, ecology, environmental degradation, and climate change inaction. Analysis of Australia’s distorted urban structure established during colonial times which has resulted growth being concentrated in just two capitals, and absence of second-tier medium-sized cities under two million to alleviate the distorting effect of high immigration levels is never addressed. Island Australia, it has to be said, is a veranda country with its population confined to a narrow 10 km deep coastal strip or land-veranda in a few capital cities inherited from colonial times, and an empty, hot, furnace-like, largely arid desert interior.
What drives the insatiable population growth, who are the population boosters, and who profits? Australia is founded on immigration, of that there can be no argument. Why must migration go on indefinitely unquestioned as a central sacred plank of national policy? Is there a responsible or sustainable size or limit, in view of Australia’s peculiar geography? Wouldn’t it be wise to manage immigration when danger signs arise and throttle down rapid urban expansion and thus regulate the pace to avoid catastrophe as has happened all too repeatedly throughout history. Australia has no population plan at the present time that would set a limit according to what can be sustainably managed. Not even a target! It was recently noted that two-thirds of our population growth is from net overseas migration and our population expanding at the rate of another Canberra every year. A single year’s increase exceeds the estimated number of First Peoples in 1788. It has taken a century for Canberra to establish itself, which is a measure of how slow and costly it is to create self-sustaining new cities away from the coast inland. Most people think we have a problem.
What must we expect if Kevin Rudd’s target of a Big Australia numbering 50 million is achieved, how great will the damage to the environment will there be and what will Sydney and Melbourne, Australia’ two largest cities, look like? Where will all the new arrivals live, and where will the funding to build 12 new two million sized cities come from, failing that, to reconfigure Melbourne and Sydney to hold 10 million. Has anyone considered the details, impacts and costs of Big Australia and the rise and rise and final explosion of Sydney north and south along the coast or leapfrogging over the Blue Mountains. Is there a plan—has anyone considered the quality of life, water, loss of habitat, energy consequences?
Earlier in the year, E. Lippmann, an architect keenly interested in such questions, published Sydney XXXL. The title invokes clothing size to highlight the current crisis of Sydney, which like Topsy, is a size XXXL bursting at its seams, over-weight, and debilitated by an inefficient metabolism. Lippmann considers the ecological consequences, the price to daily living of an unfit spread-out metropolis with a failing heart. Why big anyway? What is the attraction of big - it certainly cannot be quality of life for the average citizen or improved standard of living, much less creativity. Livable cities enjoy populations less than two million, a few, to name Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Oslo and Stockholm, are much less. A large population tells us nothing about the quality of life, happiness, and creativity of a city. Size is a meaningless abstraction, a number. Big equates with carelessness, loss of control, chaos. Who benefits from runaway population growth? The rich, certainly not the poor, not the workers who cannot afford sky-high real estate prices and galloping cost of new infrastructure? Bigger is little more than an empty government slogan to appease business and developers who are its subscribers. Where will the new arrivals live? Has anyone thought about that? What are the costs of a soaring population on Sydney, is the cost even in terms of declining living standards, overcrowding, congestion, pollution, power and water supply and basic services? To wellbeing? Sydney is stressed to breaking point now, what will it look like with double that population. Rapid unplanned growth will result in a steeper decline. Farrelly sets out the present day planning ills: “Minimised government intervention, hear-total reliance on markets instead of planning, the substitution of contractual relationships for professional trust, the repudiation of development control as ‘red tape’, developer-funded self-certification and upzoning as a way to fund public infrastructure have dramatically energised the wrecking ball and diminished the city’s sense of public trust.” All of which is true.
Immigration was a key engine of colonisation which over time has established itself as a sacred feature in the national psyche. Multiculturism disguises and distracts attention from its distasteful colonial origin and addiction. Colonisation entailed the seizure, displacement of the native people. The polite word used was ‘extirpate’. We today would probably substitute genocide as being more accurate. It was never represented as such but that was the reality, under the misleading term terra nullius, or, more accurately, terror nullius. Having emptied Australia of its native population it was necessary to re-populate it with a new labour force, a measure fulfilled by immigration, initially a punishment for convicted felons, afterwards incentivised and replaced by the offer of free land to settlers and selectors
.
Why have colonial administrations and later state governments not ended migration at some point, but rather have enshrined it as a permanent policy fixture? Australian immigration is driven by an abstract economic rationale that endless growth and great size represent an uncontested good in and of its own right.
What is ignored is the actual cost incurred by rapid population increase in building additional infrastructure to accommodate the new arrivals even when no effort is taken to build new cities or invest in the housing, roads, transportation and the myriad basic services needed for to accommodate them. The worst feature is the lack of preparation in advance, placing an enormous burden on Australia’s two largest cities Melbourne and Sydney, with a lesser impact on its other colonial capitals around the coast. The Commonwealth government which controls the throttle simply passes on these costs to the states which lack its taxing powers, thus leaving the Commonwealth in control while ignoring any following responsibility to deal with the consequences. Immigration is a convenient back door, if frequently abused lever, inherited from colonial days with which to lift economic growth. Should anyone doubt it, immigration is a ready if mindless substitute for a national economic plan. The over-reliance by the Commonwealth is a telling measure of its economic incompetence as a recent comment points out, ‘Business and states depending on large population growth are facing a coronavirus shock with the Morrison government expecting a fall of up to 300,000 moving to Australia over the next two years’. Immigration is a colonial hangover and not unique to Australia, but was universal, beginning at first with Ireland where plantation culture practices were initiated before spreading to the West Indies in concert with the slave trade, then the USA, Canada, Africa, and Taiwan, to name just a few examples.
Rapid population growth in Sydney and Melbourne is accompanied by a series of ills. A race to see which is the most expensive and unliveable city is entrenched bad policy, and a hangover from colonial economics that has no place in a proper sensible economic policy for a richly diverse value-adding economy which has matured and moved on from selling rocks.
Australian desperately needs to develop decentralised initiatives to take the pressure off the two major capital cities so the backlog of infrastructure can catch up and adequately meet the needs of these desperate metropolises, which, if anything, need to shed population.
Farrelly has supplied a troubling and utterly believable history of greed, willful ignorance, and corruption in the state of NSW and deserves our undying gratitude for her courage in taking the unpopular stand as a whistle-blower.
Lewis Mumford has largely been forgotten but had strong opinions on what he termed ‘the slavery of large numbers’, which promoted ‘sprawling giantism’ that in turn caused greater and more intense congestion. We today are witnessing the global phenomenon of the removal of quantitative limits on urban growth. Under the pressure of population, the metropolitan economy is forced to grow inorganically, indeed cancerously by a continuous breaking down of old tissues, and an overgrowth of formless new tissue. Mumford noted that the farther one moves away from the centre, the urban growth becomes ever more aimless and discontinuous, more diffuse and unfocused. Because the national government refuses to plan ahead and take responsibility for the population growth it has initiated, in the absence of intelligent economic planning Australia faces in the immediate future urban chaos - fuelling rising social tensions with the potential to tear it apart and explode multiculturalism.
Farrelly nowhere examines the danger posed by giantism per se, or where this could lead. The Washington Post dubbed Australia the ‘poster child for climate change’, a deserved criticism taken on board by the international media which asked aloud how long Australia will continue to be habitable. Killing Sydney should be read by everyone who loves Sydney and is conscious of the damage the Commonwealth and NSW state governments have mindlessly wrought by egregious policy failures and the political abdication of responsibility.
Sydney Harbour resembles Marilyn Monroe; it is beauteous and wonderful, seductive, and everyone wants a piece of it. Therein lies the danger of extreme exploitation and greed shutting off visual access behind a continuous wall of towers as has occurred at Surfers Paradise, or should one say, paradise-no-longer. Like so much else in Australian life and culture, any individual with a vision aspiring to greatness will be cut down, the work bowdlerised and rendered second rate. Farrelly recommends the public get ‘involved in making this city into its best, kindest and most generous self—Sydney could easily be every bit as loveable, a century hence, as when I first breathed its air. Such an outcome in 2122 is extremely unlikely, however desirable, whilst Australia continues to use high immigration as its prime instrument to drive the economy, while at the same time, refusing to plan for and build essential infrastructure ahead of time, supported by a national ecologically sustainable plan.
A 1930s children's history of architecture offers the following advice to those of us who walk ‘carelessly by, with hardly a glance, just because we have never been introduced to them [buildings]…If you read it very carefully , a curious thing will happen. You will find yourself looking at every building you meet, and will discover, to your joy and surprise, that the streets of the city, which you used to think dull and uninteresting, are full of a new and wonderful interest.’ If we hope to save Sydney from ending as a chaotic ugly mess, we could do no better than taking this advice to heart.
Philip Drew is a Sydney architectural historian and critic. His most recent book is New Tent Architecture, published by Thames & Hudson.