On the night of the opening ceremony, 24 January, Cyclone Wanda crossed the coast at Double Island Point north of Noosa. It didn’t have the devastating winds of cyclones like Ada and Althea that smashed the Whitsundays in 1970 and Townsville in 1971, and it weakened rapidly, but the monsoonal trough it forced south to Brisbane stayed there for days. Small oscillations in its movement and intensity generated many stretches of drenching rain.

Across Brisbane, 600 millimetres fell on the first three days of competition in Christchurch — twenty-four inches, or two feet, in the language of the time. This was three times the city’s average rainfall for January, its wettest month. On 28 January the trough weakened and retreated north. A drier, cooler air mass from the south finally brought some blue sky to the capital of the Sunshine State.

The river peaked in the early hours of 29 January at a height not seen since 1893. Residents woke to find about 13,000 buildings damaged. Children due back at school that morning got an extra week added to their Christmas holidays.

Across the Tasman in Christchurch, Australia had won a bag of gold medals while the river rose. Raelene Boyle retained the 100 metres sprint title she won in Edinburgh, fourteen-year-old Newcastle schoolgirl Sonya Gray won the women’s 100 metres freestyle and Mexico Olympic champion Mike Wenden the men’s. As the waters receded, Boyle and Gray added the 200 metres to their 100-metre golds and Don Wagstaff completed a double in the diving pool.

The deputy lord mayor reported Brisbane’s promotional T-shirts “were without doubt the most sought-after item at the Games.” Its souvenir match boxes and coasters “were widely distributed and caused much interest.” Sandwiched amid coverage of the floods, the full-page advertisement for Brisbane’s bid in the Christchurch’s main paper, the Press, caused “some concern,” but it was not fatal because “most people realised that occurrences such as these were not the normal thing.”

Whether or not the 1974 flood was abnormal depended on the time scale. The “River City” had not seen a flood as high in the twentieth century. During the nineteenth century it had seen four as high, including three much higher, and a total of eight floods classed as “major” according to the Bureau of Meteorology’s current classification system (3.5 metres at the City Gauge). Only two other “major” floods occurred in the twentieth century, the last in February 1931. This century is different again. The February 2022 flood was Brisbane’s second major flood after the even higher one in January 2011, and a further “minor” one occurred in January 2013.

The inaugural meeting of Brisbane’s Commonwealth Games Committee was held two months before the Christchurch Games. Chaired by lord mayor and sports fan Clem Jones, the meeting was told an application had already been lodged for Brisbane to host the 1982 Games. Business representatives thought the city council’s report on possible venues was technically excellent but lacked ambition. By 1982, they thought, the city “would deserve a sporting complex of world-wide standard.”

Council representatives baulked at the zeal. They “could not commit the City to structures which could become ‘white elephants,’ or to a financial burden which it might be virtually impossible to meet.” After the floods, the committee’s next meeting was deferred, but not for long. Lord Mayor Jones and his deputy flew over the city in the 4KQ helicopter and were “amazed at the number of places which could be regarded as possible sites for the Games.” A sites sub-committee was whisked around nine possible venues in a council bus just three months after the flood’s peak.

The choice narrowed to the Northside versus the Southside. Deputy Mayor Walsh, representing the Chermside ward on the Northside, wanted Marchant Park redeveloped. Mayor Jones, representing the Southside’s Camp Hill ward, liked a site in the new suburb of Nathan, adjacent to the Mt Gravatt Cemetery and Griffith University, which would accept its first students the following year.

In late July, six months after the flood, a decision was reached: the Southside. It would be closer for visitors staying at the Gold Coast and more convenient for residents of the rapidly expanding southern suburbs.

The campaign for Brisbane to host the 1982 Games succeeded, although the likely “phenomenal” cost was much criticised. At the Montreal Olympics in 1976, where the Commonwealth Games Federation met to decide the venue for the ’82 Games, Brisbane found itself the only bidder. Montreal’s diabolical financial outcome scared others away.

New lord mayor Frank Sleeman assured Brisbane ratepayers they would pay only for the “bare essentials.” A new stadium would be built in the new suburb, but it would have a permanent grandstand seating just 10,000. “Temporary” seating would accommodate another 48,000. Work began immediately and the venue was first used in late 1975. Two years later, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, it was named the “Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Sports Centre,” or “QEII.”

There was one big problem with siting the main stadium on the top of a hill. One of the signature events at major games, the marathon, traditionally starts and finishes in the stadium. After the local distance-running community rejected a plan for the runners to complete three laps along the nearby South East Freeway, ending with a sharp climb back up to the stadium, organisers agreed to start and finish the race away from the stadium. (It was men’s only; the first women’s marathon was run at the 1986 Games in Edinburgh.)

A flatter, “city” course was mapped, like those becoming popular in places like New York, Chicago and London. For Brisbane, this meant using the river. The new route started and finished on the south bank, opposite the CBD. It headed out through the city and “The Valley,” across Breakfast Creek to the river at Kingsford Smith Drive, then doubled back to the river bank around the University of Queensland. TV cameras would capture the city at its most picturesque, spectators would get accessible viewing spots, runners would appreciate the cool breeze and flat ground in a city that doesn’t have much of it.

Held the day before the closing ceremony, the marathon did not disappoint. Big crowds lined the route. Australian favourite Robert De Castella found himself well behind two Tanzanians who were close to world record pace at the halfway mark. He set off to chase alone, catching Gidamis Shahanga just before they passed a heaving Regatta Hotel, then ran side-by-side with Juma Ikaanga for a kilometre along Coronation Drive (named in 1937 when George VI was crowned). Morning peak hour traffic on the Sydney Harbour Bridge slowed as commuters tuned car radios to the struggle. Finally, “Deek” made a decisive break and won by twelve seconds.

Building the main stadium for the Commonwealth Games on a hill in the southern suburbs had helped, paradoxically, and indirectly, to re-energise an old conceit. Decades earlier, tourism promotions dubbed Brisbane the “River City.” Soon, the first of several major arts and cultural organisations began setting up on the South Bank. Expo 88 would draw millions of people from the suburbs, the state, the nation and the world to the banks of the big river.

Despite the best intentions, QEII struggled to avoid the fate those Brisbane City Councillors feared: becoming a white elephant. Track and field events take centre stage in Olympic and Commonwealth Games but local athletics events, even the biggest interschool carnivals, attract much smaller crowds at other times.

For a while, in the 1990s and early 2000s, QEII was back in business. On joining the national rugby league competition in the late 1980s, the Brisbane Broncos played at the sport’s traditional home in the city, Lang Park. A few years later, after the temporary seating at QEII was made a little more permanent, they moved there and started drawing Commonwealth Games–like crowds to the renamed “ANZ Stadium.”

Annual State of Origin matches against New South Wales, though, stayed at Lang Park. The regular monster crowds at ANZ declined. Eventually the state government and others decided to revive the old cauldron. The two “Origin” matches played at ANZ in 2001 and 2002 while Lang Park was rebuilt were the last.

In 2003, the Maroons and Broncos returned to the new “Suncorp Stadium.” They have been there ever since, sharing the venue with the Queensland Reds (rugby union) and Brisbane Roar (soccer). Last year, it was at Suncorp that the Matildas played their World Cup quarter-final against France, which ended in that epic, victorious penalty shoot-out.

QEII went back to being a track and field venue, the Queensland Sports and Athletics Centre, “QSAC.” It was used as an evacuation centre during the 2011 floods. After Brisbane won the right to hold the 2032 Olympics, there was a chance it might be revived again as a temporary venue for cricket and AFL while the traditional home of those sports in Queensland, the Gabba, was being remade as the main Olympic stadium at a cost of $2.7 billion.

That was until Monday, when QSAC got an even bigger future. Queensland’s government considered the recommendations of a committee set up to propose further options after the earlier rejection of the Gabba rebuild. The committee recommended that a wholly new stadium be built at Victoria Park, at a cost of over $3 billion, and eventually replace the Gabba as the home of cricket and AFL in Brisbane. Both recommendations were rejected. (Victoria Park was one of the sites rejected by Clem Jones’s 1974 committee.)

The Gabba is going to stay the Gabba, with a modest upgrade. Victoria Park is going to stay Victoria Park.

The winner is… QSAC! The stadium on the hill will rise again to host the track and field events at an Olympic Games fifty years after it staged them for the Commonwealth Games. At a cost of $1.6 billion, permanent seating will be increased to 14,000, and total capacity will touch 40,000 for the period of the Olympics, some way below the 1982 full houses.

The other winner is Suncorp Stadium, with its larger capacity of more than 50,000, which will get the opening and closing ceremonies.

The marathoners? They will surely follow the river again, winding out, back, out and back, sticking to the old, deceptively gentle watercourse that has always drawn people to this place. •

Information about Commonwealth Games planning is taken from Brisbane City Council committee minutes and files, and about the 1974 floods from the Department of Science/Bureau of Meteorology’s “Brisbane Floods January 1974” (AGPS, 1974). Other information drawn from Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie (2023), Margaret Cook’s A River with a City Problem (2019) and Jackie Ryan’s We’ll Show the World: Expo 88 (2018), all published by UQP.

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Within three minutes of posting, two members of the group had commented on top of each other to say the photo was taken at the corner of Liverpool and Elizabeth Streets, Hobart, looking up what is now Elizabeth Mall towards the GPO clock tower on the left. That’s how quick and attentive people are in groups like this. And they were correct, I know the place perfectly well. I don’t live there anymore, but this is my home city.

Old photographs are posted in this group several times a day and each attracts many comments, and sometimes dozens. This is just one local history group among countless others on Facebook and other social media platforms. Nostalgia is the main theme, certainly, but with every post, comment and share, memories are stimulated and connections with place and community are enacted.

Recollections are often detailed and intricate. Concerning the date of the rainy-day photograph someone suggested the women’s coats indicate late 1950s. “A bit earlier I think,” came a swift reply. “By the mid–late 1950s hemlines had risen a few inches to a bit below the knee. I remember them well from my teenage dressmaking days!”

Others leapt in to name the make of the cars, the consensus being that the one in the foreground is an Austin A40 Devon, although a few people suggested a Hillman Minx. “I immediately could smell the upholstery,” said one. “Go Dad!”

Still others noticed the banks. People love to reminisce about banks. “What happened to the beautiful old bank on the corner?” someone asked. It’s still there, came a reply, now a branch of the National Australia Bank, but the clock has been removed recently, they thought, having not displayed the correct time for a while.

The Hobart Savings Bank on the extreme right of the image has been pulled down and replaced with what one commenter described as a “modern monstrosity.” Someone else claimed to still have a pink bankbook from there with a few pounds in the account, but: “I suppose the government has pinched that.” This person remembered being interviewed by the manager there for a home loan, $20,000 over twenty-five years at 6 per cent. “Real service back then by real people, all those tellers. We have lost so much.”

By this time I was thoroughly engrossed in the world of this photograph. I sent it to my two brothers. Yes, that’s an Austin A40, said Paul, and the car with the smashed-up grille in the centre of the photograph is a Chevrolet (“1939 I think”). He noticed the traffic lights, which I had missed, and how all the pedestrians are wearing titfers. Hats, that is. (I had to look that up.)

Mark remembered the Kodak store still trading in the 1970s. “Mind you, I remember when Hobart had half-a-dozen good photo/camera stores,” he added. As a keen photographer himself, he appreciated the mood and story in the photograph. It’s harder than it looks to take pictures that do that.

For me the main feature is the GPO clock. Our grandfather worked in that building, and I picture him glancing out the window at that very moment, hoping the rain might have eased in time for his bus ride home.

I like to know the origins of things, so I sought out the photograph’s descriptive information at the State Library of Tasmania. It does have a fairly precise date, May 1953. (So, the Facebook commenter knowledgeable about 1950s hemlines was right.) It is one of a series of about 12,000 images made between 1951 and 1973 by the Tasmanian Education Department. Hats off to the library staff for their work to preserve and digitise this series; it’s magnificent.

The photos cover a wide range of subjects other than schools and education, suggesting that the department’s photographers could be called on for a variety of assignments. Our rainy-day photograph shows that they might also fill the end of a roll on the way back to the office with whatever took their fancy.

Mark is right, it’s the mood of the photograph that is captivating. Wet streets are eternally interesting for photographers and artists, and this unknown photographer appears to have sheltered under an awning and brought the shutter down just as everyone is too busy getting out of the rain to notice or care.

See how they have caught the Chevrolet’s crumpled grille just as it swung around the corner towards us? This car has had a bingle, as my father would say, the sort of thing that could occur on any wet day. Central Hobart was not built for cars, and yet in these postwar years a lot more people could afford them. The result: frustration.

Then there’s the woman on the right who draws our gaze as she walks briskly away from us into the frame. With her reflection shimmering up from the pavement, she turns provincial Hobart into a scene John le Carré could have conceived. The cut of her coat is pure 1950s. Clothes rationing is out, Christian Dior’s New Look is in, and this woman can afford the latest modes.

Other women appear to be making do with their older things. The woman with the basket crossing the street, head down against the rain: she could have been wearing that severe jacket and skirt since the 1930s. She’d be about our grandmother’s age, I should think, part of a generation for whom frugality was a necessity and later a habit.

The more I look at the photograph, the deeper I fall into a liminal state between connection and disconnection. I know this place, and yet I don’t. I belong and yet I don’t. I think it’s the raindrops bouncing up off the road that gives the image its perpetual drama. Where is all that water going to go? In Hobart, it goes into the Hobart Rivulet.

Autumn is when the rivulet is most prone to flooding. In June 1954, thirteen months after our photograph was taken, flash floods forced several feet of water into the basement of O’Conor’s shoe shop. You can see the shop sign in the photograph. Staff working there to save the stock might have drowned if the floor-level windows had given way. There had been bad floods in 1923 and 1947, but the 1954 floods were said to be the worst in a hundred years.

The rivulet emerges on the slopes of kunanyi/Mount Wellington and runs through present-day Fern Tree and South Hobart. Reaching the city, it ducks underground and up again a few times before disappearing for a kilometre or so directly under the CBD. (In 2016 the rivulet wall was breached during building works, causing more than $15 million in damage to the Myer department store and several retailers in the adjacent Cat and Fiddle Arcade.) Then it comes up for air for a short stretch parallel to lower Collins Street, disappears, and finally meets the River Derwent at an outlet north of Macquarie Point.

For thousands of years First Nations Tasmanians moving seasonally through the Hobart region would have understood the rivulet’s seasons and moods, and how it connected with other natural watercourses to support animal and birdlife. Then, in February 1804, lieutenant-governor David Collins decided that this was the ideal place to establish a settlement. The “Run of clear fresh Water” he found there played a large part in his decision. Efforts the previous year at Risdon Cove, on the eastern side of the Derwent, had faltered partly for lack of reliable clean water.

Collins understood the need to protect the rivulet, and within weeks had issued instructions to the settlers not to pollute it or destroy the “underwood” close to its banks. By 1805 a footbridge had been built across it connecting a bush track leading north, which later became Elizabeth Street. This bridge was replaced in 1816 by a brick structure named Wellington Bridge after the famous duke. Today it is covered over by Elizabeth Street but a small void protected by a grille affords the curious shopper a reminder of Hobart’s earliest days.

The first European settlers quickly learned that although the rivulet could sink to a trickle in the summer, heavy rain or snowfall on the mountain could turn it into a torrent. And this was even before the town authorities decided to alter its course for the first time, in 1825, with what was known as the “New Cut” along a section of lower Collins Street.

The New Cut diverted the rivulet towards another creek and sent both of them away from their natural bed, which had been under the present site of the City Hall. Their confluence had formed a silty beach prone to flooding, and the diversion was designed to facilitate land reclamation in support of burgeoning waterfront industries.

Early maps of Hobart — this one for instance — show how the rivulet once pursued its own gentle course from the mountain to the river, and how ruthless was the grid of streets imposed on top of it. Over time the rivulet has been diverted, dammed and forced through numerous pipes, tunnels and culverts: controlled and exploited, in other words, for the settlers’ convenience.

David Collins’s instructions to protect the rivulet were ignored, and by the mid 1820s it had become polluted by refuse from humans, animals, tanneries and distilleries. Outbreaks of disease were inevitable. In 1828 the town sheriff reported that the rivulet had become a “receptacle for all the filth and impurity of the town.”

The strip along lower Collins Street was the worst, and just as likely to flood as before. It has never been a pretty part of town, as you can see. In high school I had to catch a bus along here and my moody teenaged thoughts were not enhanced by having to stare at a tired old watercourse while I waited. Residential housing had all gone by then and I didn’t know that these streets used to be known unofficially as “Wapping,” after the working-class waterfront area of London. For a hundred years or more, the people of Hobart’s Wapping suffered the most from flooding and pollution, as the poorest people often do.

Efforts over many decades to improve the supply and quality of Hobart’s water finally culminated in 1895 with the completion of two major reservoirs at the Waterworks Reserve above South Hobart, with a combined capacity of 500 million litres. They still supply Hobart’s drinking water.

The rivulet can still rise up in anger. Calamitous flooding in 1960 led to new control measures, but in 2018 the section along lower Collins Street once again turned into a seething and very dangerous torrent. A group of urban geographers noted then that the problem (not unique to Hobart) is that urban planning measures have become disconnected from nature and overlook the ecological functions of watercourses. Built-up areas deprive a city of green spaces that act like natural sponges. It’s hard to apply water-sensitive planning principles to a city already built.

At the end of my meditation on the photograph taken in Hobart in 1953 I returned to the original question: where does all that water go? How do we prevent our cities from becoming alienated from their natural environmental features? The upper reaches of the rivulet are better managed now, but the challenges are real. Still, the open waterway is fouled by rubbish and other pollutants, some from the South Hobart tip.

If you have fifty-three minutes to spare, spend them with Pete Walsh, the Platypus Guardian. Pete, who first sought solace at the rivulet after a serious medical diagnosis, was drawn there to reconnect with something he thought he was losing. Sitting on the bank one day he was astonished when a platypus emerged from the water and zoomed up to him, wiggling her bill as if she had something to say. He realised that a fragile population of platypuses was still managing — against all odds — to call the Hobart Rivulet home.

The more Pete visited the rivulet the more often he saw this zooming platypus, so he named her Zoom. That profound moment of connection inspired in Pete a passion to do what he could to preserve a habitat for these ancient animals, and a whole community of supporters has since joined him. If Zoom has a message, it must surely be to ask us to tread more lightly on this earth. •

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She didn’t repeat that call in front of 1300 delegates at the National Housing Conference in Brisbane, but she came close, saying it should be possible to have a grown-up conversation about tax. She said Australia’s taxes encouraged property investors to focus on capital gains rather than a steady income from rents. A “healthy” housing market, she said, would prioritise “homes not assets.”

Lloyd-Hurwitz now chairs the interim National Housing Supply and Affordability Council, set up at the start of the year to advise the federal government on housing policy. In wide-ranging comments, she spoke passionately about the need to build a better and more secure rental sector, pointing out that more than 200,000 poor households hand over at least half their income to their landlords. She described housing as essential infrastructure akin to schools and hospitals, something that can’t be left to the private sector to sort out.

Yet a major thrust of the federal government’s response to the housing crisis does just that. In the updated National Housing Accord accepted by national cabinet, Labor wants the private sector to build 1.2 million “well-located” homes in five years, in the expectation that those new dwellings will bring down prices and make finding an affordable home easier.

Meeting this ambitious target would require an unprecedented rate of building: 60,000 new dwellings every quarter for five years straight. Steven Rowley from Curtin University told the conference that Australia has never achieved that level of residential construction, and only briefly approached it in early 2017. Currently, at just over 40,000 new homes a quarter, the industry is falling well short.

The federal government sees more efficient planning as the key to unlocking the residential construction boom required to meet its target. A blueprint adopted by national cabinet and supported by $500 million in competitive grants aims to streamline approvals, boost local decision-making capacity and fund essential infrastructure. Canberra is also holding out $3 billion worth of incentives to get the states and territories to improve planning systems. The money will flow as bonus payments once a threshold level of new dwellings is passed.

Rowley doubts such measures will be enough. While people love to blame the planning system for a lack of housing supply, he said, it’s market conditions that determine construction levels. And market conditions “just aren’t right.” “The last three years have seen unprecedented cost growth,” he added, “and that means development is unlikely outside the highest return areas.”

Tanya Steinbeck, chief executive of the Urban Development Institute of Australia WA, spoke about the situation in Perth, where construction costs render medium- and high-density residential projects unviable unless the underlying land values are already high. In other words, only upmarket developments in wealthy suburbs are likely to proceed.

According to Rowley, the only way we’ll get 1.2 million new homes is by dramatically rebalancing developers’ costs and the prices they can command. Construction stimulated by a sharp increase in property prices and rents would defeat the purpose of a scheme that aims to make housing more affordable.

Falling costs offer a more hopeful way forward, but Rowley believes costs have been driven up by factors that are largely beyond government control — labour shortages and the rising price of building materials, for example, and more expensive finance. Governments don’t set interest rates and have little influence over the cost of timber, bricks and steel. And while they can, over time, train more tradespeople, governments can’t stop qualified workers defecting to get better wages in the mining sector.

Even if costs moderate and supply chains flow more smoothly, it will take time for industry to respond to improved conditions. The construction tap can be turned off swiftly, said Rowley, but turning it on again is much slower.

Innovation holds out some promise. “We can do things faster without compromising quality,” said Lloyd-Hurwitz, describing an experiment carried out by Mirvac. Twelve terrace houses were built using traditional methods and twelve using a modular approach, with components of the houses made in factories and assembled on site. The modular homes were completed more quickly, with less waste and less neighbourhood disruption.

More generally, prefabrication is growing rapidly. It can help overcome skills shortages and the difficulty of getting workers and materials into remote locations like western Queensland.

But possible savings from innovation may be offset by other factors that make building more expensive. After all, we don’t just need more houses, we need better houses. From the floor of the conference, delegates called for homes that people with a disability can live in easily and homes that allow residents to “age in place.” Updated design standards often increase costs in the short term, even if prices come down again once economies of scale are achieved.

Extreme weather events, meanwhile, are prompting tighter planning controls over where homes can be located, and more stringent building codes in areas at risk from floods and fires. Energy-efficient homes are needed in greater numbers, built from materials with lower embodied emissions, but governments are dragging their feet.

In 2022, after years of negotiation, the states and territories agreed to making seven-star energy efficiency mandatory under the National Construction Code, with the changes to take effect in May this year. After industry lobbying, most states have delayed implementation, saying builders need more time to prepare. The result is grim: no improvement in housing efficiency standards since 2009. Ralph Horne from RMIT told the conference that if higher standards eventually take effect, they will only match ratings for new homes achieved twenty years ago in comparable nations.

The qualifier “well-located” poses another challenge to building 1.2 million homes. It’s code for increasing urban density in established suburbs using medium-rise developments to fill in the “missing middle” — a reference to both the lack of new homes in middle-ring suburbs and the lack of mid-rise apartment projects. A break with the pattern of going up in the centre and out at the edges has so far proved elusive.

More than two decades ago, the Victorian government’s Melbourne 2030 plan aimed to locate a “substantial proportion” of new housing in sites that had good access to services and transport, and to set “clear limits to metropolitan Melbourne’s outward development.” The aim has been partially met by high-rise inner-city towers sprouting up in the CBD, but greenfield estates on the urban fringe continue to accommodate most of Melbourne’s population growth. Some “transit oriented” residential development has sprung up around train stations — Box Hill is a notable example — but new housing in middle-ring suburbs is otherwise limited.

As Lloyd-Hurwitz pointed out, the average dwelling density of middle-ring suburbs is typically around 750 homes per square kilometre, whereas new greenfield estates now achieve densities of 2000 homes (thanks in part to smaller block sizes). Tanya Steinbeck said that while Perth’s established suburbs are dominated by freestanding houses with three to five bedrooms, the growing demand is for one-bedroom apartments, leading to massive underutilisation of existing housing stock.

Transformation of the urban landscape could be encouraged, Steinbeck said, by shifting from stamp duty paid on sales to a broad-based property tax, another long-sought policy reform. This would reduce the financial barrier to people “right sizing” their homes as their circumstances change. The ACT has gone done this path, but other states and territories are unlikely to follow unless the federal government plays a coordinating role. So far, it’s shown no inclination to do so.

There was talk of easier permitting for backyard granny flats, hardly a recipe for top-quality urban redevelopment. But Lloyd-Hurwitz also referred to Auckland’s 2016 “upzoning” to enable the conversion of family homes on suburban blocks into mid-rise developments without running the gauntlet of planning objections. This has been credited with precipitating a boom townhouse development that has slowed the increase in Auckland rents and real estate prices relative to other New Zealand cities (although causal link is disputed).

The aim, said Steinbeck, is not just density, but density done well. The risk of liberalising planning rules is that we’ll get what she called “dumb density” — small-scale developers replacing family homes on large blocks with two or three townhouses that lack energy efficiency and don’t make the best use of scarce land. Such piecemeal infill occurs without upgraded infrastructure and amenity to improve the neighbourhood for all residents.

My conversations with delegates during the conference breaks often came back to this challenge. Doing density well is hard because it means assembling fragmented housing blocks into parcels big enough to develop at scale — few developers have pockets deep enough to engage in such activity and there are few explicit incentives in planning schemes.

The National Housing Accord also includes an aspiration for 20,000 of the 1.2 million “well-located” new homes to be “affordable.” To put it kindly, this is a modest ambition, amounting to less than 2 per cent of all new dwellings over the next five years. If we include the 40,000 social and affordable homes that are supposed to be built with money flowing from the newly established Housing Australia Future Fund and the extra billions extracted by the Greens — and an extra 20,000 dwellings completed independently by state governments over the same time frame (a generous estimate) — that still amounts to only 80,000 “affordable” homes or less than 7 per cent of 1.2 million new dwellings.

Affordable is, in any case, a notoriously vague and contentious term. It’s usually taken to mean rents 20 per cent lower than the prevailing rate for a similar dwelling in the same area. But, as Lloyd-Hurwitz remarked, a discount in a high-priced market isn’t necessarily affordable, especially for tenants on low and moderate incomes.

Despite the challenges, the overall mood at the National Housing Conference was upbeat. As AHURI managing director Michael Fotheringham said in his welcoming remarks, housing has never been more prominent in public discussion than it is today. There was palpable excitement, especially among not-for-profit community housing providers, about bidding for a share of the new funds flowing in their direction. They want to get on with building homes for the people who most need them.

Delegates welcomed the federal government’s efforts to coordinate tenancy reforms via national cabinet so renters around the nation get a better deal, and they are encouraged by the new dynamism apparent at the state level. Since May, Queensland has a dedicated housing department for the first time, led by a minister, Meaghan Scanlon, whose parents both grew up in public housing. Rose Jackson, housing minister in the new NSW government, has launched herself into the job with energy and plain speaking, and Victoria has just released its long-anticipated housing statement.

If there was a general view of the five-year target of 1.2 million homes, it was probably that the ambition is welcome even if it’s unrealistic. Meeting the target would increase Australia’s total housing stock by about 2.4 per cent every year. Curtin University’s Steven Rowley said this could have a moderate impact on rents and house prices, but he doesn’t think it will make homes dramatically more affordable.

What’s needed, he thinks, is sustained public investment to build new social housing in perpetuity, allowing us to steadily build the stock of decent homes that are truly affordable for Australians on the lowest rungs of the income ladder. He worries that the current burst of new funding could again be short-lived. Like everyone else at the conference, I hope he’s wrong. •

Peter Mares facilitated a session at the National Housing Conference and AHURI paid for his travel from Melbourne to Brisbane.

The post Can we build them? appeared first on Inside Story.

This is the Boundary Estate, a public housing scheme that has provided quality homes to working-class Londoners since 1900. It was Britain’s first council housing project and one of the earliest examples anywhere of public investment in affordable homes.

The rise of the estate’s circular garden is reminiscent of an Anglo-Saxon burial mound — and it is a burial place of sorts, interring the rubble of Old Nichol, a notorious East End slum demolished in the 1890s. Described by the Illustrated London News as a “painful and monotonous round of vice, filth and poverty,” Old Nichol was a place of disease and deprivation. Thousands of families crowded into dwellings of just one or two rooms, the walls held together by cheap “billy-sweet,” a mortar that never dried out. Babies born in the slum had a one-in-four chance of dying before their first birthday.

For about eighty years after the Boundary Estate opened, almost all public housing in Britain was “council housing,” built and operated by local authorities. In Australia, state governments took the lead. In both cases public investment dried up in the closing decades of the twentieth century, ushering in a period of decline in the quantity and quality — and the reputation — of public housing.

In both places, housing construction and management increasingly shifted away from governments, local or state, to not-for-profit housing providers, although this process is further advanced in Britain than Australia. What was once known as council or public housing is now generally covered by the broader banner of “social housing.”

My guide through the Boundary Estate is social historian John Boughton, and I’ve drawn liberally on the opening chapter of his book Municipal Dreams, a chronicle of the rise and fall of council housing in Britain, in describing its history. The book grew out of his blog of the same name, launched a decade ago as a retirement project after he left his job teaching history to senior high school students.

“It was completely normal”: the Boundary Estate today. Peter Mares

For Boughton — whose long-term Labour Party membership included what he calls a brief, unremarkable stint as an elected local government official — the neglected subject of council housing chimed with existing political and academic interests. It deserved greater attention, he thought, but he never expected his blog to prove so popular.

“It just took off,” he says. “It caught a moment.” Boughton thinks the contemporary housing crisis has spurred interest in his writing by exposing the limitations of a neoliberal reliance on private capital and free markets to address complex social challenges. “People are starting to look with more sympathetic eyes on the role of the state, in housing in particular.”

Perhaps, too, the blog hit a chord with a generation shaped by council housing. Many of Boughton’s relatives lived on council estates, as did friends and acquaintances. “It was completely normal,” he says. One in three Britons lived in a council home in 1981, and it was often the best housing they had ever experienced.

Today, though, council housing suffers from an image problem almost as bad as Old Nichol’s in the nineteenth century.

I met Boughton soon after the final episode of the hugely popular Happy Valley screened on the BBC. As in many British crime series, part of the action took place on a council estate — in this case in Yorkshire, where a troubled woman was exploited by an unscrupulous criminal duo.

The image of crime- and poverty-ridden housing estates, reinforced time after time in fictional series and news coverage, has stuck. “The tendency to associate council housing with criminality has exaggerated and denigrated the experiences of millions of people currently and in the past,” says Boughton. “That is not to deny problems and missteps along the way. But it is a negative stereotype, and it is self-reinforcing.”

Where problems do arise on particular estates at particular times, they are always shaped by larger forces, he says, and especially the profound effect of demographics.

He cites the Pepys Estate, just south of the Thames in the Borough of Lewisham, which was very popular when it opened in 1973. Built on the site of a former naval dockyard and accommodating 5000 people in 1500 homes, it was one of the Greater London Council’s largest and most prestigious projects. Design innovations included basement garages to separate pedestrians from cars and elevated walkways between blocks to encourage neighbourly interaction. In TV dramas, these same locations are now likely to feature as hangouts for loitering gangs and escape routes for villains.

High-rise flats have become particularly reviled for facilitating antisocial behaviour, as if the fault resides in the very fabric of the buildings. Boughton insists the architecture isn’t to blame. “A great variety of estates have suffered problems,” he says. “Low-rise estates too, not just tower blocks.”

The roots of such ills lie elsewhere. In the decade from 1978, Lewisham lost 10,000 jobs and unemployment trebled. By the mid 1980s more than half the borough’s residents aged sixteen to twenty-nine were jobless. The Pepys Estate was hit hard, and an alternative economy sprang up based on drugs and crime. Racism was rife. Rather than fighting to get into a flat, people were begging to be transferred out.

Boughton tells a similar story abou the Park Hill Estate, a 996-flat scheme that replaced some of the worst slums in Sheffield. Completed in 1961, it also had “streets in the sky” — elevated walkways wide enough for children to play on, which enabled neighbours to chat without the noise and disruption of passing traffic. It had shops, pubs, schools, clinics, community centres and, in the words of one resident, other unaccustomed luxuries: “Three bedrooms, hot water, always warm. And the view. It’s lovely, especially at night when it’s all lit up.”

By the early 1980s, though, Park Hill was another towering symbol of council housing failure, its celebrated brutalist architecture blamed for criminality and vandalism. What rarely gets mentioned is that in the intervening decade Sheffield had lost a massive 40,000 jobs.

“Council housing does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in a social and economic context,” says Boughton. “What is happening to these communities is the product of policy and political choices.”

Attitudes towards council housing also changed as Britain became more affluent. “Into the 1960s, it was the best housing most working-class people could aspire to,” says Boughton. “But as owner-occupation became more widespread, council housing was seen as less desirable for sure. There was a psychological shift.”

As the economy declined in the wake of the oil shock and stagflation in the 1970s, public spending fell too. Repair and maintenance were neglected. Labour, which had once believed council housing should meet “general needs,” moved closer to the Conservatives’ view that it was better seen as a welfare safety net reserved for the vulnerable.

At one level, the shift (which was mirrored in Australia) makes sense: the fairest way to manage limited public resources is to prioritise the neediest. Over time, though, social housing was transformed into housing of last resort — an ambulance service that picks people up from the bottom of the cliff rather than a fence preventing anyone from falling.

Forty years later, social housing in both Britain and Australia accommodates an increasingly narrow stratum of society — the very poorest and those experiencing the most layers of disadvantage. This “residualisation” makes it easier, in turn, to stigmatise residents as “troubled” and point to “failed estates” as evidence that public investment in decent housing is a fundamentally flawed ideal.

Residualisation was compounded in 1980s Britain by the hammer blow of Thatcherism. The national government cut investment in council housing and stopped new construction in its tracks. In the year Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher took office, building commenced on nearly 80,000 new council homes in England and Wales. Within a decade, annual new starts had fallen to just 400. But when councils stopped building in England — the green band on the chart below — the private sector failed to pick up the slack. The overall supply of new housing dropped precipitously and has never recovered.

Source: Live table 213, Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government

Determined to convert Britain into a nation of homeowners, Thatcher also introduced the right-to-buy scheme. By the time the Conservatives lost office in 1997, one-in-four council homes had been sold, with prices discounted by between a third and a half of market value (up to a ceiling of £50,000). It amounted to a massive, highly subsidised transfer of public assets into private hands, and most of the receipts went straight to Treasury to retire debt.

Tenants with means were supported to become owner-occupiers; those without got less assistance than before as public investment in council housing dried up. “Typically, the best, most desirable homes got sold and the less desirable units got left,” says Boughton. “It was another form of residualisation.”

For many, this brought windfall profits. Boughton gives the example of a security guard living on a council estate in Camden who bought his flat for £39,000 under the scheme. It was valued at £70,000 at the time. Three decades later, his home was worth £600,000. Not surprisingly, he thought the scheme was “perfect.”

“The irony is that generally the first generation of former tenants who became owner-occupiers then sold off those homes,” Boughton says. Forty per cent of homes bought by their tenants are now back on the private rental market, though in poorer condition and with higher rents than the council houses next door.

“If you walk onto a suburban council estate, the well-maintained and modernised houses are council owned, while those sold under the right-to-buy scheme are least well maintained and equipped,” says Boughton. “The market does not do a very good job.”

About 40 per cent of the homes in the Boundary Estate are now in private hands, and those that are rented out are seen as desirable properties. At the “guide price” of £450 per week, a one-bedroom flat would eat up the entire pay packet of a full-time worker earning the London Living Wage.

The rest of the estate’s residents remain tenants of Tower Hamlets, the local authority. In 2006, the tenants vetoed a plan to transfer the estate from the council to the not-for-profit Southern Housing Group, even though the housing association had promised to redecorate the flats and install new kitchens, bathrooms and boilers.

In hundreds of other estates, tenants have voted to switch from the local authority to a housing association. Back in 2001, two-thirds of all social housing in England was owned and operated by local governments and one-third by registered housing providers. Today, those figures are almost reversed, and fewer than four in ten homes remain in council hands.

For the Conservatives, the shift from local authorities to housing providers was — like the right-to-buy scheme — ideological. Boughton says the Tory government genuinely believed that council housing was “the state at its worst, bureaucratic, distant and inefficient.”

While acknowledging that an era of austerity made it difficult for councils to maintain the quality of housing, he says there was some justification for the Thatcherite critique. “It varied from council to council, but some took their eyes off the ball, neglecting maintenance and repair,” he says. “Ongoing expenses were not always budgeted for.” The results weren’t all bad, he adds: local governments responded by decentralising decision-making and devolving management.

The shift to not-for-profit housing associations continued after Labour took government in 1997. Smaller and locally based, housing associations were seen as more agile than councils, more attentive to tenants’ needs and better aligned with Tony Blair’s “Third Way.”

These arguments are familiar in Australia, where the not-for-profit, or “community,” sector is also growing. The Community Housing Industry Association’s chief executive, Wendy Hayhurst, recently urged the Albanese government to direct all the proceeds from its $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund to her sector rather than do the “easy thing” and divvy the money up among community, state and private providers.

Hayhurst argued that community housing scores better on ratings of quality and resident satisfaction, a claim supported by the Productivity Commission’s most recent Report on Government Services. With its charitable status, the community sector is exempt from GST, land tax and stamp duty, which Hayhurst says enables it to build more houses for any given amount of money than state governments or businesses can.

Duncan Maclennan, a housing expert at the University of Glasgow with extensive experience in Australia, argues that not-for-profits provide better management than state authorities and better integration with other services. He says they are more effective at using their housing assets to secure low-cost private capital for additional investment. “There is a strong case to see much stronger policies of transferring public stock to non-profits,” he concludes.

Though not as advanced as in Britain, the shift from state governments to community providers is already under way in Australia. Over the past five years, more than 21,000 homes have been transferred from public sector to registered housing providers, two-thirds of them in New South Wales. Around 70 per cent remain in state hands, but this is down from 85 per cent in 2008.

The trend is clear, yet the British experience gives pause for thought. Or at least the English experience — thanks to devolution, policies differ in Scotland and Wales.

Take the Juniper Crescent estate, for instance, which won architectural awards after it was completed by inner-north London’s Camden Council in 1996. Across the road from the estate, near some once-hip but now-tawdry markets, builders are hammering away at a £1 billion development, Camden Goods Yards. What was once a commercial site is being transformed into a mixed-use neighbourhood with 644 homes, Grade A office space, a supermarket, a rooftop farm and “landscaped open space for the whole community to explore.”

Thanks to inclusionary zoning requirements, the developers are supposed to include some affordable housing as well — as they are in all new housing projects in England. As a planning requirement, an agreement on the quantity and price range is generally negotiated between developers and local governments, though John Boughton says developers sometimes wriggle out of these commitments and, besides, “affordable is a pretty loose term.”

Sound from the construction site at Camden Goods Yard is audible from Juniper Crescent, which is now run by One Housing, one of London’s largest housing associations. Juniper Crescent might need some upgrades, but it is far from past its use-by date. Yet these 120 terrace homes in stylish yellow brick will soon be demolished as part of a redevelopment more in line with the high-end condominiums being built across the way.

The knockdown rebuild plan required the consent of Juniper Crescent residents, but in a 2020 ballot they voted the proposal down. One Housing’s response was to engage “with residents further about the regeneration proposals in order to understand the ballot results more fully.” In other words, keep trying until the residents gave the right answer. After consultations fuelled by glossy brochures, free pizza and live music, residents voting narrowly in favour of demolition.

One Housing has promised that all current residents will be able to return to the redeveloped estate. Residents will have more open space than before, it says, and their new better-quality homes will be just as spacious as their present dwellings. Each household will receive a £7800 “home loss payment” to compensate for years of disruption.

The demolition of an estate built less than thirty years ago reflects the way markets are structured, says Boughton. Little incentive exists to refurbish and upgrade existing council housing. The financial imperative is for developers to demolish and rebuild, tapping in to profits from new homes for sale and private rental. Projects are justified, with some plausibility, because they bring densification.

The soon-to-be-demolished Juniper Crescent estate. Peter Mares

Redeveloping Juniper Crescent will create about three times as many homes as the estate has now, adding much-needed supply to London’s over-taxed housing market. What remains unclear, though, is how many of these additional homes will be truly affordable for low-income tenants. As even its supporters acknowledge, One Housing’s motivation in this partnership with a private developer is as much financial as social: it needs to generate income from commercial projects to fund its broader operations.

For Boughton, this attempts to turn necessity into a virtue. Housing associations cross-subsidise their social mission by building housing for private sale or market rents. A touted benefit is the creation of “mixed communities,” where rich and poor, renters and owner-occupiers, live side by side and share facilities. Boughton welcomes this aim, noting that this is what all council estates originally were. But he adds, wryly, that no one seems to worry about the lack of social mix in middle-class suburbia, let alone in the exclusive neighbourhoods favoured by plutocrats.

Yet Boughton also fears that housing associations increasingly look and behave like property developers. Even when they separate their commercial and social operations in different divisions, they risk letting the for-profit tail wag the housing-association dog.

“I’m not criticising good housing associations with local roots and a strong grasp of social purpose,” says Boughton. “I’ve got plenty of time for those. But now they have consolidated and got bigger, many are suffering from some of the same evils once attributed to councils.”

There is a compelling argument that Australia’s nascent community housing sector must also grow, professionalise, and consolidate into fewer larger organisations if it is to operate efficiently through economies of scale and a deep well of corporate knowledge. Yet in England, signs suggest that some of the biggest housing associations are losing touch with their residents and becoming disconnected from their social purpose.

CEOs now command impressive salaries and privately lobby government to let them charge tenants higher rents. One Housing is accused of leaving some of its elderly tenants without heating or hot water through winter after bungling boiler repair work. Another big provider, L&Q, was recently rapped on the knuckles by the Housing Ombudsman with two severe maladministration findings over its treatment of a tenant with physical and mental vulnerabilities.

In one chilling case, the Peabody Group apologised after one of its tenants was left dead in her flat for more than two years. Neighbours had complained about a foul stench and Peabody had cut off the woman’s gas because of unpaid bills yet failed to check on her welfare.

Anecdotes are not proof of system failure, nor evidence that things would have been better if councils had remained in control. The G15 alliance of London’s biggest housing associations provides homes for around one-in-ten Londoners: in a sector so large things will always go wrong. Yet the potential for social purpose to be eroded remains real, especially when the sector remains starved of public funds.

This is apparent in the types of housing that are now getting built. Rather than “social rent housing” — that is, homes for people on the bottom rungs of the income ladder — housing associations in England are increasingly building other types of “affordable” housing, including properties rented for as much as 80 per cent of the local market rate — which, whether in London, Melbourne or Sydney, is often still very expensive. One “affordable” property currently listed by Australian social venture HomeGround Real Estate is a two-bedroom apartment at $1100 per week.

Affordable housing is often portrayed as “key worker” housing. It is intended to enable teachers, nurses, childcare workers, police officers, hospitality staff and sales assistants to live closer to their jobs. These are tenants that private developers would welcome in joint ventures like the Juniper Crescent rebuild — if they can afford it. Social renters, who often rely on government benefits, don’t fit so comfortably in marketing brochures.

Boughton warns that social rent housing will always come second under a cross-subsidy model. “You will never have the amount of social rent housing that is truly affordable being built. It will always be neglected.”

The statistics seem to bear him out. In 2021–22, about 60,000 homes were added to England’s “affordable housing” stock, almost half of them resulting from inclusionary zoning agreements. But only about 13 per cent of the total — or 7500 dwellings — were designated as social rent. That proportion has been steady for about ten years.

In the previous decade, though, social rent housing made up 50 to 60 per cent of new dwellings. In the decade before that, it was 70 to 80 per cent. When sales and demolitions are taken into account, Shelter England calculates that England has lost more than 165,000 social rent homes in the past decade.

Today, London south of the Thames is more affluent and desirable than it was in the 1970s, and the Pepys Estate has been rehabilitated. “The Pepys Estate was famous, then it was infamous, now it just looks and feels like a pretty decent place to live,” writes Boughton in a blog post.

After Lewisham Council transferred the estate to a housing association, it underwent an award-winning redevelopment during which many original buildings were demolished, especially those closest to the river. In what Boughton describes as “pure and unabashed gentrification,” a twenty-four-storey tower block with 144 flats was sold to Berkeley Homes, which stacked an additional five floors with fourteen penthouses on top and flogged off all the apartments at a premium.

In this case, the tower block design didn’t seem to be an automatic generator of crime and dysfunction, though the tower did get a new entrance to avoid any taint of council estate. As Boughton explains on his blog, this was another example of financial considerations determining social outcomes:

Lewisham Council claimed to have run out of money and it’s true enough that the rules of the game were — and are — designed to curtail the ability of local councils to improve and expand their housing stock. But it suited, too, a gentrifying agenda which sees some London councils only too keen to bring the middle-class and their money into their boroughs.

For those with municipal dreams, providing decent housing that caters for all, including people with the fewest resources, has been a challenge right from the start. When Old Nichol was cleared to make room for the Boundary Estate, only eleven residents from the original slum made it into the new apartments. Housing generally went to the members of the artisan working class, skilled tradespeople with reliable incomes who today might be described as “key workers.”

Whether housing is built and run by councils, by state governments, by not-for-profits or indeed by private enterprise, it will only provide decent homes for all, including the most disadvantaged, if it receives substantial and ongoing public investment. One persistent hope in Australia is that superannuation funds will invest in social housing, but as the Community Housing Industry Association’s Wendy Hayhurst and Matt Linden from Industry Super Australia write, this can only work if there is consistent and long-term government subsidy to generate the returns institutional investors require for their members.

As Australian housing policy expert Vivienne Milligan warns, only governments can fill the gap between the rent poor tenants can afford to pay and what it costs to build, run and maintain their homes, let alone generate a profit. A reliance on inclusionary zoning and cross-subsidies from commercial projects is just not going to cut it.

Boughton has an abiding sympathy for old-style council housing but is far from dogmatic about whether it should be in local government hands or run by not-for-profits. “Anything that provides genuinely affordable housing and looks after buildings and tenants is welcome,” he says. “A significant share of the population will never own their own home, and housing association, or local authority housing, should and can cater for a broader range of the population.”

But, he adds, “I do advocate for local authority house building as a cost-effective and affordable means of providing housing, as demonstrated from the 1890s to the 1970s.” Between 1945 and 1979, councils built an average of 126,000 dwellings each year. “Local authorities were able to borrow from the national government and use rents to repay loans. They had the resources, organisation, financial clout, and political will to build at scale. That’s what we’ve lost.”

Local authorities also build to a higher standard than commercial developers, says Boughton. “No one is looking to Barratt for best practice,” he says, referring to one of Britain’s biggest mass home builders. “But the very best council housing is something to aspire to.”

Boughton’s new book, A History of Council Housing in 100 Estates, concludes with a profile of Goldsmith Street, a Norwich City Council project of around a hundred highly energy-efficient homes. Awarding it the 2019 Stirling Prize, judges from the Royal Institute of British Architects called the project “a modest masterpiece.”

“Not everywhere can be like that,” says Boughton, “but it’s not a pipe dream to think that local authorities can play that role.” •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post The elusive quest for decent homes appeared first on Inside Story.

They weren’t offering to build or finance these new houses; they want private developers to do that.

Sitting behind these policies is the commonsense view that the key to bringing down the cost of housing is building more dwellings. This accords with our everyday experience of how markets operate: when something is scarce, prices go up, and the best way to bring prices down is to provide more of it.

When it comes to housing, though, the relationship between price and supply isn’t so clear-cut.

We know this partly because we have an alternative to house prices — rents — as an indicator of housing demand. Rents track demand for housing as a service, whereas real estate prices also reflect demand for housing as an investment.

It turns out that rents have risen far more slowly than house prices over the past twenty years (although now they are rising sharply in England and Australia). And despite low wage growth, the average share of household spending devoted to rent has also remained fairly constant in both places.

That’s not to say that rents are affordable, especially for low-income tenants in expensive cities like London and Sydney. If rents were already excessive twenty years ago, they are still excessive today, reflecting a persistent shortage of housing. The point is that rent increases over time have been relatively modest; if the pace of house building had fallen well behind the growth in demand then we might have expected sharper rises.

We know, too, that factors other than supply can have immediate and dramatic impacts on property prices. As interest rates have gone up in recent months, house and apartment prices have dropped back from their 2022 peaks.

Prices tend to go down when it’s harder to get a loan (which is why regulatory authorities tighten bank lending rules when they want to dampen the market). And prices go up when governments stimulate the market with first homeowner grants or tax concessions. The construction industry is also notoriously volatile, so the supply of new homes fluctuates as the number of dwellings completed rises or falls from year to year. What’s more, new homes make up only a small proportion of overall housing stock and real estate transactions, so the impact of construction on prices is slow and muted.

Over time, such ups and downs should even out, revealing the underlying relationship between housing supply and housing demand. So, what does twenty years of census data tell us about the housing challenge in Australia and Britain? Is the core problem that we don’t build enough houses or are other factors also at play?

Australia’s population grew by 35 per cent between the 2001 and 2021 censuses, and the stock of dwellings grew by 39 per cent. England’s population grew by 15 per cent, and its stock of dwellings 17 per cent. In short, in both countries, population and dwelling supply moved roughly in tandem.

Of course, as with rents, if there was already a housing shortage in 2001 then that shortage would have carried through to 2021, keeping prices high. In principle, if we’d built more housing then prices should have come down. Proportionally, though, the scale of the problem has stayed roughly the same, so again, a lack of building doesn’t appear to account for the rapid escalation in real estate prices over the past two decades.

But a simple comparison between population growth and dwelling growth can be misleading, for a number of reasons.

First, housing demand is driven not by the overall number of people but by the overall number of households. This might seem like splitting hairs: average household size has remained roughly constant in England and Australia over the past twenty years, and so the relationship between household numbers and dwelling numbers held steady.

Here things get complicated, though, because in an ageing society, with more people living alone, household size should fall. This means more households overall and a need for more dwellings to accommodate them. In both Australia and England, average household size was projected to fall to about 2.2 people by 2021, but has remained higher.

One view is that the projections were wrong, because they failed to anticipate social changes such as fluctuations in birth rates, falling divorce rates and a preference by some recent migrants to live with extended family.

But perhaps housing shortages prevented the decline in average household size? A lack of housing can induce adult children to stay in the parental home longer than they’d prefer or force two families to squeeze into the same accommodation. The formation of new households is suppressed, and the demand diverted into “hidden” or “concealed” households. According to one estimate, two million adults could be living in concealed households in England.

Linking population and dwelling numbers over time also disguises regional differences. Greater London, for instance, gained more than 1.6 million new residents between 2001 and 2021, but the population of Sheffield hardly changed and remains below its 1950s peak. Barring a new industrial revolution to bring factory jobs back to Sheffield, the demand for housing there is likely to remain relatively flat.

Dwelling growth in the City of Melbourne has far outstripped population growth over the past twenty years thanks to a boom in high-rise residential towers. On census night 2021, a quarter of all the municipality’s homes were unoccupied. Covid alone is unlikely to account for all those empty apartments. Rental vacancy rates in the CBD are significantly higher than the rest of Melbourne.

The population of the City of Hobart, by contrast, has grown faster than dwelling supply since 2001, and the share of unoccupied dwellings was below the national average at the last census. This might help explain why Hobart is the toughest capital city for tenants, with the fewest vacancies and the highest rents relative to income.

So, is it possible that we may have been building enough houses, but in the wrong places? London School of Economics geographer Paul Cheshire blames planning failures for “actively preventing houses from being built where they are most needed or most wanted — in the leafier and prosperous bits of ex-urban England.”

Does his thesis gain more weight if we drill down to a more local level and can compare two local government areas in the same city and the same labour market?

Tower Hamlets, in London’s inner east, and Camden, in the inner north, are in many ways similar. About a third of their residents live in social housing, but both also have pockets of considerable wealth. In 2001, each of the boroughs had a population of about 200,000 people and a comparable population density.

Since then, however, their paths have diverged. Tower Hamlets has gained more than 100,000 residents, while Camden gained only 12,000 (and its population declined after 2011). Tower Hamlets is now the most densely populated local government area in England, home to 112 people per soccer pitch–sized piece of land (as the Office of National Statistics calculates it). Camden has “only” sixty-nine people per soccer pitch.

What conclusions can we draw from this? Perhaps Tower Hamlets council is more pro-development than Camden, and better planning has enabled more dwellings to be built there to accommodate new residents? Perhaps Tower Hamlets simply had more room to grow, with disused industrial sites like the docklands at Canary Wharf available for redevelopment? Or maybe the residents of Camden, which is home to an older demographic, have begun to consume more housing per head of population than their younger counterparts in Tower Hamlets?

Camden has double the share of residents who own their homes outright and more than double the share of households with at least two spare bedrooms. It also has a higher percentage of vacant dwellings than Tower Hamlets, and its residents are far more likely to own a holiday house.

The contrast between the two boroughs highlights a third objection to simple comparisons between numbers of people and numbers of dwellings: demand for housing is a product not just of population but also of income.

As leading British housing economist Professor Geoff Meen puts it, housing demand comes “not just from newly forming households, but also existing households as incomes rise.” In other words, as people get wealthier, they want bigger, better houses as well as second homes and holiday houses. Cheshire says his research shows that a 10 per cent increase in incomes leads people to spend about 20 per cent more on extra space in houses and gardens.

We could express this differently: as the rich get richer they consume more housing; as the poor get poorer, they consume less, to the point of living in severely overcrowded homes or without a home at all. If we look for the roots of the housing crises in England and Australia through this lens, then we might shift focus from the supply of housing to its distribution.

When we do that, the challenge becomes not just to build more housing but to find ways to make its use fairer and more efficient — by altering how housing and land are taxed, for example. More progressive land taxes or capital gains taxes on housing could both redistribute wealth and help dampen property speculation.

Or we could adopt the German approach to capturing the value of changes in land use. When land is rezoned from, say, agricultural to residential in England and Australia, dramatic increases in land value generally accrue to the landowner. In Germany, much of this “planning gain” goes instead to public authorities and is used to fund infrastructure or social housing.

The complex relationship between housing demand and housing supply suggests there are no simple solutions to the challenges that we face, and we should be wary of claims that the answer is just to build more dwellings. If high prices are the product of a speculative bubble rather than undersupply, then building more houses will cause a different set of problems.

Economist Ian Mulheirn from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change points out that high real estate prices fuelled residential building booms in Spain, Ireland and parts of the United States in the first decade of the 2000s. When that boom went bust, it contributed to the global financial crisis and left “a large overhang of vacant and decaying ghost estates.”

The “build more” argument often goes with the view that the supply of new houses is held back by planning and zoning “red tape.” It then becomes an argument for scrapping the rules that limit incursions into land set aside for other purposes, such as London’s green belt or Melbourne’s green wedges.

This is contested territory. Once developed, the environmental or agricultural benefits of that land are lost forever. But if green space effectively subsidises elite pursuits like “‘horseyculture’ and golf” then the case for turning some of it over to housing might carry more weight.

Planning has been the subject of persistent reform efforts in many parts of Australia without, as yet, delivering lower house prices. “Of right” approvals have been introduced for code-compliant projects, decision-making powers transferred from elected councils to expert panels, “special purpose” bodies created to deliver urban redevelopment, and ministers given greater powers to override local decisions on major projects.

Strong arguments exist for rules-based planning systems because the alternative of assessing each application individually is time-consuming and costly, especially if decisions are made at a hyperlocal rather than city-wide level. But planning regimes should align with environmental and social goals, including affordability, rather than simply empower developers to respond to a housing “demand” that may be driven by growing inequality.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers says the task ahead is not just to build more homes, but to build more “well-located” homes. Boris Johnson’s one million homes promise was predicated on every local government area having its own mandatory housing target, although councils were very critical of the algorithm used to determine what to build where. Those targets have since been scrapped anyway, following opposition from Conservative MPs who feared a backlash against new developments in their prosperous constituencies.

This is a reminder that building homes where they are most needed — that is, with good access to jobs, transport and services — tends to throw up the biggest challenges.

In cities like Melbourne, this could be done by replacing postwar family homes with smaller, more energy-efficient, medium-density apartments and townhouses to better accommodate today’s smaller households. But it is in exactly these suburbs that not-in-my-backyard opposition tends to be most intense.

It is also in these areas that commercial barriers are greatest. It is easier to build on a rezoned greenfield site on the edge of the city, or in a rezoned brownfield area like a former dockland, than to transform a middle-ring greyfield area, especially if the aim is to retain the benefits of suburban streetscapes like tree canopies and gardens.

In such cases, what is needed is not so much liberalised planning, as consistent and supportive planning to assist developers to consolidate individual house blocks into larger sites, while also responding to community concerns about loss of amenity.

The number of dwellings is clearly important for the affordability and availability of housing, whether to buy or rent. But along with supply we also need to think about distribution, both spatial and economic. The question is not “do we need more houses” but rather “where do we need more houses, and who needs them most?”

To put this another way, is the challenge to keep up with housing demand, or to respond to housing need?

If it is the former, then the market is likely to meet the demand for a new holiday home more quickly than it meets the need of a low-income family to move out of an overcrowded, overpriced and damp apartment. Property developers have no incentive to provide housing for people who cannot pay prevailing rents or prices. Either we need to help those households participate in the market by boosting their incomes, or we need to build homes they can afford.

Another thing that Australia and England have in common is a sustained fall in public investment in social housing. If governments in both countries had continued to subsidise social housing at the rates they did in the postwar decades, then many thousands more affordable houses would be available today.

Prime minister Rishi Sunak’s Conservative government has no chance of delivering Boris Johnson’s 2019 pledge of a million homes before next year’s election. Let’s hope that Jim Chalmers has more success in building a million “well-located” new homes in Australia, and that a decent share of those homes are affordable for the people who need them most. •

The post Not enough houses? appeared first on Inside Story.

This small child doesn’t know that the street out the front of their house is, potentially, a very dangerous place. A very dangerous place: the street outside is something all parents take great care to teach their children to be wary of: never to linger on, never to cross without an adult. Remember: Look right, look left, look right again.

Luckily, pedestrian fatalities in Australia are slowly decreasing. In 1998 398 pedestrians died, but by 2018 the number had fallen to 177, though this past decade the figure has remained pretty steady. Worldwide, some 270,000 pedestrians are killed each year on roads, and this number also shows a downward trend over time.

So are our streets becoming less dangerous to walk on? Not necessarily. While safety improvements might have been made to your street in recent years, many transport studies also show declines in pedestrian mobility, especially among young children.

When quizzed on these trends, close to 70 per cent of parents in New South Wales said there’s too much traffic on the roads for their children to walk safely to school in the morning. Many parents of small children will bundle them into the car instead — much safer.

Dutch authors Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet are bothered by facts like these. In their new book Movement: How to Take Back Our Streets and Transform Our Lives they call for a radical rethink of our streets and the role they play in our lives.

Verkade and te Brömmelstroet lead with a series of provocations: Why do we think about streets first and foremost as places to move from A to B? Why does the need for speed and efficiency triumph over other kinds of uses? And do we even know how to imagine alternatives?

Questions like these hadn’t occurred to Verkade, a Rotterdam-based journalist, until she met te Brömmelstroet, otherwise known as “the Cycling Professor,” at the University of Amsterdam. On assignment to write a series on bicycle superhighways, Verkade’s interview with te Brömmelstroet completely upended how she thought about streets, inspiring the three-year journey of discovery recounted in Movement.

Be warned, she writes, “Read this book and you might never look at the street outside your front door in the same way again.”

The cars that ate Paris — and Los Angeles, Sydney and Delhi too

It’s hard to overestimate how radically the automobile has transformed how we live together in communities. With its mass adoption across developed nations in the twentieth century came the wholesale reconstruction of city neighbourhoods.

The principle of circulation took hold: looking down on Manhattan in the 1930s from his privileged view in an aeroplane, Le Corbusier was struck by a vision of the city as a body in need of fluidity of movement. He called motor cars “machines of circulation” and likened roads to human arteries, promoting flow and reducing stagnation. Instead of crooked laneways and dense housing, motorways were built to clear congestion and connect far-flung suburbs.

Before the transformation: Cumberland Place, The Rocks, in 1901. Rocks Resumption photographic survey/Museums of History NSW

Life on city streets changed. Playing on the street became more dangerous as more and more people drove cars. Whole neighbourhoods were demolished to make way for new road networks. Kids learned to play elsewhere.

Some communities fought back. Most famously, a Canadian journalist who had moved her family to Manhattan in the early 1950s, resisting the pull of low-rise suburbia in favour of cheaper inner-city housing and street buskers, found herself leading a community campaign to stop the demolition of her local park, Washington Square. Describing her alarm at its proposed replacement with a sunken expressway, Jane Jacobs called on her mayor to champion “New York as a decent place to live, and not just rush through.”

Jacobs would go on to lead a successful ten-year battle to save the park and the surrounding Greenwich Village, inspiring community campaigns across the world. In Amsterdam, Verkade and te Brömmelstroet write, a mass campaign of tactical resistance from community and activist groups prevented the demolition of the city centre to make way for a new road network.

Similar campaigns occurred in Australia in the late 1960s and 1970s as well, with new alliances forged in places like inner Sydney between working-class unions, student groups, environmentalists and historical preservation societies, united in their fight against proposed new motorways.

Like Jacobs, people wanted places to live, not places to rush through. The communities saved by these activist campaigns are now highly valued tracts of real estate. People love to live in places like Greenwich Village, Verkade and te Brömmelstroet’s Amsterdam, and Fitzroy, Surry Hills and Potts Point because they are walkable, loveable, liveable.

But as iconic as these campaigns to “save our streets” were, the reality is that the majority of Australian, North American and European cities were completely redesigned around the needs of the motor car. After the campaign to save Washington Square, the number of cars on roads doubled every ten years until the end of the 1970s. Ownership then accelerated even faster, until the world hit one billion registered vehicles in 2011 — one vehicle per every seven people in the world.

Those who studied the impact of motorways came to realise that the more roads you built, the more people expected to be able to drive — generating what’s called “induced demand.” If you keep on building more and more roads, people will drive more. In Australia we now have over twenty million cars for just over twenty-six million people, among the highest rate of car ownership in the world.

The next billion cars on this planet won’t take too long: it’s predicted there will be two billion cars on the roads by 2030, driven by rapid rates of motorisation sweeping across the developing world. Like first world cities, cities of the developing world are rapidly expanding their road networks to make way for floods of new cars, ushering in a tsunami of new infrastructure projects. Some twenty-five million new kilometres of roadway is expected to be laid by mid-century, a 60 per cent expansion from 2010.

At this rate, we’re careering headlong into a future of planetary-scale bitumen and concrete.

Can we imagine anything different?

If you want to see how cities could work without relying on a car to get around, visit the Netherlands, home to the writers of Movement, where a quarter of all trips are by bike. You can find more than 37,000 kilometres of cycle paths here, many of them segregated, as well as a network of bicycle “super highways” connecting towns and cities built in recent years.

This is the place where urban designers come to study how streets could work differently — not primarily for motor cars but for cyclists. Here you can find streets where cycle lanes run up the centre and cars are relegated to side lanes, where intersections like the “chips cone” assist cyclists riding together in large volumes. Sensors on traffic lights prioritise cyclists’ movement in wet weather.

But even the Dutch don’t quite have it right. Despite the investment in infrastructure, they still experience high casualty rates on roads. In 2021 a third of all road fatalities involved cyclists. This reflects the high rates of cycling in general, of course, but also shows that helping cyclists move more efficiently and across greater distances doesn’t always mean safe streets. In fact, as mobility diversifies to take in new kinds of vehicles like e-scooters and e-bikes, cycle paths themselves are also becoming more dangerous.

The authors of Movement see a big problem in valuing streets primarily for personal mobility. It turns out that even with mass investments in road networks, the average time spent travelling remains roughly the same. Why? Because greater distances also become the norm.

By prioritising investments that help us rush through, we also neglect to invest in other parts of our communities. And we neglect to account for the true costs incurred. Do we really recognise what it costs us as a society when children can’t move safely around our communities?

As much as this is a story about mobility in cities, at the heart of Movement is a call to pay attention to how decisions are being made about the street and community you live in. The message here is that how we live together in communities, and how we come to prioritise some activities over others shouldn’t be handed over to technocrats, planners, developers and politicians. We all have an interest in caring about the shared spaces in which we live.

Marco the Cycling Professor spends a lot of time campaigning for small changes to where he lives, in Ede. Why is it that a local school has prioritised a car drop-off zone but not created space for something else? How did this get to the top of the local council’s list of investments, encouraging parents to drive rather than helping them with other actions? Was it a popular vote, or did an active minority campaign for the car option when everyone else went about their lives thinking about other things? (Yes.)

Marco letter-drops the community, invites everyone to respond to the proposal, urges people to show up to the meetings. He manages to get the drop-off zone defeated.

Everyday actions can make a difference, sometimes. In Paris, mayor Anne Hidalgo has used her powers to reduce car use in the city core and plans to ban all non-residential city traffic there by 2024. Car-free zones have been created outside schools, diesel cars banned, speed limits dropped to thirty kilometres per hour, and substantial investments made in new cycle paths.

Car ownership is down to three in ten Parisians. The city is being completely reimagined as a “fifteen-minute city” prioritising access to local services over freedom of movement. Why should everyone have the right to cross the city by car whenever they want? Many other European cities are following suit.

What about Australia?

Keep spending to keep moving

Roads receive a lot of investment in Australia — collectively, it looks like we care about them a lot. In New South Wales alone, the latest budget included an $11 billion allocation for new road projects — on top of the estimated $21 billion spent on the West Connex motorway since 2015. That doesn’t include the costs of maintaining local roads, paid through council rates. In 2018–19, the national figure was as much as $8.3 billion, or an estimated half of all rates collected by local governments that year.

Massive spending like this is justified because of the way our time has come to be valued. In the field of transport economics, the value of time is expressed as a function of movement: if you are in any way held up when you are travelling to and from work in your car, then the time you are delayed is given a dollar value, multiplied by the volume of people estimated to be travelling each day for work.

On this basis, Infrastructure Australia’s Infrastructure Audit estimated the total cost of road congestion in Australia’s six largest cities to be $19 billion in 2016, expected to blow out to $39 billion by 2031. With those figures in mind, it doesn’t take long before multibillion-dollar investments to build new road infrastructure start to look kind of reasonable.

But what if we applied the “value of time” metric in other ways?

What do children sacrifice to let cars rule our streets? They lose the time they might have spent playing on the street, walking safely to a park, walking safely to school. Do we know how to value this time lost? Do we know how to cost how time spent isolated compares with time spent playing with others?

With less mobility come greater levels of obesity. A recent study by the Monash Business School Centre for Health Economics estimated the annual cost of childhood obesity in Australia at $43 million. While obesity in children is increasing for a host of reasons, one determinant is exercise. There is a cost there, being borne by children. We need to get better at valuing it.

What of other costs of car-dominated communities? There is the value of time lost when someone is killed — otherwise known as the “value of a statistical life” — which is currently $195,000 per year in Australia, or $4.5 million per death on average. In 2020, when 1106 people lost their lives due to road accidents (just over one in six were collisions between cars and cyclists or pedestrians), we can count the cost at $4.98 billion.

If you care to multiply the total number of road deaths reported in Australia between 2012 and 2021 (11,894) by the figure of $4.5 million per life lost, you’ll arrive at a figure of $53.5 billion. That’s not including the costs of serious injuries. The World Health Organization says the current global road death toll of 1.4 million per year will rise to 1.8 million by 2030. That means road traffic, judged by accidents alone, is deadlier than malaria.

There are other costs. In OECD countries, the health impacts of air pollution were estimated at US$1.7 trillion in 2010, with about half of this attributable to road transport. The evidence increasingly shows that diesel fumes increase the risk of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. As research continues to show causal relationships between air pollution and human health, a bigger picture of what we are losing in cities is emerging.

Animals also suffer: some ten million are estimated to be hit on Australian roads each year. The carnage is driving some species close to extinction: recently, motor vehicle deaths were found to be the leading cause of death for the endangered Queensland cassowary, whose numbers have been reduced to a few thousand in recent years.

This is without touching on the environmental costs attached to the burning of fossil fuels, the manufacture of cars and the laying down of concrete. What is the value-of-time equation associated with how the burning of fossil fuels for transport will affect future lives?

Australians in particular are clearly being let down by allowing such a limited range of metrics to be used in such powerful ways. These metrics also miss another vital feature of public spaces — their contribution to the flourishing of individuals, communities, cities and societies. Everyday streets and public spaces are not just engineering problems to be solved, or costs to be avoided; they are also places in which social and individual benefits are realised. Can we place a dollar value on this kind of flourishing?

Ultimately, how we value our streets says a lot about how we value our time. As Annie Dillard famously wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” No one wants to spend their life stuck in traffic, but the law of induced demand says we’re not getting that time back by spending more and more on roads. The authors of Movement have it right: it’s time to think differently about that street outside your front door. Hey, you might even like to stop and linger awhile. Why the rush? •

Movement: How to Take Back Our Streets and Transform Our Lives
By Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet | Translated by Fiona Graham | Scribe | $29.99 | 288 pages

The post Why the rush? appeared first on Inside Story.

The story came to mind while I was reading Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London, sociologist Caroline Knowles’s perambulatory new book about how wealth shapes the English capital. Inspired to tread some of the same streets myself, I soon came across one of the spectacles Knowles documents: a “basement conversion” more accurately described as a large-scale excavation to create extra rooms under an elegant Kensington terrace. Sometimes, Knowles tells us, builders find it’s not worth their while to crane a mini-digger out of a multimillion-pound project, leaving “dozens of them… buried in the foundations of houses.”

It sounds like an urban myth, though Knowles says she spoke to builders who confirm it. Either way, the extravagance of efforts to create what have been labelled “iceberg homes” makes the tale credible. On the project I came across, the planning approval posted on the builder’s hoardings said the owners had allowed ninety weeks for construction.

It’s not hard to imagine why. Some excavations go down as many floors as the original house went up, and then extend under rear gardens to create space not just for wine cellars but also for gyms, cinemas, swimming pools and car parks.

Not surprisingly, basement conversions are the source of bitter neighbourhood disputes. Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page and pop star Robbie Williams engaged in a five-year stoush over Page’s fear that excavations for a pool under Williams’s £17.5 million (A$32 million) Holland Park mansion might weaken the foundations of his own £12.5 million pile next door.

Williams won out in the end, but no mechanical diggers will be buried in the basement of his Woodland House — building approval is conditional on the cavern being hollowed out by hand to minimise vibrations. Avoiding cracks in the stained-glass windows of Page’s French Gothic Tower House will add £1.5 million to Williams’s renovation bill, but this is small change for the singer and his wife, Ayda Field. They recently sold estates in Switzerland and Britain worth more than £30.75 million and splashed out US$50 million on another spread in Los Angeles.

The clash between a 1960s rock star and the lead singer in a 1990s boy band might not qualify as a contest between old and new money, but it could well be an example of the conflict between the “haves” and the “have yachts.” The “haves,” in Knowles’s terminology, are the merely wealthy. The “have yachts” are super-rich. Also known as UHNWIs (ultra-high-net-worth individuals), they can afford to keep fully crewed multimillion-dollar boats moored in Monaco in readiness for the occasional Mediterranean jaunt.

As for yachts, so for cities. In the words of sociologist David Madden and planner Peter Marcuse, when housing enters global investment circuits “its use as a living space barely registers.” The built form becomes “a tangible, visual refection of the organisation of society” and global wealth is “congealed” into bricks and mortar — or indeed underground swimming pools.

As a writer, Knowles places herself in a literary tradition that takes in Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin and Teju Cole, figures whose work “exposes politics, like a sediment in the landscape.” As a social researcher, she upends the established focus on poverty and the poor to turn the same “unforgiving framework” of research on the very rich. She walks and talks her way across London, trying to understand how very rich people shape the city, and how they live in it.

She struggles to meet many actual billionaires. Russian oligarchs who use “complex financial instruments provided by London firms” to hide their riches from Moscow prove to be a reclusive bunch. She does meet a lesser billionaire she calls Sturgeon (she gives all her informants pseudonyms), who is investing some of his excess wealth in an “experimental sustainable caviar business” (anaesthetising and milking the fish to harvest the eggs instead of killing them). But Sturgeon is reluctant to discuss the source of his wealth, his compatriots’ lives or any security concerns wealthy Russians may have.

The same goes for the art collector and philanthropist she calls Soviet, who is only a multimillionaire anyway. Middle Eastern oil royalty, British aristocrats and other UHNWIs who moor their wealth in London’s safe financial harbour are no more forthcoming.

Instead, the bulk of Knowles’ insights are gleaned from those who work or live within the gravitational orbit of extreme wealth, like the retired civil servant she calls Officer.

Officer “patrols” the streets of Kensington, keeping an eye on basement conversions and other developments in case the residents’ association can intervene to prevent the worst excesses. Officer himself doesn’t have “serious money” and is disdainful of those who do. He says many of his super-rich neighbours rarely spend much time in the mansions they acquire. That’s if they hang on to them — others buy, renovate and move on.

The super-rich might purchase a terrace house divided into apartments and consolidate it into a single multi-storey home, or knock through the walls of adjoining terraces to create a mansion. As Officer’s friend Historian points out, the next buyer will also have to be super-rich to afford what’s now an even more expensive property, and the neighbourhood will be forever changed.

When Officer’s “ghost neighbours” are in residence, they swim in their private pools, watch films in their private cinemas, work out in their private gyms, and use the vehicle lift to enter and leave their mansions in luxury cars. They don’t frequent neighbourhood cafes or pubs, let alone walk to the corner shop, contributing nothing to the viability of local enterprises or a sense of community. “It spoils things for people who do live their normal lives here,” says Historian’s wife Opera. “Rich people,” Knowles decides, “are poor neighbours.”

Knowles gains further insights into the lives of the rich from Wig, a barrister. One of Wig’s clients wanted advice on whether to seek a divorce in London or go to the considerable expense of shifting his wealth overseas. Advising on the latter course, Wig saved his client tens of millions by avoiding English courts, which are “comparatively generous to partners who are not directly involved in generating the money.”

These manoeuvres don’t always go so well. In another case Wig represented a woman whose husband tried the same trick. Wig stymied the multimillionaire’s claim that he lived offshore by proving that he was still London-based. He had a British shotgun licence, which is only legal if the owner lives at the British address listed on the certificate, and he had a Transport for London seniors card that is only available to residents.

Alerted that divorce proceedings are public documents, Knowles does her own digging. It may be voyeuristic, but it’s also revealing. One divorcee, seeking a settlement that will enable her to live in the manner to which she is accustomed, asks the court for an annual travel budget of £2.1 million, and half as much again for fashion and jewellery — enough to cover a yearly fur coat, fifteen cocktail dresses, fifty-four pairs of shoes, eighteen handbags and much besides.

In this world of extravagant display, domestic staff adorn already elaborate homes. Butler is one of an estimated two million people who work in domestic service in Britain, “the highest number since the Victorian era.” Butler acknowledges that he “looks good in a suit,” which means he can be employed on day shifts and seen by visitors.

He also knows he is easily disposed of. He recounts how a colleague was fired after twenty years’ employment for being “a bit too old.” He witnessed another boss bawl out a valet because he didn’t know how to wind his £250,000 watch, and he saw a team of butlers draw the wrath of their employer at the end of a sixteen-hour day because they failed to serve tea in a Meissen porcelain cup. Money gives the rich the authority “to humiliate those who serve them.”

Money rises early and retires late, and Knowles follows its arc from east to west. Her walks begin amid the glass towers and brash nightclubs of Shoreditch and the City of London, where the finance machine “churns, expands and skims,” redistributing money “into ever fewer hands.” This is where “the building blocks of the plutocratic city” are manufactured, to be reinforced by bespoke advice on estate planning, tax shelters and family trusts.

She moves through Mayfair, Belgravia and St James, where new and imported money mixes with inherited wealth in places that have “the sort of hush which only lots of money can buy.” Hedge funds, private equity firms and family offices hide discreetly behind brass plaques — no names, only numbers.

She examines domestic life in Kensington and Chelsea, discovering that men still mostly go out and make the money while women mostly stay home to manage the household, staff and children who live in a triangle between city residence, country estate and elite boarding school. After hanging out with twenty-year-old Bags and her boyfriend Barbour in Sloane Square, Knowles observes that their lives mimic those of their parents, “heavily prescribed by gender and tradition” with “little room for imagination and manoeuvre.”

Knowles concludes her journey by following the “vortex of extreme wealth” upstream along the Thames to Richmond, home of Kew Gardens, then further west beyond the city fringes to Virginia Water, a London commuter suburb described by the local real estate agent as “the most expensive village in Britain.”

At the heart of Virginia Water is the Wentworth Estate — 1100 large homes built in the 1920s Arts and Crafts style. This is where Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet endured house arrest in the late 1990s while efforts were made to extradite him to stand trial for genocide and torture. An interior designer tells Knowles that it’s tricky and expensive to find the right materials for building in Wentworth. Bricks, for example, must be “tumbled… so they don’t look new and shiny, or too bling.”

The Wentworth Estate is built around a golf club of the same name, another site of struggle between the haves and the have yachts. After billionaire Chanchai Ruayrungruang bought it in 2014 he doubled the fees and halved membership numbers, pushing out the merely wealthy in favour of a richer, more exclusive clientele. Talk show host Michael Parkinson was among those who offered stiff resistance in the courts.

Knowles finds herself on “sinister and silent streets” where walkers are neither familiar nor welcome. Signs remind her Wentworth is a private estate and members of the public use its roads at the pleasure of the owners. She wonders if driving would be any better and learns that estate managers, with a direct line to Surrey Police, use number plate recognition software to identify vehicles that have no business there.

In other parts of Virginia Water, residents have clubbed together to privatise their streets as well. Road ownership “has spread through the area like a rash,” supported by CCTV cameras, private security guards and signs reading “only residents and guests.” Properties are defended by approach lights, alarms, “tactical landscaping” (fences) and yet more guards.

For Knowles, this is “Johannesburg in Surrey.” While rich white South Africans might fortify themselves “against the imagined depredations of the impoverished black masses,” the source of potential threat in Virginia Water is unclear. A private security consultant tells Knowles that London is a lucrative market because of its lack of actual risks. But if you’d like four black Range Rovers to follow you around, he can arrange it for £10,000 a day.

Like yachts and good-looking butlers, security is another performance of wealth, “an eye-catching display of money that few can afford to stage.”

Art can be spectacle too. On her way to meet “Banker” in the City of London, Knowles admires the paintings in his foyer by Damien Hirst, the British artist best known for putting a Queensland shark in formaldehyde and encrusting a skull with diamonds. In Mayfair alone Knowles counts twenty private galleries: on offer in one of them (in the catalogue’s words) is Hirst’s “delectably fresh” Summer Breeze, sixteen butterflies fluttering against a blue sky, “punctuated by soft formations of luminous white clouds.” The painting subsequently sold for £435,000, about 25 per cent above the gallery’s top estimate.

“As money accumulates,” observes Knowles, “it struts in the clothes of high culture.” But art is not just for display; like property, it is another convenient way to launder money or stash funds in a “safe deposit box.” And if you are prepared to forgo looking at it, you can also avoid Britain’s 20 per cent value added tax by warehousing it offshore.

Culture and finance share the same streets, notes Knowles, and this is true of public art too. Further east, at Canary Wharf, Henry Moore’s Draped Seated Woman is one of three large bronzes gracing a small square. Under a 1960s scheme to place works by leading artists in housing estates, schools and other public places, Moore sold the sculpture to the London City Council at a 25 per cent discount. For three and a half decades, residents of the Stifford Estate in Stepney enjoyed passing by the familiar figure, which they fondly dubbed “Old Flo.”

When the estate was demolished in 1997, Old Flo was loaned to a sculpture park in Yorkshire. Two decades later it was back in its original borough but remained lost to the housing estates of Stepney. Placing the statue in a forest of concrete, steel and glass “constructed on the dispossession of London’s poor” could be described as artwashing — not least because Canary Wharf, like the Wentworth Estate, isn’t a public space.

Here, you’re on private property and “no right of way, public or private, is acknowledged.”* It comes as little comfort to be told that you are also under twenty-four-hour CCTV surveillance for your “safety and security.”

As I traced Knowles’s steps I experience more direct surveillance in Belgravia’s Eaton Square, one of London’s most exclusives addresses. With its Georgian townhouses straight out of a BBC period drama, this is “a world coated in fine aggregate render [and] painted in off-white magnolia,” with matching columned porticos and black wrought-iron fences. In the late afternoon gloom, I watch a resident emerge from her taxi to be ushered inside by a doorman in bowler hat, coat and tie. Then I realise I am being observed too, by a burly figure with a military stance standing watch further along the footpath.

Eaton Square’s heritage-listed terraces surround a series of six rectangular parks accessible only to residents. All the land belongs to the Duke of Westminster: “these streets are his, the squares and the statuary.” Under the rules of primogeniture, the seventh duke, otherwise known as Hugh Grosvenor, inherited the £9 billion estate at the age of twenty-seven despite having two elder sisters.

In one of the most powerful sections of Serious Money, Knowles walks the increasingly gentrified streets of Notting Hill. Here she interviews residents who chose the area for its vibrant “social mix” but found themselves floundering after “the parallel tramlines of the rich and poor, along which the neighbourhood usually ran, suddenly, dramatically and momentarily crossed.” That was on 14 June 2017, when the shoddily renovated Grenfell Tower exploded into flames, killing seventy-one residents and rendering hundreds more homeless.

Knowles speaks to “Palace” and other well-heeled residents who rushed to help distressed Grenfell neighbours. Their efforts were earnest and genuine, but ultimately served to emphasise the gulf between them and their neighbours. “The chasm between rich and poor narrowed in the immediate aftermath of the fire, as lives entwined; and then reopened as social inequalities as usual were resumed.”

Today Grenfell Tower is shrouded in white cloth, awaiting a decision on whether it will be demolished. Across the top floors a banner with a big green heart reads “Forever in our hearts.” At ground level, the white hoardings blocking access to the site host art works, floral tributes and scribbled texta messages to lost loved ones.

Grenfell sits at the northmost end of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, which hosts extremes of wealth and poverty. A quarter of all homes in the borough are social housing, though the Notting Hill Housing Trust, in a sign of the times, now accommodates some of its tenants further east in the Borough of Hackney, where properties are cheaper.

You don’t need to walk far south from Grenfell Tower to enter a different social world. The plaque on a last surviving bottle kiln reminds passers-by of “the nineteenth century, when potteries and brickfields were established here amid some of the poorest housing conditions in London.” Today, the local estate agent lists a one-bedroom “mews house” in Pottery Lane at £700 a week. A worker earning the London living wage of £11.95 an hour would need to work a fifty-eight-hour week just to make rent.

Among the property’s selling points are “the green open spaces of Holland Park” just to the south, which boasts an Opera House, an elegant Japanese garden and a statue of its namesake, Henry Richard Vassall-Fox, Third Baron of Holland. In 2020, activists daubed the statue’s plinth with red handprints and placed a cardboard sign in the statue’s arms reading “I owned 401 slaves.” Then as now, London’s wealth is found “in bricks, stones, bodies and bones.”

Southwest of Holland Park is Cromwell Road, where three lanes of rush-hour traffic pass more rows of white stucco, the terraces broken by the occasional squat supermarket or multi-storey hotel, including the old Holiday Inn, an ugly example of 1970s brutalism. Now empty, it’s the site of another protracted planning dispute. In 2018, when developers proposed demolition to build a larger, more contemporary hotel, the Royal Borough received 750 objections arguing that the project would “replace one ‘out-of-place monstrosity’ with an even bigger one.” Approval was denied, but two years later, London mayor Sadiq Khan intervened to give the project the green light. His price was a little bit of additional housing — the developers will build sixty-two units (up from forty-six) for residents on low incomes under the mayor’s affordable homes program.

It is a perhaps-inevitable irony that the architectural splendours we admire in London are the product of violence and exploitation. As Knowles writes, “Imperialism’s industrial, artistic and cultural swagger are stamped into the streets.”

But wealth can leave beneficial legacies. On the western side of Hampstead Heath sits a curious structure known as the Pergola. The 245-metre-long walkway, entwined with wisteria, roses and other climbing plants, affords vistas over the heath and its woodlands. It was built in the early twentieth century by Lord Leverhulme, aka William Lever, whose fortune came from the manufacture of soap and other cleaning products.

Lever was a progressive industrialist who supported universal suffrage and built housing for his workers at Port Sunlight, though there is evidence of forced labour and other abuses in his Congo and Solomon Islands operations. As part of Lever’s private estate, the Pergola was designed as a place for Lever to take a solitary walk, have a think, or stroll after lunch with fellow politicians and business figures.

Today, the Pergola is much-prized public space. As cultural geographer Timothy Edensor writes, this “structure for pleasurable walking” serves as an example of how contemporary city planners might better promote “pedestrian pleasures” into urban design.

Will London’s latest “gilded age” bequeath comparable legacies? Knowles’s observations suggest the diggers excavating the city are driven by a “vacuous rapaciousness” that hollows out urban life. A “troubling and secretive presence,” the super-rich have “a profoundly damaging impact,” with their “endless search for new frontiers of luxury” constituting an environmental disaster.

Stringent personal security, she concludes, is merely a way of hiding the indefensible from public scrutiny. And yet for the rich themselves, the money that drives such wasteful, hidden opulence seems to create increasingly isolated, lonely and paranoid lives.

In Virginia Lee Burton’s book, Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne can’t escape the pit they have dug for themselves. But their story nevertheless ends well. At the urging of a young boy who has been watching them work, the new town hall is built around them. Mary Anne is converted into the boiler that keeps the building warm and Mike is invited to be its permanent caretaker. They become the warm heart of the community. For the diggers of London, no such ending is in sight. •

Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London
By Caroline Knowles | Penguin | $55 | 320 pages

* After this article was published, Inside Story received an email from a senior account executive at the The Academy PR, a public relations firm whose clients include Canary Wharf, to say that “in fact Canary Wharf is a public space, open to the public at all times and free to access.” When I visited Canary Wharf, I read and photographed a sign with the following text:

PRIVATE PROPERTY: CONDITIONS OF ACCESS.
This is private property and no right of way, public or private, is acknowledged over it. Any use of this land is with the permission of the landowner.

Although I wrote that Canary Wharf “isn’t a public space,” it would be more accurate to describe it as a “privately owned public space” in line with the definition used by Greenspace Information for Greater London: “publicly accessible spaces which are provided and maintained by private developers, offices or residential building owners.”

My overall point is not that the residents of Stepney housing estates are no longer free to visit Henry Moore’s “Old Flo”; rather, its relocation to Canary Wharf means it now resides in an entirely different world.

— Peter Mares

The post The plutocratic city appeared first on Inside Story.

While we wouldn’t have used the term, we were acting as YIMBYs — saying “yes” to a development “in my backyard.” But many progressive, middle-class residents of Fitzroy and other well-located suburbs have switched sides since then and are now firmly in the NIMBY camp, particularly when it comes to housing.

NIMBYs have come to oppose not just “social housing” — subsidised homes for people on low incomes — but new construction of any kind. Apartment buildings attract special ire, resisted as “inappropriate” for being too tall, for overshadowing or overlooking, for being out of keeping with “neighbourhood character,” for undermining heritage values, or because they generate those familiar evils: inadequate parking, congestion and noise.

YIMBYs see it differently. They believe that objecting residents are primarily worried about their property values. Places like Fitzroy and its equivalents in other Australian capitals may or may not be home to nineteenth-century terrace houses adorned with ornate cast-iron fretwork, but they are certainly “bucolic hamlets of wealth within the hearts of cities,” as Melbourne-based American sociologist Max Holleran writes in his new book, Yes to the City. And residents generally want to keep them that way by resisting “new housing that would bring more people and, potentially, greater socioeconomic diversity.”

Conflicts over housing are often portrayed as a simple generational divide between “boomers” and “millennials” — “you spend too much on avocado on toast” versus “you got all the breaks.” Holleran brings other fault lines to the fore, including the different interests of homeowners and renters, and the conflict between established residents in desirable suburbs and those who also want to live in places with good access to transport, jobs, schools, coffee and a lively local culture but can’t afford it. Underlying all these tensions are questions of class and wealth.

The story of the YIMBY movement begins in San Francisco with the foundation of BARF — the Bay Area Renters’ Federation. The acronym was chosen not just to inject humour into dour housing debates but also to emphasise that tenants faced a situation so dire that it made them want to throw up.

From 2010 to 2019, as the tech boom helped boost San Francisco’s population by 80,000 people, only 29,000 new homes were built. The city compounded the problem by ruling in 2018 that only one unit of housing could be built for every new 3.45 jobs created. Real estate values skyrocketed, pushing prices six times higher than the US average.

The 1960s radicals who gave us flower power found themselves occupying homes worth millions while well-heeled tech workers forked out monthly rents of US$4000 or more. Those pushed to the margins were the service workers who clean, make coffee, teach, nurse, fight fires and police streets. They were forced either to become “super commuters,” travelling up to three hours from outlying districts to get to their jobs, or to live in ever more expensive and insecure housing.

As real estate values rose, so did homelessness. Holleran describes the spaces beneath San Francisco’s elevated trains as “encampments reminiscent of Latin America’s informal settlements.” Around the headquarters of firms like Uber and Pinterest “the unhoused roam the streets in huge numbers as tech workers skitter to the other side of sidewalks to avoid them.”

BARF activists began showing up at planning meetings “dominated by homeowners saying ‘no, no, no’” and calling out “yes” instead, hoping that at least some new housing projects would get approved. They wanted to shift the debate from “real estate ruins the city” to “controlled growth moderates prices and allows for new residents to contribute to existing communities.”

Aware that in more affordable parts of the city “urban consolidation” is code for redevelopment that forces out low-income residents, BARF committed to pushing for densification only in well-off suburbs, where house prices were already high.

But the coalition that BARF sought to build was unstable and fractious. On the one hand this group of mostly young, educated, white urban professionals sought to make allies of long-term activists dedicated to getting subsidised housing built for those in most need, and so align themselves with poor African-American and Latino residents attempting to defend their neighbourhoods against gentrification. On the other, BARF courted real estate agents and property developers. It is easy to see how these interests might collide.

This tension has riven YIMBY movements everywhere, especially when they have accepted funding from companies, rendering themselves vulnerable to accusations of astroturfing. They also want to reassure existing wealthy homeowners that new development won’t destroy the character or quality of their cherished built environment (or, as a subtext, lower their property values), while at the same time — as Holleran writes — wanting to convince low-income residents that “new housing will not further intensify gentrification and displacement.”

This doesn’t mean the YIMBY argument carries no weight. While housing justice activists see YIMBYism as a poor substitute for increased public investment in social housing, the reasonable YIMBY response is that decades of campaigning have failed to produce tangible results in economies where most housing is, and always will be, created by the private sector. Enabling new apartments to be built in established suburbs increases housing choices for current and future residents and should help to hold prices down overall, and even reduce them in the long term.

Most of Yes to the City focuses on the United States. Holleran recounts the unsettling story of Boulder, Colorado, an affluent “eco-utopia at the foot of the Rocky Mountains” where lifestyles and property values are protected by an environmental greenbelt and limits on density, height and “non-familial co-habitation.” In the land of the free, liberty does not necessarily extend to living in a share house.

He documents the parallel trajectory of Austin, Texas, a university city celebrated for its lively music scene and “cowboy hippie spirit,” summed up in the motto “Keep Austin weird.” These days Austin is only affordable for people who are “economically productive but culturally boring” (namely, “doctors, bankers, and brokers, not poets, painters, and performance artists”).

Despite an acute housing shortage, downtown Austin still has open-air car parks that lend “a sprawling vacant feeling to some parts of the central business district that should be bustling.” Yet higher-density projects face stiff opposition for threatening the city’s acclaimed “weirdness.” As in San Francisco and Boulder, residential development has been pushed to the sprawling edges, condemning service workers to housing insecurity or car dependency and long commutes.

Australia’s planning constraints are generally less extreme than in the North American cities Holleran profiles. Postcode 3000 has transformed Melbourne’s CBD into a forest of residential towers, and urban consolidation is obvious in inner suburbs like Brunswick and Footscray. Over the past ten years, almost twice as many apartments as freestanding homes have been added to the housing stock of Greater Sydney. Yet Hobart, which has the most acute shortage of affordable rental housing of any Australian city, still has downtown areas, like in Austin, devoted to low-value uses like open car parks.

Whether planning rules are solely to blame for this lack of residential construction, or the causes are more multifaceted, is another question though. In Melbourne, for example, realtors are spruiking the CBD site of the Witches in Britches theatre restaurant as “a significant landbank opportunity.” Sometimes it’s not NIMBYs who delay development, but speculators looking to cash in on rising property values.

Yes to the City concludes by looking at how the concept of Yes in My Backyard has gone global. Holleran brings an acute outsider’s eye to observations about Melbourne and Brisbane, and invites Australian readers to consider how emerging YIMBY activism here might inject new life and fresh ideas into debates about housing and urban policy.

While some of our cities may be going up in the centre, they also continue to push outwards at the edges, giving us our own version of Holleran’s “missing middle” — a reference to underdevelopment in ageing middle-ring suburbs (or greyfields) and to the relative paucity of European-style medium-density housing that sits between freestanding homes and high-rise apartments. Stoushes over planning and densification are alive and well.

Holleran provides a useful contribution to Australia’s bitterly contested and often arid discussion about how to improve housing affordability. Opinion has hardened into two rival camps. For one side, the problem is entirely a question of supply — and the answer is to liberalise planning and zoning rules and let development rip. For the other, the problem comes down to demand: lax credit rules, tax concessions and other generous subsidies have turned housing into a speculative asset and driven up prices. On the latter view, the solution lies in tax reforms, more financial regulation and much greater public investment in social housing.

YIMBY movements generally fall into the former supply-side camp, arguing that all development is good development, even at the luxury end of the real estate market, because it adds to the overall stock of housing and eventually “filters” down to benefit all. Active YIMBY groups in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney can be contrasted with NIMBY organisations like Save Our Suburbs that oppose “inappropriate development” and “forced rezoning.”

Interestingly, both sides invoke arguments about lifestyle and environment. YIMBYs argue that higher densities bring the benefits of more walking and cycling, a “buzzy city” with outdoor dining and spaces for arts and culture, and rain gardens and trees in place of car parks. Save Our Suburbs wants to protect residents from “overcrowding, traffic congestion, pollution and loss of bushland and heritage resulting from ill-considered planning impositions.”

Avoiding such unhelpful dichotomies, Holleran reveals rifts within each camp. Not all YIMBYs take the build-more-of-everything approach; they are also concerned with price and quality, resilience in the face of a changing climate, and how new developments enhance or diminish the urban fabric by enabling walkability and neighbourliness. At the same time, he recognises that NIMBYs’ objections can be well founded: “Concern about one’s backyard is often a deeply deliberative form of community engagement that addresses the carrying capacity of land with on-the-ground knowledge that is attuned to environmental quality and social cohesion.”

Overall, though, Holleran is sympathetic to the YIMBY view that “building nothing is not an option.” He points out that hyperlocalism can provide cover for “latent racism and an unwillingness to share space and resources with others.” In San Francisco and Austin, planning controls and rising real estate prices have coincided with a rapid decline in the cities’ African-American population. Rather than “devolved decision-making” he would back the YIMBY call for city-, region- or even nationwide planning that de-emphasises the interests of individual homeowners and enables rational infrastructure and a fairer sharing of the costs and benefits of urban growth.

But Holleran also argues that the YIMBY agenda is far from enough to improve housing affordability, contain suburban sprawl, redress socioeconomic and racial segregation, and better prepare cities for climatic events. Greater state action will be needed to override local sensibilities and interests.

Just how contested this territory can become is evident right now in Britain. As part of its “levelling up” policy to “spread opportunity more equally,” Boris Johnson’s government committed to setting mandatory housing targets for every local council. In the competition for the leadership of the Tory party, Liz Truss promised to put an end to such “Whitehall-inspired Stalinist housing targets.” Her successor, Rishi Sunak, was none too keen either, and in any case the proposal has been white-anted by a group of conservative backbenchers concerned about the impact on their leafy constituencies.

This is not a simple left–right divide. In the Times, the director of the centre-right Centre for Policy Studies called their actions “selfish and wicked,” saying they would “enshrine nimbyism as the governing principle of British society… and leave every proposed development at the mercy of the propertied and privileged.” •

Yes to the City: Millennials and the Fight for Affordable Housing
By Max Holleran | Princeton University Press | US$27.95 | 216 pages

The post Building nothing is not an option appeared first on Inside Story.

We see how Melbourne was made and remade, from the years leading up to the vibrant, anything-is-possible 1860s through to the long (and not yet complete) postwar enthusiasm for destruction and reconstruction, with buildings, streetscapes, urban centres, gathering places and green spaces disappearing only to reappear in markedly different form. We follow — by means of archival footage, photographs and the part-passionate, part-laconic commentary of a small group of highly engaged experts — how the city got from there to here.

In one sense it is a tragic tale, a story of how nineteenth-century commercial vitality could combine with a commitment to beauty and ornament and aesthetic pleasure, and how that happy combination was abandoned in favour of an equally commercialised faith in the clean and functional yet soulless lines of modernism.

In the later nineteenth century in particular, Melbourne was the most modern of modern cities, but by the early twentieth century the city seemed to be stuck in an earlier version of what it meant to be modern. Extending over many decades, the drive to keep up and go up is now commonly regarded as having got out of hand — a view that will only be reinforced by watching archival clips showing the wrecking ball repeatedly making short work of sandstone and brick and other materials supposedly meant to last.

Towards the end of the film, the tone changes, if not quite to an acceptance of what can’t be undone, then to an acknowledgement that lamentation alone serves no purpose and that we should focus instead on appreciating and celebrating those buildings that have, whether by chance or design, escaped the wrecking ball and now stand isolated or in short, nostalgia-inducing rows.

Buildings that were once imposing are now imposed upon, surrounded by newer and higher structures. From vantage points across the city, we can see architectural history in a single frame, with the metaphor of continuous change and growth made real by the contrast between the squat and solid, satisfyingly proportional yet fancifully decorated buildings of the early days, and the ambitious, straight-up, no-nonsense towers of more recent times.

Not everyone will be convinced by the attempt at balance. The film, with its wealth of archival clips of urban destruction, makes it difficult to understand how wreckers and citizens could have been quite so gleefully enthusiastic about it all. But the urge to knock down and rebuild, which started small, took earnest hold in the immediate interwar years and became rampant from the 1950s through to the 1980s, was not simply the result of philistinism gone mad.

Those statement buildings of earlier times — the insurance offices with their soaring ceilings and abundant curlicues, the lowering hotels with grand public spaces and small, draughty, unplumbed bedrooms, the multi-floor cafes with chandeliers and murals, the picture palaces that later sprung up all around suburban Melbourne — all of them were, in that phrase guaranteed to strike dread into the hearts of architectural conservationists, “no longer fit for purpose.” Replacement seemed the only option.

The fact that Melbourne was always changing, forever being built and rebuilt, meant it was constantly being filmed and photographed. Change attracts the camera, creating a number of distinct golden ages of Australian urban photography, most notably in the 1860s, when the newness of both Melbourne and the photographic medium combined to document the process of urban creation. Mid-century photographers like Wolfgang Sievers and Mark Strizic captured, sometimes in the same image, the excitement of re-creation along with the regret it entailed.

And film of course chronicled these changes in real time: the crowds bustling by Victorian work sites as buildings made their way to unprecedented heights of five or seven or eight floors, right through to Whelan’s ubiquitous wrecking balls making short work of a now-redundant building once expected to last forever — “forever” turning out to be little more than half a century, and frequently a good deal less.

We can’t escape the images’ elegiac tone. And no doubt there were many who at the time regretted the passing of a building they associated with their own youth and optimism, a personal landmark perhaps, one that they were used to making their way by. But regret, by and large, is not what we see on the faces of the witnesses to this assertion of energy and optimism.

The mid-century period of peak demolition was also a time when the most agile and acrobatic of the wrecking crews became urban celebrities, performing breathtaking balancing acts for lunchtime crowds of city workers. Clips from the time capture something of the excitement of looking on as the proudly unknockdownable was swiftly and comprehensively knocked down. Just as people were irresistibly attracted to those makeshift viewing windows that allowed them to peer in at the process of construction taking place, so they could gather to watch the building being demolished, then watch while the whole process started over again.

That was then. Now, the signs everywhere are that, architecturally speaking, we are falling out of love with modernity. Those who long for a return to classical design principles were until recently regarded as hooked on nostalgia, advocates for recreating what could not be recreated except as pastiche. While our fascination with statement buildings and starchitecture continues unchecked in many ways, something has changed.

Organisations and lobby groups that advocate a return to classical design principles (as variously defined) are cropping up all over the place. They appeal, with their accompanying images of medieval hill towns and height-restricted town centres, to what is described as our often unconscious responses to fractals and proportion and ornament. In this traditionalist version of the ideal city, buildings should attract the eye but not stand out — or up — too much. The elements of an urban landscape should go together to form a visually satisfying whole.

Stolen skyline? The Crown Casino building at Sydney’s Barangaroo. Phillip Elwin/Flickr

Ultimately, this is about our unresolved attitudes to density and height. How much should we try to fit in the frame before the composition becomes unbalanced, with the new overshadowing rather than complementing the old? A series of articles last month in the Sydney Morning Herald, assessing the relative success or failure of Central Sydney’s ambitious Barangaroo development project, hardly comes close to resolving this question. The commentaries land heavily on one side or the other, as indeed did the many hundreds of readers who felt moved to comment.

The centrepiece of the Barangaroo development, the Crown Tower — visible from points all over the wider urban area — is either a testament to vulgarity of massively inappropriate scale (“Barangaroo stole our skyline,” in the judgement of journalist Margot Saville) or a bold architectural statement of international significance. The Barangaroo development itself is a missed opportunity (a now standard criticism of any architectural or design endeavour, big or small), just one more example of the triumph of profit over public benefit — or the bold transformation of a redundant eyesore into an instantly iconic destination, a major civic asset.

Between these opposing views is one piece of common ground, and that is the ground on which none of Barangaroo’s buildings stand. A renewed enthusiasm for green space — parks, gardens and landscapes returned to their natural or near-natural state — reflects a long-overdue recognition of the intimate connection of First Nations people to the land, the dangers of climate change, and the boost to physical and mental health that comes with access to nature. But green space has the added advantage of being an increasingly rare focus of consensus, free of public debate’s almost automatic polarisation.

The villains remain, of course — the rapacious developers who push back against the greenery in their aim to create more saleable floor space. But even the most cartoonishly profit-seeking developer will generally grasp that a bit of greenery goes a long way towards enhancing perceptions of liveability in the minds of prospective buyers.

One of the common criticisms of skyscrapers, and the race for the next one to be taller and shinier than the last, is that like all bigger and better feats of design and engineering, they are monuments to excess, to the display and performance of wealth and power. In Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat’s 2021 film Official Competition, a wealthy and now elderly businessman longs to leave something more behind than his rather prosaic achievements in the world of commerce. “I want to do something that lasts,” he says. “A bridge, for example, designed by a famous architect.”

That he opts instead to finance a film, with a great director, famous actors and the likelihood of critical acclaim, underlines the link between monumentalism and performance. Skyscrapers may be monuments to excess and display, but so were many of the buildings they replaced — the grand merchants’ houses, the imposing and richly decorated insurance buildings, the cafes and hotels with their imported chandeliers, built to last only to give way in their turn to the next performance.

The Lost City of Melbourne asks important questions about the urban landscape, about how we look at it and what we see. What has been lost, and does the knowledge of past loss spoil irredeemably our appreciation of the present? Should we try to replace the past, always assuming that we can? The cycle of demolition and construction has been part of the public identification of Melbourne, and hence of Melburnians, with modernity. It was a particular brand of modernity, one that coexisted with social conservatism, but powerful for all that.

The rush to glass and steel, and the loosening of height restrictions that occurred in the postwar years derived from a fear that Melbourne’s claims to be modern, recently so well founded, were under threat. Perhaps today’s ragged skyline — a jumble of the old and the new — is a new version of modernity we can learn to love. We can see those older survivors as evocative relics in sadly reduced circumstances, just hanging on, or as scrubbing up rather well, all things considered, in the dusk with the height behind them. •

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Simms invited the onlookers to come closer to his smouldering fire of eucalyptus leaves, its cleansing herbal smoke wafting in the cool breeze around smiling faces. Feeling the smoke on your face, in your lungs, it feels good to know you belong here. Among the guests were planning and public spaces minister Rob Stokes, Sydney mayor Clover Moore and Suellen Fitzgerald, chief executive of the city’s newly amalgamated parklands authority, the Greater Sydney Parklands.

The inclusivity in Simms’s welcome — we all belong here, it’s your land as well as ours — feels generous given that this land, never formally ceded by traditional owners, was effectively stolen by the British. It also speaks to the way Australians of both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal descent are increasingly working together to inscribe Indigenous ways of knowing and belonging into everyday culture.

Simms was inviting those present to see their place here through a Country-centred lens, a message affirmed by D’harawal Saltwater knowledge keeper and artist Shannon Foster, who created new interpretive signage for the trail. “Country unites us,” she explained to the crowd. “It’s still here, before the concrete and the glass.”

The idea of Country, an Aboriginal way of understanding connection to land, sea and sky, places the human within complex, animated landscapes of symbolically charged meaning — reviving pre-European ways of occupying Australian places. If the idea of Country is shaped by the retrieval of old ways, and of “deep time,” it is also being mobilised as a future-focused design language for Australian cities.

With momentum towards Country-centred urban design now growing, the next few decades may yet see a new Australian urban typology emerge. In this emerging future, Indigenous architects, designers and knowledge holders play the role of leader and vision-maker, their ideas and symbologies shaping built environments for future generations. How their visions are transcribed over coming years into new urban precincts — of concrete and glass, and of regenerated riverways, new community centres, housing typologies and building materials — will be worth watching.

From lost time to deep time

There is something exhilarating about this idea that we are living on a land where the energies of ancestors continue to enfold and enliven the spirits of everyday places, animating hard and soft matter and the air in between, taking us beyond the humdrum worlds of everyday streets and regimented lifestyles.

I am a non-Aboriginal person whose career has centred on the meanings and attachments we bring to places, and in particular how our various symbolic attachments to place are used to animate the collective arts of city making. Educated to understand history through a European lens, I quickly learned that to look for historical meanings and attachments to place, as an Australian, is to constantly negotiate sites of erasure. We are, as the late art critic and historian Robert Hughes remarked in a 1998 National Trust lecture, “a nation built on the need to forget.” Relatively little of the history of Australian cities remains etched in their built form: all too often we make new places of symbolic and cultural importance by erasing their past and starting again.

I am also an eighth-generation descendant of convicts and emancipists; I trace my line to the first generation of Australian farmers who worked the land for the Macarthur family. And I’m the third-generation descendant of a Queensland man who fell in love with the ancient landscape of Western Australia while based there during the second world war, uprooting his young family to move to a place that was, in his eyes, “closer to God.” I’ve always sensed a kind of hauntology lurking in my fascination with places, and their lost histories, perhaps propelled by a kind of ancestral desire to recover that which has been lost and displaced.

It’s not just me though. A sense of the hidden past pervades much writing and connection to Australian places. The poet Judith Wright wrote of this loss and erasure in her poem “Bora Ring,” conjuring the sense many Australians feel living in a land dispossessed, where “the song is gone; the dance is secret with the dancers in the earth.” In her introduction to Dancing with Strangers, an account of the first moments of British arrival in Sydney Harbour, historian Inga Clendinnen laments how much was lost in those first years of settlement: “In my view the sacred world of the Australians in 1788 — the world of mind and spirit, none of it written but stored in landscape, artefact, dance and story — is closed to us outsiders.” In People of the River, Grace Karskens traces the “lost worlds” of early Australia, and wonders whether early settlers were forced into a state of disenchantment by their ignorance and neglect of Aboriginal spirituality.

A Country-centred orientation thinks differently about this sense of loss. To Aunty Rhonda Radley, a Gathang language teacher and Birpai Elder, “When we listen to Country, we learn that time isn’t linear. We can connect to people across many different times, around the idea of place, and of Country.” Many Indigenous people are guided by ways of viewing the recent and ancient past as at once personal, familial and geological. Loss is reframed as renewal. Nyura yin-gu mara-la barray-gu, nyaa-gi, ngarra-gi says Aunty Rhonda in Gathang, a language recently considered close to extinct but now undergoing a revival: “You all have come here, to this country to see, to listen, and remember.”

The city as Country?

Indigenous ideas of place often invoke a pre-settlement landscape in which the city is rendered a false artifice. In “Native Born,” Archie Roach sings about the cities and parks looking out of place, “because the spirit’s in the land.” If Australian cities are tamed, regulated, commoditised, and ultimately modern, then Country is ancient, and beyond suppression by humans, who gain their sustenance from its abundance. But that binary is starting to break down.

A cohort of Indigenous designers and architects — joined by many non-Indigenous practitioners across the built environment profession — sees cities as important sites for Country-centred transformation. In the words of designer Alison Page, the work of building can be a way to “sing creation stories into existence,” reinforcing ecological responsibilities to care for land, sea and sky.

Earlier this year Page, a designer of Walbanga and Wadi Wadi descent who grew up in La Perouse, released a new book called Building on Country. In it, Page and her co-author, architect and anthropologist Paul Memmott, describe a groundswell of professional interest in understanding how the rich and complex culture of Indigenous people can shape future design and architecture.

In New South Wales, this groundswell is being embedded within the planning process. Due to be finalised in coming months, a state environmental planning provision called Design and Place will require all projects to “start with Country as a foundation for place-based design and planning.”

What does this mean in practice? To Page, Country-focused design repositions the built environment as central to “ancient conversations about the human connection to nature.” For Danièle Hromek, a spatial designer of Yuin/Budawang descent, “When you start a project with Country and embed it all the way through as the heart of that project, that can inform the work of others, even before architects are brought in.” This positions Aboriginal people quite differently to more traditional forms of “Aboriginal consultation,” which risks engaging with traditional custodians too late in the design phase of a project.

A Country-centred approach allows Aboriginal perspectives to shape the very fabric, design and identity of a place as it is worked into being by a range of other contributing professions and traditional custodians, incorporating the work of architects, engineers, planners, community facilitators, approving agencies and more. Through her consultancy Djinjama Indigenous Corporation, Hromek works with a number of NSW government agencies on urban transformation projects. “I try to ensure Country is not only imprinted into a final work but also shapes the vision and intention of a place.” This vision might be expressed through its masterplan, which in turn guides the principles through which a place can be developed.

“We took the totem of the lyrebird,” she explains, “and used it to design a justice precinct in Campbelltown.” The lyrebird is known for its performance: it dances and contorts itself to create incredible mimicries for curious audiences, shifting the gaze of a potential predator towards itself, and away from its nest. The character of this totem bird inspires spatial ideas for design. “You ask people to look this way, while the people who need to be protected are over here,” says Hromek. “That creates a clever solution to a problem, which is directly informed by Country.” She locates the presence of sacred hills nearby: she uses these to inform the spatial orientation of buildings, allowing resident populations to maintain important sight lines to the hills.

Symbolic associations between people and place are imprinted into new precinct designs. “The soils, the ecological system as a whole, can tell us how we should behave here,” Hromek says. “We can ask Country, what should we do here? If you know how to ask, Country can communicate and can absolutely tell you.” She finds this approach can inform everything from where accessible lifts should be, to how a facade could look, or how to behave there. “Even if it’s not in actual form, it’s there in memory, still.”

Thinking and working differently

The NSW planning provision has been accompanied by a draft Government Architect framework called Connecting with Country, led by principal architect and Yugembir-Goori man Dillon Kombumerri. Kombumerri has spent much of the past three decades advocating for Indigenous-led design and architecture. The new framework centres on the need to acknowledge that “profound relationships have been forged with Mother Earth and other ancestral beings,” creating knowledge systems that are part of our spiritual practices and act as a “vast database of wisdom.” It asks government and industry decision-makers to “take up the challenge of thinking differently, working differently, and making decisions that prioritise Country.” Releasing the report, NSW Government Architect Abbie Galvin said, “If we care for Country, it will care for us.”

Rather than viewing land as property to be exploited for human ends, this approach positions our relationship to land as part of complex animated landscapes of ancestral energies and more-than-human perspectives. By extension, this means humans should no longer be the focal point for design decisions about how places are planned and built. Instead, “place making” becomes a practice that recognises the value of places for non-human species and life forms, as well as people. The making of places also becomes a practice of translating ancient symbols and stories into built form — radically reimagining how time is inscribed into environments, and what we can read into their material presences. “What a transformational perspective for Australian designers and architects,” Alison Page writes, “to be part of an Australian design ethos that views the construction of the built environment as an extension of our creation stories.”

We are now witnessing contemporary urban planning and design becoming infused with sacred songlines. These highly symbolic travel paths, connecting sacred places created by ancestors, contain within them what Page calls “vast amounts of ecological data without the written word” and can be used to create new wisdom and practice. Kombumerri talks about water songlines to his colleagues across the NSW government and beyond. These songlines run across the country, linking lakes, rivers, wetlands, aquifers, springs and soaks. From an Aboriginal perspective, many of these are physically and spiritually joined: “These links are reinforced by acts of travelling to sacred places, performing ceremony and singing up Country.”

As Kombumerri explains, a Country-centred perspective allows water to be respected for its spiritual and living rights, more than its functional necessity for human welfare alone. It supports the momentum to grant rivers legal personhood, just as the Victorian parliament did in 2017 when it passed the Yarra River Protection (Wilip-gin Birrarung murron) Act, the first legislation in Australia to be co-titled in a traditional owner language. The legislation translates as “keep the Birrarung alive” in Woi Wurrung, the traditional language of the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people. It was an Australian first in legally identifying a large river and its corridor, which crosses many boundaries, as a single living and integrated natural entity for protection.

To give space for Country-centred knowledge in the planning and design of future places also points to growing confidence in a distinctively Australian urban vernacular, and a role for those working in built environment professions to reinvigorate what Page calls “ancient conversations about the human connection to nature.” It also places Aboriginal designers and thinkers at the heart of conversations about the future of our cities, and it invites non-Aboriginal people to connect in a meaningful way with the cultures of First Nations people. For Michael Hromek, an Indigenous designer of Yuin/Budawang descent, who works with global engineering firm WSP, the approach is far more empowering for traditional custodians and owners of Country, by allowing Indigenous-led perspectives to guide the vision and principles of a project, and to inform the work of other stakeholders, designers, engineers and communities.

Country-centred values of place?

Presented as a radical rethinking of the human relationship to place, the idea of Country can reframe the values underpinning built environment projects. If thinking through Country can influence the direction a building is oriented, or what materials are used, can it also shift how and what gets valued in a precinct development? To reverse the phrase, if Country cares for us, will we care for it? Can developer contributions from a new precinct, for example, be reinvested into regenerative habitats for at-risk species? If we view “places as Country” as lively landscapes of the human and non-human, deeply interconnected, then can new precinct designs for place support cooler, restorative habitats for both human and non-human life forms in more equal measure? And importantly, could a Country-centred perspective seek to evaluate the impacts and benefits of new developments across broader indicators, to encompass not only economic but also social, cultural, intergenerational and interspecies impacts?

How ideas of Country will negotiate Australian cities’ highly commodified urban landscapes over coming years — and how planning regimes adapt — will be interesting to watch. Some signs of stress are evident in the interaction of different Aboriginal organisations and groups. In New South Wales, Aboriginal sovereignty is enacted not only through traditional connections to Country (via native title) but also through acts of land reclamation. The state’s Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1983 aimed to compensate Aboriginal people economically for their historical dispossession; decades on, Deerubbin Local Aboriginal Land Council is Western Sydney’s biggest private landowner, and remains focused on its mandate to exploit the land for financial gain — a mandate that doesn’t rest on traditional claims of ownership or connection to Country, as is the case with native title.

For Naama Blatman-Thomas, a University of Sydney geographer who has partnered with Deerubbin LALC, commodified land offers “liberating possibilities” for Aboriginal communities. Funded by the UK’s Urban Studies Foundation, she is looking at how Deerubbin uses “non-traditional” mechanisms of private land ownership and reclamation to advance urban decolonisation and First Nations sovereignty.

But tensions exist between Deerubbin, and the traditional custodians of Western Sydney, the Darug people. The land council does not support membership by Darug people, and cites contests over Aboriginal knowledge of place and Country across Western Sydney in its July submission to the Department of Planning, Industry and Environment’s Design and Place guidelines. For many Darug people, among them descendants of Darug Boorooberongal Clan Elder, Yarramundi, Aboriginal identity was for many years forced underground, a “secret” shared only with a few family members. Today their role as traditional custodians of Country across Western Sydney is widely recognised, including by local and state government agencies, just as land claims by Deerubbin LALC continue to escalate across the region. These tensions are part of the rapidly-developing landscape of Western Sydney, a region where connections to Country and the work of Aboriginal land reclamation appear to be in conflict. (A more detailed discussion of this issue can be found in historian Peter Read’s essay, “Dispossession Is a Legitimate Experience.”)

Michael Hromek is optimistic that different Indigenous viewpoints can be reconciled. “A focus on Country can help different traditional owners and custodians come together around a common focus,” he says, citing his experience working on the $13 billion level crossing removal program across Melbourne. Country is ancient, and it is symbolically charged, but it also remains crisscrossed by waves of dispossession, loss, compensation and commodification, which also continue to animate the landscape. To me, a white Australian, learning to see place through the lens of Country, being led by Indigenous designers and storytellers feels like a powerful way to build future places. As historian Bill Gammage says, if we can succeed in understanding our country, “one day we might become Australians.” And our cities might also reflect the many languages and meanings of Country. Aunty Rhonda’s words come once again to mind: “You all have come here, to this country to see, to listen, and remember.” Nyura yin-gu mara-la barray-gu, nyaa-gi, ngarra-gi. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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This is the feel of a city being remade. Jackhammers, excavators and earthmovers dig up and demolish. Heavy machinery moves in and out of construction sites across the city, breaking up bitumen and disrupting traffic, ushered along by weary traffic wardens whose authority is proclaimed by hi-vis gear.

The tumult was set in motion last year. With the cities furloughed and workers told to stay home, governments at all levels got busy announcing policies to speed up planning and development approvals. “By fast-tracking assessments,” said NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian, “we will keep people in jobs and keep the construction industry moving, as we ride out the Covid-19 pandemic and set our sights on economic recovery.”

Anything “shovel ready” was good to go: just cut through the red tape to make sure the job numbers don’t plummet. Here in New South Wales, more than $100 billion in infrastructure spending was announced in November: $30 billion to be spent in 2021 alone, $14 billion of it on Sydney-based transport projects. In Canberra, the territory government promised $4.3 billion over four years.

The Victorian government earmarked more than $10 billion in its November budget for landmark transport and infrastructure projects like the Suburban Rail Loop, and speeded up approvals for other significant new developments. The Queensland government pledged more than $13 billion for big infrastructure schemes like the Building Acceleration Program, which offers interest-free loans for new projects.

While it made a smaller contribution than many were seeking, the federal government also stepped in, with $11 billion allocated in its latest budget for infrastructure spending and targeted incentives for construction projects.

Using infrastructure spending as an economic recovery tool makes a lot of sense, especially when the construction sector is as important as it has become in Australia in recent years. Without most of us realising it, the sector has reached the point where it employs around one in ten Australian workers.

A construction workforce of that size means our cities must be dug up, revitalised and rebuilt at an ever-quickening pace. Otherwise governments risk dire job-loss announcements from the industry’s powerful lobby groups, like the Master Builders Association’s declaration last June that hard-hat companies faced a “valley of death,” with the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

In the language of media-friendly announceables, keeping the construction pipeline flowing means not just jobs but also “better services” for communities, including better roads, better bridges, better rail and, potentially, more — and therefore more affordable — housing. What’s not to like?

Quite a bit, it turns out. Using construction to keep the economy buzzing has downsides we hear much less about.

“Shovel ready” projects often proceed without proper consultation, as state governments override local planning processes. Some local councils are receiving more infrastructure investment than ever before, but they lack the resources to properly plan and consult. Cutting through red tape and “green tape” is, of course, code for sidelining environmental and community-impact assessments.

Alarmingly, public-benefit tests for many fast-tracked projects also fail to consider the environmental impact of construction itself. Construction accounts for almost 40 per cent of global carbon emissions, and many worry that rapidly scaling up the industry threatens nations’ ability to meet their Paris Agreement targets.

In Australia, the construction sector generates the same amount of waste as all households put together; it is also in the top three most waste-intensive industries in the country. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, for every $1 million in value generated for the economy, construction generates eighty-seven tonnes of waste. The sector’s rapid growth means this problem is increasing at a truly alarming rate: since 2016–17, construction waste grew by as much as 22 per cent.

Making matters worse, Australia’s construction sector is a laggard in adopting innovative techniques and using materials efficiently. Globally, the Construction 2.0 agenda — a push for modern, emissions-limiting building practices — continues to accelerate, with a focus on new materials and technologies to better manage building supplies, reduce waste, improve working conditions and reduce environmental harm. Simply throwing money at the sector to keep workers on the tools feels like a very Australian way of managing our way out of a crisis, particularly when investment in research and development remains notoriously low.

For Australia’s cities, the focus on construction also represents poor long-term planning. A new wave of “circular economy” industries is emerging with a focus on recycling building waste materials into new building products like the “green ceramics” being developed by the University of New South Wales’s Veena Sahajwalla. But the new apartments, new freeways and new transport corridors are swallowing potential sites for light industrial or mixed-use development and leaving little space for these industries to grow.

We tend to think of “innovation precincts” as hubs for technology and knowledge workers, like the Australian Technology Park in Sydney. In fact, cities need innovation in the very nature of building — especially in managing construction waste and using materials efficiently — to meet the challenges thrown up by accelerating urban growth.

It’s hard to make space for this kind of innovation precinct when our methods of measuring the value of land tend to favour short-term over long-term value. As the industry website The Fifth Estate recently reported, residential land is priced at $2000 a square metre, double the value put on industrial land. Rezoning favours the outcomes with highest short-term yield.

These are complicated issues. But how the construction industry is allowed to operate and how we think about the waste it generates tell a big story about how this country plans to meet its targets under the Paris Agreement and deal more energetically with the climate emergency.

Meanwhile, seemingly oblivious, the earthmovers and dozers and diggers are being kept busy, the waste keeps piling up, and the emissions continue. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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The pun might have been too tempting to resist, but the article tells a more modest tale. For a super fund managing more than $54 billion in super assets, an investment of “up to” $10 million is barely a drop in the vast ocean of unmet housing need. And it’s not clear how much of it will go to housing people on the lowest incomes.

Cbus is joining with the National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation to finance a ninety-six-dwelling pilot project across six “shovel-ready sites” owned by the NSW Land and Housing Corporation. The land will be offered to community housing providers on a forty-nine-year lease, creating a subsidy that will help deliver housing at lower rents.

But it’s unclear how many of the new homes will qualify as “social housing” — dwellings reserved for poor tenants who would pay no more than 30 per cent of their income in rent. The pilot will provide “mixed tenure dwellings,” and the not-for-profit housing organisations are allowed to partner with private developers and investors to deliver them. This suggests that the numbers will only stack up if the lowest-cost homes are cross-subsidised by dwellings rented out at full commercial rates.

The project is also likely to include an “affordable” component pitched at “key workers” on low to moderate incomes. These homes, rented at 20 per cent below market prices, may come closer to profitability but are unlikely to generate the level of returns super funds require.

NSW housing minister Melinda Pavey says this “innovative build-to-rent and financing model” will deliver on the state government’s objective “to build new and better social housing by renewing ageing assets that are expensive to maintain.” In other words, rather than invest public money or take on extra debt to directly expand and upgrade the state’s declining and outdated public housing stock, the government hopes super funds will finance community organisations and private developers to do the job for it.

Beyond the pilot, the Land and Housing Corporation will invite bids to develop a further 300 homes on sixteen sites in metropolitan and regional areas across New South Wales. And the model could be extended to other states. Cbus has suggested its lending to the sector could exceed $100 million within three years. “We need more of this type of innovative thinking and collaboration that provides the best possible bang for our buck we can get,” says Pavey.

But whether this really represents the best possible bang for the public buck is open to dispute. With Commonwealth bond rates at 0.8 per cent, as former prime minister Paul Keating recently told Fran Kelly on Radio National Breakfast, “we could be building public housing now till the cows come home.” Australia’s leading housing researchers make a similar case: the most efficient way to build homes for low-income renters is “direct public investment,” and Australia should avoid “overly complex private financing ‘innovations’ that have proven ineffective elsewhere.”

“Yes, putting it simply, that’s correct,” admits Stephen Anthony, chief economist at Industry Super Australia and lead author of a recent report on affordable housing for the NSW Community Housing Industry Council. The problem is that the federal government has no appetite for investing in social housing, despite joint calls for action from unions and industry bodies and compelling arguments from economists and housing experts that it is an ideal form of job-creating stimulus. Canberra believes it already has enough pump-priming planned and sees social housing as a responsibility of state and territory governments.

While state governments are stepping up their own efforts — Tasmania, for example, is promising 1000 new units of social housing over the next three years — only the federal government has the resources to make any kind of dent in the national social housing shortfall of more than 430,000 dwellings — a figure that, without action, will grow to well over 700,000 by 2036.

So, in the absence of federal investment, what would it take for super funds to play a role in housing the Australian nation?

When I put this question to Stephen Anthony, he responded by asking me to step back and consider why it is difficult to turn a buck from rental housing in the first place. The main reason is simple: residential property is very expensive. And every time prices go up, so does the investment needed to develop a project. Since tenants — especially low-income tenants — can’t afford to pay proportionately higher rents, the rate of return on capital goes down and rental housing become less attractive to institutional investors.

And why are property prices so high? The rot set in with financial deregulation in the 1980s, says Anthony, when banking was “handed over to the money changers” and became “all about collateralised lending.” Instead of providing small and medium-sized enterprises with capital to expand their businesses and increase employment, the banks’ “main game” shifted to “unproductive” property loans. (As of March 2020, about two-thirds of new lending by deposit-taking institutions was for housing.)

Combined with negative gearing, the capital gains tax discount and record low interest rates, this shift in lending fuelled the rise of “amateur” landlords — the “mum and dad” investors — who are more focused on rising property values than on rental returns. Because they mostly buy existing dwellings, they add little to the overall supply of rental housing. (Almost three-quarters of housing loans are for existing properties.) Instead, they bid up prices and inflate real estate values, especially in Sydney and Melbourne.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s latest push to wind back responsible lending laws and make it easier to borrow from the banks (in the hope that looser credit rules will boost economic activity) is likely to ramp up speculative activity. If prices start rising again, super funds will be even more wary of investing in housing projects focused on rental returns rather than capital gains.

As Stephen Anthony points out, superannuation funds gain no benefit from negative gearing because they can’t borrow to invest in property and so can’t claim interest payments as a deduction. While they do get a capital gains tax discount, it is 33 per cent rather than the 50 per cent available to small investors — and capital gains shouldn’t be the main game in build-to-rent projects anyway. The way states levy land tax further discourages large-scale rental investments.

All this helps to explain why Cbus’s involvement in the NSW housing project takes the form of debt rather than equity. The return to its members will come as interest payments on a loan rather than as an income stream from tenants’ rent, which also means that the community housing providers, rather than the super fund, will bear most of the risk.

The point here is not to disparage the Cbus loan, or other recent initiatives by industry funds like HESTA, Aware (formerly First State), NGS and Australian Super to provide homes for low-income renters and key workers. Rather, it is to argue that investment in rental housing on a significant scale — rather than in once-off niche projects — will remain unlikely while Australia’s tax and financial arrangements encourage landlords to focus on rising property prices rather than a steady flow of long-term rent income.

The higher real estate prices go, the lower the return on investment in rental housing, and the less attractive it becomes to super funds. What’s more, rising property prices discourage governments — state or federal — from developing social housing because the required subsidy keeps getting bigger.

A 2018 report for the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, or AHURI, calculated that the average subsidy needed to build a unit of social housing in Australia was $13,000 per dwelling per year. Costs vary greatly between regions, of course: in parts of rural New South Wales the figure could be as low as $5000 annually; in parts of Sydney it could be as high as $35,000.

Let’s imagine that we want to get a super fund to invest in a hundred-unit social housing project (with rents set at 25 per cent of tenants’ income) in one of Sydney’s middle or outer suburbs. For the project to generate a gross rate of return of 6.5 per cent, Industry Super estimates that every two-bedroom townhouse would require an annual subsidy of around $25,000. If investors settled for a lower rate of return — say 4.5 per cent — then the annual per-dwelling subsidy would be about $15,000. If the state government (or a local council or a non-government organisation) provided land at no cost, then the required subsidy would almost halve. And of course, the subsidy can be reduced even further, or wiped out altogether, if, like the Cbus project, the development is a mix of social, affordable and market-priced rentals.

According to AHURI’s modelling, overcoming the NSW shortfall in social and affordable housing would require a state government investment of about $3.5 billion every year until 2036. This might sound like a great deal of money, but since the broader housing sector already receives billions of dollars via negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount, governments could tackle the challenge by changing priorities rather than borrowing more.

This is not just about targeting support to those who need it most, but also about dampening the fires that propel property prices.

In the current low-growth environment, says Stephen Anthony, institutional investors could be attracted to an affordable housing project that offered a return of something like inflation plus 3 per cent. In the first instance, the investment may come not from Australian super funds but from their North American and European counterparts, which will settle for lower returns based on reliable income streams like rent payments because their members are generally older.

But broadscale institutional investment is unlikely until we close the gap between the cost of new housing and the rents low-income tenants can afford to pay. “To make a market work you have to have a market price in there,” says Anthony. “We have to fill the subsidy bucket somehow.”

In the absence of significant tax reform or debt-financing of social housing, prospects might seem bleak. But Stephen Anthony says there are still things governments could do.

One would be to create an Australian version of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit that operates in the United States. The scheme allows not-for-profit organisations that build social and affordable housing to generate tax credits that they can then sell to private companies looking to reduce their tax liabilities. It helps develop about 110,000 units of housing each year, worth around US$8 billion.

Anthony, who once worked briefly for the conservative Heritage Foundation in Washington, says the tax credit was created by Ronald Reagan’s administration. “It is a game-changing policy that can appeal across the political aisles,” he says. “The ability to trade in tax credits is gold for corporations trying to manage their tax liabilities.”

In operation since 1987, the scheme has an established record and the confidence of corporate investors. It’s no free lunch — just like negative gearing, it means revenue forgone for the federal government — but it may be a more palatable option than extra borrowing.

Another suggestion is for the federal government to set up a housing investment fund along the lines of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. While this would require a big up-front injection of capital — the CEFC got $10 billion — it has the advantage of taking housing funding off the government’s balance sheet. The NSW Social and Affordable Housing Fund and Victoria’s Social Housing Growth Fund are initiatives of this kind, but their capital of just $1 billion each falls well short of the scale required to match the problem.

A much larger national fund could support social housing developments with equity investments as well as discounted loans to help attract additional private investors. Again, though, it wouldn’t alter the fundamental equation in which rents from low-income tenants are insufficient to generate a positive return on investment (as the CEFC is expected to do across its portfolio).

Anthony argues that the states could also use their planning powers more aggressively to increase the supply of social and affordable housing. His report singles out Western Australia’s integrated property development model, which requires that new land releases or urban redevelopments include various types of affordable and social housing, from discounted rentals to shared equity. It’s rare to see inclusionary zoning used in Australia, but it is common in many other countries.

As the Cbus example shows, super funds can be attracted to social housing if sufficient support is on offer — whether it’s free or discounted land, capital grants, cross-subsidies through market rentals, tax credits, or some other method or combination. Another way to change the equation, of course, is to permanently increase and properly index JobSeeker payments and Commonwealth Rent Assistance so that social housing tenants can afford to pay more rent (though some of the gains would flow to private landlords).

For social housing to be developed at scale, Anthony and other analysts say that Australia needs an agency similar to the National Housing Supply Council, created by the Rudd government in 2008 and abolished by the Abbott government in 2013. “This is not central planning but coordination,” says Anthony. “It’s overall guidance to identify where the shortages are, what resources are available and which players might come to the table.”

The other key requirement is certainty. “You need an institutional constant to establish the framework and leave it in place for future governments,” says Anthony.

The potential rewards of tackling the problem are considerable, as are the potential risks of not acting. As Anthony’s housing affordability report warns, Australia is experiencing its biggest peacetime economic shock since the Great Depression, and our approach to housing finance could make matters much worse.

Australia’s pre-1980s banking system was “framed by the tragedy of the 1890s property bust,” says Anthony, and “forged under fire during the Great Depression of the 1930s,” and “eventually informed by the 1936 Banking Royal Commission.” Deregulation, though, has “reawakened the old boom-bust property cycle” and fostered “an addiction to household debt,” which as a share of disposable income is much higher in Australia today than it was in the United States immediately before the global financial crisis.

If we transform financing and tax arrangements for housing then we can lay the foundations for future prosperity, just as we did after the second world war. And even if government has to take on extra debt to build homes for low-income renters, it’s a public investment that will return a dividend in higher productivity, lower health costs, lower welfare spending and changed lives.

“That’s indisputable,” says Anthony. “The bottom 30 per cent of the population by income just need a roof over their head. They want to live in one suburb for as long as possible. They want stability. And anything that brings stability to the family unit ticks all the boxes for investment and saves government a motza in the long run.” •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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Except for now. This quarter, there’s little growth to be seen, and the tall buildings are relatively empty. Many office buildings in the CBD report occupancy rates below 30 per cent. In Sydney, where much of life has opened up, it’s the suburbs that are bustling. The relative emptiness of the CBD means money is staying away, no longer coursing freely through shops, cafes and restaurants. Busy intermediaries weave through the suburbs on bikes or in vans, delivering goods and food to shoppers who remain closeted away with their devices.

If the relative emptiness of the central city feels like a shock, we’d do well to remember how relatively novel is the particular, pre-pandemic form of the city we’re familiar with. Skyscrapers stacked tight in the centres, with radial train networks transporting commuters in and out of dormitory suburbs, represent distinct configurations of home and work, domesticity and commerce, that might be slipping. Has the “age of dispersion” arrived? Will investors continue to capitalise on the empty air above certain streets, building more towers for more offices, extending the decades-run of speculative property investment centred around CBD locations — or will another urban form take root?

As it happens, the tall building wasn’t welcome in Australia’s biggest cities for many years. The City of Sydney’s first modern skyscraper, the AMP building on Alfred Street in Circular Quay, was only completed in 1961, well after the first tall buildings were emerging across American cities. When it arrived at its harbourside address, it was a gargantuan structure, towering twenty-two storeys over neighbouring buildings like some kind of alien life-form. It shattered the human scale of the street, delineating new sightlines for speculative growth.

The building was only possible because of the lifting, in 1957, of the Height of Buildings Act 1912, which had been used for decades to prevent the onslaught of American-style skyscrapers on Sydney’s city centre. The Act, known as the “anti-skyscraper law,” was driven by fears that tall buildings were particularly vulnerable to the ravages of fire. Sydney’s CBD had been scarred by the events of 1901, when a massive fire in an eight-storey department store resulted in five deaths, including a young man forced to jump from a window in front of lunchtime crowds.

Gamechanger: the newly completed AMP Building in Alfred Street, Circular Quay, in 1962. City of Sydney Archives

Melbourne, too, moved quickly to limit its building heights to 130 feet, a constraint maintained during the interwar period. Architects, firefighters, fire insurers and politicians were united in their view that any building exceeding the range of fire-fighting technologies was unsafe. As a consequence, for many years our cities continued to grow outwards, not up.

Many Australian urbanists of the early twentieth century considered tall buildings to be ugly expressions of the unbridled greed of speculative capitalism. As skyscrapers spread across America, Australian architects, including those working abroad, worried they would sully the rare beauty of Sydney and its glittering harbour. A group of architects, writing from London, called for special consideration to be given to Sydney as a city of rare beauty: “the idea that such an enormous asset as this beauty… should be so recklessly undervalued as to be left at the mercy of private speculation” gravely concerned them.

During this era, the ideal form of urban progress — or what we might now call “innovation” — was to be found in the pioneering form of the suburb. Though it later became unfashionable, the suburb was born of public health crises and designed as a harmonious balancing of privacy, hygiene and social cohesion. Where English cities had been afflicted by ill-planned slums that spread death and disease, Australian cities could experiment much more freely with new spatial configurations. Ready access to nature spaces, whether public parks or private gardens, gave rise to numerous planning laws explicitly designed to protect citizens from ill-health.

This aspirational urban form emerged in the 1830s, when the wealthy and well-educated looked to the ideas of Scottish gardener and publisher John Claudius Loudon, who popularised the potential of the “suburban villa with garden attached” to create health and happiness. Another Scotsman, biologist Patrick Geddes, would devise novel ways of seeing the city as a “bio-social” unit, taking account of health, ecology and wellbeing.

Shocked by the overuse of slum clearance to eradicate disease in India in the late 1800s, Geddes, now credited as one of the founders of the urban planning movement, pioneered a different kind of public health response to city pestilence. Governments, he argued, should not only clear away slums, disrupting countless lives, but design more intelligently, placing large gardens and parks, offering fresh air and communal spaces, at the centre of communities.

Likewise, the influential idea of the “garden city,” which gained expression across English and American cities and suburbs after the first world war, was seen as a way of improving the health of the working classes. Devised by planner Ebenezer Howard, it aimed to better integrate the experience of town and countryside, doing away with the crowded and unhealthy experience of the inner city.

Health Living: City Planning Diagram 2, from Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow (Swan Sonnenschein & Co., Ltd, 1922)

So, if today’s coronavirus sparks a rapid dispersion from dense urban cores, it certainly wouldn’t be for the first time. But nor would it mean an end to the city as such. If public health crises of earlier eras gave us suburban ideals of healthy living and generous urban parks for our leisure, the lasting changes resulting from this pandemic may well lie in the new spatial patterns that emerge from how we work.

Gone like a flash, perhaps forever, is the expectation that work necessitates being in an office; just as the “internet” is no longer a thing to dial up. It’s been fifteen years since Australian urban futurist William Mitchell decried as obsolete the workplaces of the industrial revolution, those essentially Taylorist constructions that required working at the same place at regimented times. And yet it took invisible strains of virus, not wireless broadband, techno-utopianism or even the rise of a knowledge-based workforce, to accommodate widespread teleworking.

From open plan to open air?

So what comes next? When you listen to those with a stake in commercial property markets, this is just a blip. Businesses will still need their offices to differentiate themselves, cultivate workplace culture and attract the top talent. But why exactly should workplace culture and connectivity only be forged in an office?

The answer may lie in reassessing the very function of the “work space” and its role in an organisation. Many are now rethinking what these spaces need to feel like if they are focused less on providing technology for computer-based tasks — after all, these can be done anywhere — and more on the need to promote workplace culture and nourish wellbeing. These spaces must now be “healthy” — with the “healthy building” tag now a feature of premium office spaces that tout their superior air and variety of lifestyle support services. Office space designers are embracing a greater symbiosis between natural and built forms, known as biophilia, interweaving green walls, natural materials and outdoor spaces. The airconditioned nightmare of the modern, monotonous layout just might be coming to an end.

For an image of what this might look like, look at Atlassian’s new headquarters next to Sydney’s Central Station. When completed, the tech company’s headquarters are projected to be tallest hybrid-timber building in the world, featuring elevated parks, mass timber interiors and an energy-generating glass façade. This green vision accompanies the recent announcement by Atlassian’s founders that employees may work from home permanently if they choose. No doubt they expect the quality of this space to attract plenty of tenants, if not their own workers.

Beyond changes to the look and feel of premium office spaces, we should also recognise something more radical going on. The nature of work is finally catching up with the affordances of digital tech. Distances are dematerialised; computing is “ambient”; organisations are becoming more “liquid.” My colleagues may be as much in Sydney as in Singapore. The local is no longer a place to depart in the morning, but a space to dwell in while working.

Like the radical suburban experiments of a bygone era, this public health crisis may yet allow for renewed kinds of making and connecting in previously dormant suburbs and neglected peripheral spaces. It may not be a “flight to the suburbs” in a retrograde sense, but a casting off of rigid modes of separation between home and work, industry and nature, as expressed in city forms. Australia’s suburbs may yet be well-suited to a coming era of biophilic urbanism, one that embraces “green infrastructure,” regenerative agriculture and productive allotments of either low or high-density urban farms.

Indeed, many are calling for more urban farming in a post-pandemic era, building in more local, resource-efficient food supply chains across suburban landscapes. Start-ups are springing up to deliver modular, stackable, automated vertical farms. With the right vision, the sleepy Australian suburb, places we once left for a busy day in the office, may again prove vital to a healthier urban future. For those like Rebecca Scott, chief executive of Melbourne social enterprise STREAT, post-pandemic Melbourne needs to be imagined as a “huge, edible urban food bowl,” a productive foodscape created by supercharging investment not just in green infrastructure but edible infrastructure as well.

If escaping pestilence and plague gave us the suburban dream, perhaps this pandemic will seed new patterns of work–life dreaming across the low-rise landscapes of the Australian suburb. Imagine a localised urban food hub in your area that also includes co-working spaces, tech supports, arts spaces and some outdoor dining. Would you return to the CBD? Perhaps only sometimes. But meanwhile, food supply chains would be diversified, carbon offset, water saved, transport networks declogged, with working families given more time, perhaps, to spend together.

Of course, these are just speculations. Perhaps train stations in the CBD will again be at bursting point during peak hour before too long. But as previous generations of urban visionaries and designers remind us, public health crises are often times of intensive urban innovation, when radical ideas actually gain purchase and are put into action. Perhaps this, too, will be one such time. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post The end of the city? No, not quite appeared first on Inside Story.

Like many academics who spend their lives pursuing new knowledge but find industry take-up of their insights shockingly limited, Allen and Macomber were frustrated at how little the property sector knew, or even cared, about the relationship between buildings and health. Despite gains in “human-centred design,” “workplace experience” and “workplace health and safety,” the quality of something as mundane as the actual air in a workplace didn’t seem a priority.

Evidence was increasingly showing that indoor air quality has a dramatic impact on employee productivity and health. And other evidence revealed that specific building materials and processes can reduce air quality. Yet the property sector’s complicated system of financing, construction and management was failing to ensure buildings were designed with healthy outcomes in mind.

Healthy Buildings was therefore written to convince more people to care more about the indoor health of the buildings in which they spend so much of their lives. Allen and Macomber wanted the property industry, in particular, to pay more attention, because its members were the ones with the most power to change things. “The people who manage your building,” they urge, “have a greater impact on your health than your doctor.”

But then 2020 happened: a global pandemic that has not only underscored the dependence of our global economy on conditions of public health but also provoked a sudden emptying out of central business districts. From where we stand today, it can seem as if the world of work will never be the same again. What does that mean for the way we think about buildings — particularly those towers dominating commercial districts — and workplace health?

If the global spread of novel coronavirus has driven home the critical link between health and economy, it’s also turbocharged a shift towards teleworking and distributed workforces. We now know for certain that virtual connectivity can supplant physical clustering, particularly in professional, knowledge-based service industries. And if the workplace habits of 2020 stick around, this shift has drastic implications for the commercial building sector and the future of “workplace design.”

A growing number of companies are preparing for employees to work remotely on a permanent basis. One largely US-focused list tracking working-from-home announcements shows that the companies adopting permanent practices are mainly technology companies, like Twitter, Facebook, Shopify and payments company Square. For many others, flexible working is likely to become a permanent feature, with rotating schedules in place for employees to work part-time in their offices. As one analyst reflected in Fast Company, “The genie is out of the bottle, and it’s not likely to go back in.”

Writing before the pandemic, Allen and Macomber knew the world of work was changing as daily interactions became more and more digital. But, like most people, they believed the benefits of clustering in cities outweighed any attractions of purely virtual networking. In Healthy Buildings they call the digital revolution one of the “mega-changes” transforming the world of work, creating a “seismic shift” in how, when and where employees work. Before 2020, though, all this seemed a bit inconsequential. “Businesses are responding,” they write, “with workplaces centred on the human experience, with employee health and well-being as a core component.”

For savvy investors and developers, the digital revolution was a chance to refocus the attention of property developers on what a healthy building could add to a bottom line. Allen and Macomber point to quantitative research showing “in an objective and reproducible way that our cognitive abilities, health, productivity, and well-being are directly impacted by decisions in the engineering, operations, and running of our buildings.”

If better indoor air can improve productivity by 10 per cent, as one study found, then that can be promoted as a value-add asset by a landlord or property manager, translating into higher profits not just for a company leasing space in the building but also for the landlord, who can justify premiums on the rent. It’s this logic that gets us to the central premise and promise of this book: “Healthy Buildings represent, without exaggeration, one of the greatest health — and business — opportunities ever.”

Here we are, though, in 2020, when the impact of a global pandemic on workplace practices makes a book like Healthy Buildings at once very timely and also somewhat stranded in a strangely alien world.

Looking backwards from our vantage point today, we see a world with an unshakeable belief that perpetual demand for high-rise office towers would remain a key feature of modern urban life. Commercial real estate financiers and developers would continue to dictate the physical conditions in which institutionalised work is carried out, “responsive” to “human-centred” design trends such as “activity-based working” (open-plan offices where you continuously “hot desk” for the forty-odd hours of your working week).

This unshakeable system of high-rise clustering gave us the centrifugal patterning of the modern city, with its radial transport networks fanning out from city centres to sleepy, low-rise suburbs. With it came the city’s congested streets, demanding ever-increasing public spending on transport infrastructure to facilitate mass population flows each day, ultimately inundating and extending “peak hour.”

That system of design didn’t exactly have the health of employees in mind. It demanded long commutes for employees forced to remain sedentary for extended hours, even on top of the many desk-bound hours they spend in air-conditioned offices. And for those with young families, it required complicated systems of childcare and after-school care. If we stopped to think about it, the health implications of centrally clustered commercial office spaces ought to have been considered well beyond the quality of their indoor air.

Because Healthy Buildings now exists in a world of novel coronavirus, its readers may well find themselves wondering at the narrow definitions of “workplace health” it prioritises. Readers might even wonder: who really stands to benefit from its approach to health and workplace design, and who loses?

Quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson’s observation that “the first wealth is health,” Allen and Macomber target executive leaders and have the bottom line of the property sector firmly in their sights. Just as building owners have been able to capitalise on the energy efficiency movement, investors in healthy buildings can now use building certification standards to differentiate their product from more standard stock.

The most promising of these is a new WELL building standard, which focuses exclusively on the impacts of buildings on human health and wellness. It builds on the success of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, certification standard developed by the US Green Building Council and, locally, the Green Building Council of Australia. Under LEED, buildings can apply for “points” against energy efficiency measures, which in turn create market differentiation and, ipso facto, higher rent yields and lower vacancy rates.

Like LEED, WELL allows financiers to recoup investments, whether in energy efficiency or healthy building outcomes, in the form of higher rents. Think of it as building branding, with benefits.

WELL may be a useful innovation for the property sector. But what if, after 2020, many businesses start to question their reliance on the office tower? Prioritising the health of employees in 2020 has actually meant keeping workforces at home. Return-to-work programs over coming months need to be staggered to avoid congestion on public transport networks. Has commercial real estate’s grip over our workplaces — with its insistence that office towers are the best design option we’ve got — just been loosened forever?

Of course, perhaps 2020 will just be a blip, a year to remember. For the financiers of New York’s 425 Park Avenue, which opened in June 2020 as the first tower in New York City to be certified with the WELL standard, there’s not too much to worry about. The building prioritises health-focused amenities like rooftop gardens, open-air patios and bike facilities. While acknowledging it’s a challenging time, its financiers aren’t making any radical changes in the eye of this storm. “You’re not redesigning a building for a moment in time if it’s going to last for fifty or a hundred years.”

Healthy Buildings co-author Joseph Allen was present at a virtual “fireside chat” about the new building with its designer, Norman Foster, one of its financiers, David Levinson, and the president of the International WELL Building Institute, Rachel Gutter. For Gutter, the pandemic means the conversation has fundamentally shifted: “WELL and healthy buildings went from sounding like a ‘nice to have,’ sounding like a luxury, to sounding like a matter of life and death.”

Yes, healthy buildings certainly are more important than ever. But for those less committed, reputationally and financially, to an existing pipeline of developments, now might be a good time to reflect more seriously on how the pandemic year of 2020 will change where and how employees work.

It might also be a good time to consider the other kinds of health impacts that result from a relentless pursuit of company profit at the expense of other kinds of planetary health. In fact, now would be a very good time to make planetary health a priority that dictates which major building developments can be approved. Wouldn’t that be a way to think seriously about the health impacts of buildings, too? •

The post What difference can a healthy building make? appeared first on Inside Story.

If property values fall and then stay low, Australia’s economic downturn could be deepened by the lack of consumer confidence that comes with subdued house prices. Some borrowers, particularly those who bought recently using low-deposit loans, could find themselves owing more to the banks than their house is worth — and with Australian banks more heavily exposed to residential property than most of their OECD counterparts, the financial impact could be wide.

Master Builders Australia predicts that residential construction will fall by 27 per cent next financial year, which means 43,000 fewer homes will be built in an already slowing industry. Construction — Australia’s third-largest employer — sheds labour quickly in a downturn but picks up much more slowly because of the time taken getting planning approval, running marketing campaigns, booking up pre-sales and securing finance. The impact of a construction downturn also ripples through sectors like building supplies and real estate services.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that Master Builders Australia has joined with its traditional rival, the construction union CFMMEU, in calling for the federal government to stump up $10 billion for 30,000 new social housing dwellings. Community agencies agree: the Community Housing Industry Association has combined with National Shelter and Homelessness Australia to propose a Social Housing Acceleration and Renovation Program, or SHARP, to spend $7.7 billion to build 30,000 new homes and repair thousands more, and ACOSS wants something similar.

This might sound like special pleading by vested interests and the usual bleeding hearts, but these proposals are a far more practical and immediate response to Australia’s recession than grandiose plans like a fast train between Melbourne and Sydney.

How do we know that? At a cost of less than $6 billion over three years, Kevin Rudd’s post–global financial crisis social housing initiative created 14,000 jobs. Every dollar spent generated $1.30 in economic activity. Almost 20,000 new dwellings were built and another 12,000 — some uninhabitable, others likely to become so — were repaired. Along the way the initiative helped to build the capacity and asset base of Australia’s nascent not-for-profit community housing sector.

But Rudd’s initiative was a one-off response to a crisis, and once it was over much of the momentum was lost.

State-based social housing packages — like the one announced this month in Victoria — will help to counter the immediate downturn. But they won’t tackle structural problems in the housing industry, including the way that Australia’s near-total reliance on the private sector generates boom–bust cycles. Despite Rudd’s initiative, real estate prices rocketed in most capital cities after the GFC, boosting household debt, inequality, rental stress, housing insecurity and homelessness.

Any stimulus program needs to fit into a national housing strategy linking all three levels of government. It should build at least 15,000 new units of social housing every year for decades into the future — about five times what gets built now, but no more than the construction levels regularly achieved in the decades after the second world war.

With the need for a national strategy more urgent than ever, the timing of Housing Policy in Australia: A Case for System Reform couldn’t be better. Experienced researchers Hal Pawson, Vivienne Milligan and Judith Yates pull together years of work — not only their own but also that of colleagues working through the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute — and draw on overseas experience to make a persuasive case for change.

In a sense, the aim of housing policy is simple: everyone should have access to safe, decent, affordable shelter, whether rented or owned, house or apartment, city or country, shared, single or family. But if there is an underlying thesis to this book, it’s that the basic aim has been confused by the different and in many ways conflicting role housing has come to play. Increasingly, it is a vehicle for building and transferring wealth.

As housing researcher Bill Randolph writes in the foreword to this book, we’ve moved from housing policy as “a ‘fourth pillar’ of the postwar political settlement, alongside wages growth, social security and trade protection” to a position where, in effect, “the market became the policy.” But, as the authors make clear, the housing market is profoundly shaped by government action, primarily through iniquitous tax settings and subsidies that benefit some (existing homeowners and property investors) and harm others (low-income renters in the private market).

Successive government policies have led to the “financialisation of housing,” a term that I had found rather opaque until I read this book. As the authors explain, the term refers to how dwellings are “increasingly viewed as tradeable assets with capital value rather than homes with utility value.” It is a process supported by the deregulation of the financial system since the 1980s.

One local manifestation of financialisation is the way it encourages homeowners to view their house as a bank from which they can withdraw funds, often in order to buy more property. Financialisation also means that investors buy “stash pads” as a kind of “safe-deposit box” for excess capital, often in markets where the purchaser has little or no connection to the local community or its urban fabric. Foreign investors buying high-rise apartments in Sydney and Melbourne are a good example, but so are Australian investment funds buying cheap rental properties in the American Midwest.

In a more developed form, financialisation encourages the emergence of private equity firms, trusts and other corporate entities as mass landlords focused on driving up rents and driving down costs. The firm Kushner, in which Donald Trump’s son-in-law and preferred fix-it man Jared Kushner is a major shareholder, owns 23,000 apartments across five American states. It stands accused of systematically harassing low-income tenants to force them to move so that it can raise rents, and then of pursuing those same tenants through the courts for unpaid fees.

Australia’s 2.1 million landlords are mostly small-scale property investors. But if Covid-19 produces a major property slump and distressed owners are forced to sell in a falling market, then we face the possibility of the same kind of property empires that emerged in the United States and Ireland after the GFC. Even during the boom, the number of Australian investors with multiple properties was growing faster than the number who owned just one.

Pawson, Milligan and Yates build their case for system reform by revealing the many shortcomings of a narrowly conceived market approach. For a start, current arrangements increase risk — most obviously for households, with 1.3 million people pushed into poverty by excessive housing costs. But it’s also evident in the apartment boom, where a lightly regulated industry has produced defective buildings clad in highly flammable materials or vulnerable to flooding.

And then there is the risk that property-fuelled household debt poses for the financial system and the wider economy. Periodic “price corrections” in the housing sector depress demand and consumption throughout the economy, and threaten the stability of the banking system. As the authors write, “This latter issue is of particular salience for Australia since, as reportedly demonstrated by IMF loan book profile data, Australian banks’ exposure to residential property is the highest in the developed world.”

Second, our approach to housing increases inequality. In theory, an era of low interest rates and deregulated lending should make home ownership more affordable. But, by enabling higher-income earners to take out bigger loans “to purchase more expensive housing than they might otherwise be able to afford,” it fuels price rises and puts home ownership “further out of reach for low-income earners.”

Rising prices widen the “deposit gap” between the price of a dwelling and the maximum amount a bank will lend, so while a household’s income might be high enough to comfortably service a mortgage, it is almost impossible to save the required down payment. In March, just before the pandemic hit, Melbourne’s median house price reached a record high of $918,000. That makes the standard 20 per cent deposit $184,000, or more than a decade of saving on the gross median income of $88,000 — assuming, heroically, that the household is able to save a fifth of its earnings.

Over the past two decades, as a result, “wealth rather than income has presented the major stumbling block to home ownership entry for low-to-moderate-income households.” The best advice to aspiring first homebuyers is not “get a good job,” as former treasurer Joe Hockey once claimed, but choose wealthy parents.

As home ownership moves increasingly out of reach, the pressure on low-income tenants increases. They are crowded out of the declining number of affordable properties by renters who earn more and are trying to keep their housing costs low while they save for that elusive deposit.

Another way of thinking about housing and inequality is to think about housing as an essential cost that everyone has to pay. True income inequality is not revealed by comparing raw data on household incomes but by comparing those incomes after housing costs have been covered. Using this measure, the gradient of income inequality in Australia is much steeper.

During the housing boom, incomes for the top ten per cent of households rose 85 per cent before housing costs, and 81 per cent after. Incomes for the poorest ten per cent of households, by contrast, rose about 50 per cent overall but only 30 per cent after accounting for housing costs. As a proportion of income, housing costs had risen sharply for the poor — who are mostly renters — but barely changed at all for the wealthy — who generally own their own homes.

At the time of the Henderson poverty inquiry in 1975, as the authors note, “before-housing” poverty was higher than “after-housing” poverty. Now it’s the opposite. In other words, our housing system helped to pull people out of poverty in the postwar decades but now pushes them deeper in.

The role of housing in inequality also manifests spatially, write Pawson, Milligan and Yates, not only in the “coincidence of rising homelessness with growing numbers of grossly under-occupied homes” but also in the fact that residential property close to city centres (and to jobs and services) appreciates more rapidly than dwellings on the urban fringe.

Housing-related tax concessions — like exempting the family home from capital gains tax — drive this inequality. Households in the top income quintile receive “an average benefit more than sevenfold that received by households in the lowest income quintile.” It’s well established that wealthy households also capture the bulk of gains from investment breaks like negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount. Yet these tax concessions do nothing to increase the overall supply of rental housing (let alone affordable rental housing). As the authors document, in the ten years to 2018 only 7 per cent of investment property finance was used to build new dwellings.

These tax concessions don’t just increase inequality, they also reduce productivity by encouraging Australians to overinvest in housing using money that could be spent in sectors that might generate more wealth. By treating housing as a protected asset, tax arrangements encourage inefficient use — large houses with unoccupied bedrooms, for example, or second homes that are rarely used. And housing inequality is itself a drag on productivity: insecure private rental housing is likely to result in frequent moves, which damage children’s schooling, and congestion is worsened by the long commutes of workers forced to the “‘affordable edge” of Australia’s cities.

The market approach has also sent Australia’s public housing system into long-term decline. Under the first ten-year Commonwealth State Housing Agreement, struck in 1945, state housing authorities built about 96,000 homes for rent. Although Menzies shifted the bias towards home ownership under the second agreement in 1955, state construction continued to deliver a significant proportion of all residential building activity through the 1960s, accounting for about one in every six houses built between 1945 and 1970.

Since the mid 1990s, government’s average contribution to building has been about one in every thirty-three houses. Amounting to fewer than 4000 dwellings per year, this is barely enough to keep pace with sales and demolitions of existing social housing stock, let alone the growth in Australia’s population. With many dwellings occupied by long-term tenants, the availability of social housing to people in need has fallen precipitously, from 52,000 new social housing lettings in 1991 to just 35,000 in 2017.

Other processes have also had an impact on public housing. In the 1980s, the deinstitutionalisation movement shifted people with disabilities, especially mental illness, into community care. With no government investment in alternative housing to provide this care, “public housing became the default tenure for many of those affected by the closure of the institutions,” despite the fact that existing stock was not well suited to this purpose. Once a way of increasing the supply of housing, public housing became a safety net and then, increasingly, an “ambulance service.”

Symptomatic of this trend, state and territory governments have progressively transferred responsibility for their housing portfolios from public works agencies to human services departments. “Perhaps the single word that best captures post 1970s change as characterised here is residualisation,” write Pawson, Milligan and Yates:

This describes a process of socioeconomic change whereby the tenant population of social housing has become increasingly confined to those unable to compete effectively for market housing. This change is starkly highlighted by official statistics revealing that the proportion of NSW public housing tenants for whom wages are the main source of household income fell from 85 per cent in 1960 to just 5 per cent by 2013.

The history of public housing in Australia is one in which governments have been “reluctant landlords,” with the period from 1945 to 1956 “a partial exception to this general trend.”

Other nations have taken a different path. About a third of all Dutch households live in secure, rent-moderated social housing. In the face of UK-wide austerity measures, the Scottish government has continued to develop social housing at a high rate. Even in the United States, a longstanding low-income housing tax credit facilitated the private-sector development of almost three million affordable rental dwellings by 2017. US housing financed in this way must retain its affordable status for at least thirty years, whereas under Kevin Rudd’s short-lived National Rental Affordability Scheme, housing only had to be priced affordably for ten years. The US tax credit leveraged around US$100 billion in private investment; in the absence of a similar mechanism here, the holy grail of superannuation funds investing in social and affordable housing will never be realised.

Many other countries also make much greater use of planning measures like inclusionary zoning to generate social and affordable housing, recognising that the market alone won’t deliver an adequate range of dwellings.

While there are differences of detail between the major parties in Australia, write Pawson, Milligan and Yates, “it would be difficult to identify any distinct ideologically inspired policy difference between governments of Labor and Liberal/National hue at either federal or state/territory level.” Instead, governments engage in “busy work” — measures that give the impression of activity but fail to strike at core issues. Partly this failure reflects a shared view that home ownership “is inherently the most superior form of tenure” — a myth the authors debunk — and the linked ideal of “a property-owning democracy.” And partly it’s electoral maths: voters who own their own homes, and who have an interest in seeing the value of that property increase, vastly outnumber aspiring homeowners who have an interest in greater affordability and renters who would benefit from more social housing.

But governments can only ignore the failures of housing policy for so long. Australia’s low age pension rate is predicated on widespread home ownership keeping housing costs low in old age, but this is now the “crumbling pillar” of Australia’s retirement income system. With forecasts that home ownership rates among the over-sixty-fives could fall below 60 per cent around the middle of the century, spending on Commonwealth rent assistance will cost much more than the current annual $4.4 billion, which is more than three times the funding the federal government provides to the states under the National Housing and Homelessness Agreement.

As the authors make clear, pandemic or no pandemic, this is a long-term problem with long-term implications:

Firstly, Australia’s current housing policies and housing system are further compounding existing income and wealth inequalities. Secondly, current forms of housing assistance will become fiscally unsustainable if current trends persist. Thirdly, Australia’s housing system underperformance is increasingly compromising broader public policy objectives.

This is an academically oriented book using careful language and detailed referencing. Retailing at more than $100, it isn’t destined to be a bestseller. But it is a landmark achievement that puts a peg in the ground, a reference point for where housing policy should go next at this moment of crisis and opportunity. Politicians, public servants and industry players who are thinking about how Australia rebuilds after the Covid-19 pandemic would do well to read it. •

Peter Mares’s four-part radio series, “Housing the Australian Nation,” will be broadcast on ABC Radio National’s Earshot on  from Saturday 30 May.

The post When the market is the policy, housing fails appeared first on Inside Story.

Quite suddenly, doing one’s daily work no longer means long and frustrating commutes across sprawling metropolitan regions. Most offices are shut. The bars are shut, the clubs are empty, the city promenades are deserted. Many people find themselves out of a job, their gigs cancelled, their shifts gone, their employee status furloughed.

And so the dynamic rhythms of an urbane, social, inner-city life are suddenly and radically compressed — confined to a walk in the park, perhaps, a cycle around safer streets, a dash to the supermarket for essentials, and quite possibly many more trips to the biscuit cupboard.

This time, we know, will pass, but we don’t know quite when. In the meantime, how we see how our cities will need to change. Mapping and reporting a city’s rhythms over coming months will require a shift in how we think about the role and purpose of our urban spaces.

In recent years, cities have been powerhouses of the global economy. The “triumph of the city” — in Edward Glaeser’s famous turn of phrase — has been evidenced in the greater productivity and innovation that results from proximity and density.

But we now face an uncertain era in which many of the usual indicators — economic output, occupancy rates, congestion, employment — tell a story of sudden decline, precarity and isolation.

Density suddenly looks dangerous. Gathering may breed sickness.

Over the coming months, and perhaps even years, as we look ahead to uncertain recovery periods, the indicators used to judge how well a city is performing will likely stay dire. In the meantime, we can expect to see the emergence of different ways of living in cities together. Perhaps, too, we might even find better ways of valuing these things.

As the urbanist Richard Sennett reflected in his 2015 book Building and Dwelling, “the built environment is one thing; how we dwell in it another.” The urban economy has taken a huge hit: yet here we remain, in densely packed neighbourhoods, dwelling together.

Many of us find ourselves living much more locally. Gone are the frenetic dynamics of a centrifugal city that sees office workers from across a metropolitan region journeying in and out of central business districts.

At the same time, parks are busier than ever, for now, as many of us have been forced to trade regular trips to the gym for a jog, a bike ride or a skate. The search is on for local walks with not too many people, a secret beach or river run — staying away from popular places and looking for the least-worn tracks.

Cyclists find themselves on much safer streets; air quality is improving. With urban traffic down by a quarter or more, the opportunities for active transport are greater than ever. Der Spiegel reports the German government recommending cycling in order to maintain safe social distancing but also to strengthen lungs, lower blood pressure and clear airways. Perhaps governments can accelerate this shift in Australian cities too?

Dwelling together, while maintaining social distancing, provokes us to discover ways to congregate in novel ways. Residents of an apartment block in Waterloo, Sydney, gathered on balconies to join two opera singers in a rendition of “I Still Call Australia Home,” no doubt inspired by similar scenes on balconies in Italy. In the coming weeks we’ll no doubt see more experiments in community singing.

Some people are trading hectic travel schedules for closer observations of home lives. As one suddenly stranded-at-home sociologist posted on Twitter: “Things you notice on a medium-density housing balcony in #partiallockdown: bubbles floating by; a man dancing with his toddler in a bedroom; a woman skipping with rope on her 7th floor balcony; the smell of delicious food being cooked.”

Sound enthusiasts are trading novel recordings of their neighbourhoods quietened under lockdown; gardening stores report spikes in seedling sales as neglected vegetable patches are tended to with new vigour. Kind-hearted neighbours are doing letter drops offering to assist the elderly with shopping errands.

Local governments have begun to play a critical role in supporting community resilience. Major city councils and arts-funding organisations have launched new grant programs for artists who have lost gigs, reallocating future initiatives and reprioritising spending.

Can local governments follow this lead to free up funds to support vital new community initiatives? What might these initiatives look like, in a world of social distancing?

Place management and placemaking — the creative programming of public spaces that has flourished in recent years — can’t be “activating” spaces to bring a crowd, but perhaps other methods can be used to forge connections between people living together in neighbourhoods. This is a time when community resilience is vital.

In a Covid-19 world placemaking may mean helping neighbours congregate and connect digitally, curating community events online, or using public spaces to promote the services being offered by local businesses.

Combined with digital infrastructures and tools, social-distancing measures have accelerated our migration into virtual spaces. Call volumes are up 50 per cent in recent weeks, broadband demand up by 40 per cent. Dropouts are common as telecommunications demand skyrockets.

Social distancing has left us hustling on the information superhighway like never before, alt-tabbing IRL over to the URLs — especially to videoconferencing via Zoom, Houseparty, Skype, FaceTime or Google Hangouts.

Our social media platforms have become vital digital public squares, places for gathering and sharing news of the day. All-night dance parties are planning upcoming streamed events. Yogis and Pilates instructors are streaming one-on-one and group classes. Digital platforms like Slack are seeing spikes in new paid customers unlike anything seen before. Coronavirus will no doubt act as an accelerant for new habits for remote working. Will the sudden pivot towards teleworking take hold?

Likewise, new digital tools and apps enabling citizens to report symptoms and track local coronavirus cases are springing up. Stopping the community transmission of coronavirus will require more vigilant tracking of cases, and tools like bluetooth and mobile GPS allow those with suspected symptoms to report their cases, and where they are, so community members can better judge their risks when out in public.

Will such efforts at sousveillance — which essentially turn surveillance from a top-down activity to one enacted voluntarily, from below, by citizens — encourage a move towards more community-based, crowdsourced care, facilitating greater awareness of those who are struggling with health or accessibility issues in your area? Or will we see more acceptance of data-tracking by authorities for health-related, or insurance, or other disciplinary purposes? Time will tell, but perhaps we can be hopeful about how localised data might be used for good, not only for the benefit of multinationals.

Perhaps, for a brief spell, we can also wonder what a world of slow cities might look like. Environmental activists have long argued for limits to growth in order to protect vital ecosystems and to slow rising carbon emissions.

As city productivity measures plummet, we can also look to the ideas of “degrowth” activists, who see in the topography of the Australian suburban form abundant opportunities for slower, more sustainable cities. While material wealth may be less abundant, can communities learn to adapt existing public spaces for local needs like agriculture, food waste or sharing cooperatives?

During the second world war, “victory gardens” sprang up across Australian cities to increase the volume of local food production. Even after threats to agriculture supply dissipated, home gardens and gardens in parks were maintained and supported by local governments to support community morale. We might envisage similar changes to our urban fabric over the coming years.

In these past weeks, we’ve witnessed how vulnerable our densely populated cities are to sudden shock. Coronavirus may not only force us into domestic isolation for months; it may also leave our cities poorer, and growth rates lower.

Perhaps we can start looking for ways to better value the role played by city spaces in supporting measures of health and wellbeing. If this global pandemic reminds us of anything, it’s that imaginative and creative responses to crisis will always emerge — and maybe even thrive — at the local level, in a park or street or community space near you. Perhaps this is a time for us to discover the art of dwelling, not just building. •

The post Making space appeared first on Inside Story.

Locals pour in to the Def Chef in the city’s main thoroughfare, Macquarie Street. Cong Phap Bui and Tuyen Tran bought the cafe last year. The couple arrived from their native Vietnam to study in Sydney six years ago. When their student visas expired they wanted to stay in Australia, which would be possible if they worked in a rural area for at least two years. A migration body covering Orana, the region that embraces Dubbo and about a quarter of outback New South Wales, sponsored them.

Phap recalls their first impression of Dubbo. “It was very quiet, very sunny and very hot,” he says. “There were not many people walking in the street.” Three years later, it’s a different scene. Neither Phap nor Tuyen had run a business before they went to Dubbo. They now work seven days a week, starting at 6.30am. When I managed to get a breakfast table, I noticed they have two young local women on their waiting staff; they also employ two chefs. And last June, eight months after they bought the business, they received permanent residency in Australia. “We thought of returning to Sydney, but it’s very crowded there,” says Phap. “Dubbo is very friendly, and isn’t quiet anymore!”

Stories like this are also unfolding elsewhere in town. Two more Vietnamese cafes do brisk business further along Macquarie Street. Around the corner in Talbragar Street, the Tanoshi Japanese restaurant sits opposite the Great Wall, an Asian supermarket that opened in July. Eateries in surrounding streets have created a competitive cafe culture that Dubbo locals could once only have dreamed of.

Macquarie Street looks prosperous and handsome: at one end is the 1887 post office designed by colonial architect James Barnet; at the other is the two-storey Old Bank building, now a bar crowded each night with young professionals. Between them sits the statue Dubbo unveiled last May of William Ferguson, a pioneering Aboriginal rights activist from the 1930s.

In the middle of one of Australia’s worst droughts, Dubbo projects a sense of progressive confidence. It started as a trading post in 1849 on the state’s vast western plains, when sheep, cattle and white settlers were moving in. (The Macquarie Inn, its first hotel, was licensed the same year.) Many settlements further west have since faded or become ghost towns.

Former local radio host Dugald Saunders, the Nationals MP for the state seat of Dubbo, calls the city the “capital of the west.” He estimates that about sixty multicultural groups rub along there. Ben Shields, Dubbo’s mayor, has overseen four citizenship ceremonies so far this year, admitting 134 new Australian citizens; the most recent one, in September, included people from Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe.

At 2 per cent, Dubbo’s unemployment rate is less than half that of the state as a whole, and not much over a third of Australia’s 5.3 per cent. Its population of 43,000 people, about 14 per cent identifying as Aboriginal, is growing at a rate of 1.4 per cent a year, a feat matched by few other country areas. Australia’s overall population growth rate of 1.6 per cent, higher than average for rich countries, is driven mainly by people pouring in to the big state capital cities.

Peter McDonald, a demographer at the University of Melbourne, calculates that Dubbo and Albury-Wodonga are the two fastest-growing inland country towns in Australia; their combined populations are rising by 2000 people a year (compared with 2000 a week for Melbourne, the fastest-growing capital).

Governments have talked for decades about decentralising Australia’s population away from the big seaboard cities. Dubbo has become a showcase of how it’s finally working. Duplicating its success elsewhere, though, will be a challenge.

I first visited the Dubbo region as a student from Sydney with a summer holiday job, driving a truck laden with freshly harvested wheat to a railway silo at Geurie, a hamlet about twenty-five kilometres east of Dubbo. Back then, people talked pretty much only about two subjects: wheat and wool. Several decades later, the change is striking.

Although this year’s harvesting season is approaching, the paddocks around Dubbo won’t be yielding any grain. The ground has been too dry for farmers to grow anything. Burrendong Dam on the Macquarie River, a primary source of irrigation and town water, is just 3.7 per cent full. Plans are afoot to access water caught in the dam’s outlet valve, but this fallback step offers only an extra four months’ supply. With their river allocations stopped, farmers are competing with townsfolk for access to artesian water; but without rainfall groundwater, too, is not being replenished.

Sign of change: a stagnant Macquarie River at Dubbo. Robert Milliken

Even in normal times, agriculture had slowly ceded its economic dominance to other industries, as Dubbo grew inexorably into a service town for places like Geurie and Wellington in the east and others as far away as Bourke, about 370 kilometres west.

“No single business or industry is the mainstay now,” says Matt Wright, president of the Dubbo Chamber of Commerce. Wright runs Money Quest Dubbo, a mortgage and finance broking company. Real estate is among Dubbo’s top three industries by value. Houses in town trade for a median price of about $360,000. “Dubbo is a very competitive place to live,” says Wright. But the biggest employers are health services, retail and construction, in that order.

Geoff Wise, a former NSW western lands commissioner long involved in Dubbo’s community affairs, identifies three places whose growing service roles have helped to boost Dubbo’s economy: its stock saleyard, one of the biggest in Australia (where more sheep and cattle are now being shipped out than shipped in); its hospital; and its airport. The last place is undergoing a remarkable transformation.

Dubbo’s location at the crossroads of the Mitchell Highway to Sydney, the Golden Highway to Newcastle and the Newell Highway to Queensland had long made it a road transport hub. Sydney once offered the only direct air link to a capital city. Now, you can fly with various airlines directly to Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane and Newcastle as well. The airport’s passenger numbers have more than doubled in the past fifteen years. They are just one part of the airport’s boom.

I met Wright in a sprawling new cafe attached to the airport’s latest addition, the Royal Flying Doctor Service Visitor Experience. This new walk-through exhibition looks likely to rival the Taronga Western Plains Zoo at Dubbo as a major tourist drawcard. In another part of the airport’s grounds, construction was under way on the second stage of a new training base for the NSW Rural Fire Service; the first stage, bringing in volunteer firefighters from across the state, opened in July. A new flying doctor training centre has also opened at the airport. And work is due to start next year, elsewhere in Dubbo, on yet another project: a maintenance centre for a new fleet of rural and interstate passenger trains that eventually will replace the state’s entire XPT train fleet.

Dubbo hospital is growing with state and federal funds, and a new cancer treatment centre is on the way. The University of Sydney is expanding the Dubbo campus of a rural health school it runs jointly in Dubbo and Orange; part of the university’s Sydney Medical School, it is designed to train doctors in the challenges of health in rural areas. School manager Kim O’Connor says these challenges grow ever greater: “Drought, climate change, mental health and their impact on rural people are all a big worry. We need to train young people for this instead of losing them to the cities.” She hopes the new graduate program will attract local students, including Aboriginal people, but expects them to come from all over Australia.

A synergy is emerging between all these big projects. Doctors from the flying doctors’ new training centre sometimes teach at the rural health school. “Students interested in emergency medicine love it,” O’Connor says. All this opens the sort of problem that many rural communities would like to have. With low unemployment and construction projects estimated at $5 billion due over the next five years, Matt Wright worries that “there won’t be enough workers to fill the jobs.”

Earlier this year, Canberra launched the latest bid to encourage people to move to places like Dubbo. The Morrison government is offering 25,000 extra visas that will give immigrants permanent residency in Australia if they work for three years in a regional area. It has also signed Designated Area Migration Agreements, or DAMAs, with seven regions around Australia, allowing employers to sponsor skilled and semiskilled workers from overseas if they can’t find them locally.

The Orana region of the state, in which Dubbo lies, is one DAMA. Mechanics and welders, at least, will soon be in big demand there. As well as Dubbo’s planned XPT train service hub, route construction on the proposed Inland Rail freight line between Melbourne and Brisbane will happen around the small town of Narromine, about forty-five kilometres west of Dubbo.

On top of all this, a federal parliamentary committee is about to start an inquiry into strategies for encouraging migrants to settle and stay in regional areas. It’s expected to report in late 2020.

About four-fifths of Australia’s population growth, much of it driven by immigration, is happening in the three biggest cities, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and their satellite centres like Newcastle, Geelong and the Gold Coast. The Morrison government has cut immigration by 30,000 arrivals to 160,000 next year, partly as a political response to complaints about overcrowding and inadequate transport. Its bid to steer more migrants to the regions could be another string to that political strategy. At first sight, it looks plausible. One estimate suggests over four million jobs will open across Australia by 2024, about half due to the baby boomer generation’s retirement. Mark Coulton, a federal National Party MP whose electorate embraces the Orana region, says “thousands of jobs have been identified” there alone over the next decade.

But some question if a political strategy of steering more people into regional cities can work. In a paper written last year for the University of Melbourne, the demographer Peter McDonald argues that the global economy is moving towards megacities. Australia, he suggests, will be no exception: “There should not be an expectation that future growth of the Australian population… can be redirected in anything other than a minor way to regional Australia.” Cutting immigration to give the big cities breathing space, says McDonald, is “flawed logic,” a sentiment with which former senior immigration official Abul Rizvi agrees. Those cities will always have a bigger variety of jobs and greater demand for workers. If immigration can’t supply them, the big cities will draw them from other parts of Australia, meaning places like Dubbo will lose people, not gain them.

McDonald tells me that Dubbo and similar country towns are attracting young families as new residents, drawn by their promise, prosperity and affordable housing. For immigrants, though, the big test will be whether they stay after fulfilling pathways to permanent residency; “strong evidence,” he says, suggests that many then relocate to big cities. McDonald questions the government’s policy of promising extra points to immigrants if they go to a region. The approach would be more effective, he argues, if local employers had a bigger say in selecting immigrants and matching them to their regions’ specific demands.

In some Dubbo businesses, that is happening already. At least two have also managed to adapt the old mainstay, agriculture, to changing consumer tastes in the outside world.

Roger Fletcher has the classic weathered look and direct approach of an Australian whose life has been shaped by the bush. Born in Glen Innes in northern New South Wales, he started droving sheep as a teenager. His schoolteachers had a low opinion of his prospects: “They told me I might as well leave school at fifteen,” says Fletcher. “So I did. It made me a millionaire.”

Fletcher now presides over Fletcher International Exports, known as Fletchers, a family company on Dubbo’s northern edge. His wife Gail and three children are also involved in the business. Since the Dubbo plant opened almost thirty years ago, they have started a second one at Albany in Western Australia — “to help alleviate climatic risk,” says Fletcher. The company now exports lamb and sheep meat, skins, wool and grains to eighty countries. Five years ago, it started running its own freight trains from the Dubbo plant to the Port Botany export terminal in Sydney, keeping control over goods until they leave the country.

Plenty to think about: exporter Roger Fletcher.

With about 700 workers, Fletchers is Dubbo’s biggest private employer (there are 500 more staff in Western Australia). Drought has slightly dented the Dubbo workforce’s size but not its enthusiasm, or Roger Fletcher’s keenness to hire people from any background who can do the work. He also runs a training program for Aboriginal workers.

Fletcher can’t say what proportion of his staff are immigrants. “Like water, they’ll find their own tracks here. We don’t go out to recruit visa people. They just come. They’re from about thirty nationalities in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. They have all sorts of visas, including those for skilled workers. Some have bought houses and live here. One of the greatest achievements out of this is that no one group of people is above the other. It’s the best workforce I’ve ever had. And it’s happened over the past ten to fifteen years.”

What made him choose Dubbo to build his plant? “It’s the central point for sheep in eastern Australia,” says Fletcher. “A selling centre, a logical location.” Dubbo also owes its growth to the smaller towns it now services. “It wouldn’t be where it is without the back country,” says Fletcher. “It’s vitally important that we look after those towns north, south and west.”

Asked what sort of impact his business has had on Dubbo’s economy over the past thirty years, Fletcher lets out a sigh and says, “I don’t have time to think about that.” He has plenty else to think about. Fletchers’s sheep meat is slaughtered according to Halal practice and Islamic rites. Foreign customers visit the plant every day of the year. On the grain side, he worries that the drought means he has “broken the chain” with customers in Asia. “But out of all bad comes good,” Fletcher says. “Out of this drought, good things will come.”

Just beyond the white, timber Rawsonville Bridge, built over the Macquarie River west of Dubbo in 1916, Emma and Jim Elliott are at work on their farm, the Little Big Dairy. Emma’s family, the Chesworths, started the business after they moved there from the Hunter Valley fifteen years ago. Dubbo, hot, dry and drought-prone, is hardly conventional dairy country, but the family took a risk mainly for environmental reasons, says Emma: the Hunter’s coalmines were affecting its groundwater; Dubbo has more secure groundwater supplies; and Dubbo’s lower humidity and flatter landscape make life easier for cows.

The Little Big Dairy has created what might be called “niche milk.” Emma’s parents and her brother have built a herd of about 1000 Holstein cattle for milking on the farm and export as breeders. Emma and Jim market and distribute the milk in big, colourful trucks that go as far as Sydney, Canberra and Lightning Ridge. In Dubbo, they sell to supermarkets, butchers, fruit shops and cafes, including Def Chef.

Their key selling point is to call their milk “single source”: a claim that every litre can be traced to the cow it came from. High-end cafes are playing up the provenance of their milk now, “as they’ve been doing with coffee beans,” says Emma. “That’s why we’ve kept control of the distribution as well, instead of sending milk out to faceless processors.” Like Fletcher, they employ many working-visa immigrants, mainly French in their case. “They just arrive and ask for jobs,” says Emma. “It makes it easier for us because it’s hard to find local people to do farm work.”

The drought has hit them, too. Locally grown grains are no longer available to feed their cattle; they can irrigate sparingly from groundwater, but not from the Macquarie. But they think their business has contributed to Dubbo’s “high-end cafe culture,” helping to change the town’s image along the way. “People are more connected and understanding of our community than before,” says Jim, who grew up in Dubbo. “They get what we’re doing. We don’t have to explain it.”

On my last morning in Dubbo I meet Rio Paul, who works for the Dubbo Regional Council at its visitor information centre. After Rio and her husband Jerose Joseph emigrated from India, Jerose trained in Melbourne as a hospital worker. He now works as a manager at the Dubbo Base Hospital, and took Australian citizenship last year.

Both came from big cities in India, and wanted to steer clear of them in Australia. At first, Dubbo seemed a challenge for Rio. “I’d never lived in a country town and had no friends or job here,” she says. But she landed a position with a real estate firm “within minutes” of arriving. “It wasn’t as hard as I thought.” Since they arrived, Dubbo’s Indian community has grown. Many work in health services, others at Fletchers. Rio and Jerose plan to stay. They’ve bought a house, and their first child is due. “For the future generation, there are many opportunities here,” says Rio. “We’ve invested in Dubbo.”

Later that day, I set out on the six-hour journey to Sydney on one of the XPT passenger trains due to be replaced by a new model, for which Dubbo will be the service base. The train is crowded, the service efficient. A few minutes after leaving Dubbo we pass through Wongarbon, a hamlet of fine old buildings and about 700 people.

Three days earlier, I had driven there from Dubbo to meet Brett Garling, a noted sculptor and artist whose gallery was once Wongarbon’s general store. Garling sculpted the statue of William Ferguson in Dubbo’s main street, and is now working on a sculpture series to commemorate the horses that once worked in Hunter Valley coalmines.

Garling went to Dubbo High School, but he’s in no hurry to move to what has become a regional boom town. “It’s more like a city,” he says. “Now you can walk down the street and not say hello to anyone you know.” Wongarbon’s smallness, serenity and seclusion suit him fine. He shops mainly in Wellington, a once-prosperous town further east that has struggled as Dubbo has flourished. “To support Wellington,” he explains.

Perhaps it’s Garling’s life as a landscape artist that makes him challenge those who reckon Dubbo’s expansion has few limits, that its growth has really only just begun. Mayor Ben Shields, for instance, enthuses about a proposal last January from the tech billionaire Elon Musk to build a road tunnel under the Blue Mountains for $1 billion, cutting travel time west from Sydney. “That would open Dubbo up even more,” says Shields.

“I don’t agree with the forecast of 100,000 people for Dubbo in twenty years,” Garling responds. “In the middle of the worst drought, why should that be? We have a river here that can’t sustain 40,000 people, let alone 100,000. As a race, we have to reduce people as climate change takes hold. Tell farmers around here that climate change doesn’t exist and they’d laugh in your face.” Garling pauses, then concedes that Dubbo has “a whole lot of city services and opportunities the west needs.” He adds with a chuckle: “It doesn’t mean I have to like it!” •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Capital of the west appeared first on Inside Story.

I wait seven minutes before the car arrives. My driver this time is Australian-born, and we get chatting pretty quickly. I learn he’s driving Ubers on the side while doing his MBA. While we talk, we also negotiate with the digital map that lurks on the dashboard, giving us instructions on where to go. I have my own favourite routes through the local streets that get me to Sydney’s airport, but the map, fed by data obtained from all of us going about our daily business, has its own ideas.

I tell my driver about a photographer friend of mine, also an Uber driver on the side, who likes to run two versions of Google maps when he’s driving, one within the Uber app and one straight from Google. My friend says the Uber route is just slightly longer, and therefore more expensive, most of the time. That seems hard to be believe, my driver told me, but yeah, maybe.

My driver and I get to talking about Uber’s opening up to public shareholders earlier this year, which saw the company attract a lower sharemarket price than was anticipated, mostly because of revelations by the company that it was struggling to make a profit from ride-sharing. My driver was pretty well informed about all this. “For Uber, long term, it’s about the data, not the ride-sharing,” he explained to me, not knowing quite how obsessed I was with the company myself, and with the rise of data-driven urban platforms more generally. I nodded and agreed. Yep, it’s all about the data.

We’d probably been reading similar stories about Uber in the news recently. Dara Khosrowshahi, the chief executive, seems to be running a PR campaign about the company’s ambitions to become the “broker of human movement” — specifically, of “people, food, and freight” — in cities. Kind of like the Amazon of transportation, he has been saying. When it was first launched, Uber created a new marketplace for ride-sharing by better connecting people who needed a lift somewhere with people who could trade some, or most, of their spare time for extra money. Uber Eats, launched in 2012, has likewise provided a simple way for people to order takeaway food, by connecting these people with others in their city who would happily deliver it to them for a small fee without having to be tied to one particular restaurant. Uber Freight is coming too, an app that “matches carriers with shippers” in a way that presumably will aim to beat systems people use now to get their freight where it needs to be.

For Uber, creating a technology platform to improve human movement was more a way to grow a company quickly — really quickly, faster than any company before.

I wonder aloud, to my driver, what kind of “broker” of human movement Uber is. Is it really so “data-driven’? Isn’t this still, really, about human capital, and how it’s being put to use? Uber spends a lot of money on incentivising drivers, “shippers” and food deliverers to use its platform to generate their own income, perhaps swapping what they’re already doing for this gig, or perhaps squeezing it into their spare time to make some extra cash. The amount of money Uber spends on marketing and user incentives is why they don’t yet make money on their ride-sharing business, despite the considerable fees they charge drivers, food deliverers and restaurants to use the platform. Being big, being part of more and more urban interactions taking place across every city around the world, is what matters most here. I put it to my Uber driver: Isn’t that just classic rent-seeking behaviour?

The difference here is the data, he explains to me. He says “dayta,” like an American, not “darta” like most Australians. You can’t work in tech or business these days and get away with “darta.” Uber can make all kinds of uses of the dayta created by users — which means, he explains, their brokerage service is not non-productive, in that classic rent-seeking sense. They’ve accelerated into self-driving cars, and they can also use all that dayta they’re generating to capture a granular sense of how cities really work.

Yes yes, that dayta.

It’s one of those conversations that pokes around some big topics, but won’t jump fully in. My Uber driver and I know we’re only going to be speaking for a few more fleeting moments before I jump out of the car with a cheery goodbye, trying not to slam the door too hard lest I damage my rider rating. Good luck with everything! I say.

Once out of the car, the Uber app hits me with a rating request. How was your ride today? I enthusiastically tap on the five-star option, and choose “Great conversation” to describe why my trip was so great.

The experience I’ve just recounted is not quite true — it’s more an amalgam of many different Uber trips I’ve taken over the past few years, and the conversations I tend to strike up with drivers. During much of Uber’s life in Australian cities, I’ve been reflecting on how platforms of this kind have been affecting the way we live in cities together.

Despite all kinds of misgivings about the kind of company Uber is — a massive, US-based outfit that fleeces the very people it seeks to “partner” with to sell its technology, and puts taxi drivers like my neighbour out of a job — I’ve become fascinated by the kinds of interactions it and similar companies have introduced.

There’s a sense of heightened sociability between strangers that seems to occur, perhaps because we’re protected by that threat of algorithmic-generated banishment if either party takes a misstep. Or maybe it’s the kind of people who have been quick to take up Uber as a transport option. As an iconic company of the “gig economy,” Uber often attracts people who aren’t looking to drive cars for the rest of their lives — which means you get to chat with people like my Uber driver, who also happened to be studying for an MBA and thinking about the future of data platforms.

The translation of myriad kinds of urban interaction into data points for more sales is what attracts the brightest and the wealthiest to thinking about all kinds of new ideas for Australian cities.

Uber is also, in many senses, the realisation of a quite radical idea advocated for many years by sustainability planners. What if we could get people to stop thinking of transport through the lens of the privately held motor vehicle and instead encourage people to share their driving experience? Couldn’t this cut the number of cars on the road, and free up space for other kinds of uses?

Like the car-sharing company GoGet, founded by sustainability advocate Bruce Jeffreys, Uber advocated its way into our cities as an innovative way to get people to move around them differently. Assets once considered purely private could become shared resources. Instead of ownership being the goal, we could reduce consumption and shift towards an economy based on access.

Apart from GoGet, these companies haven’t focused on creating cities that use fewer of the planet’s scarce resources. For Uber, creating a technology platform to improve human movement was more a way to grow a company quickly — really quickly, faster than any company before, generating huge benefits for its business leaders, investors, and shareholders.

For a company like Uber, the future of cities, and how we live in them, is primarily about the possibility that digital infrastructure built today will stick around as a foundational platform for future generations, in cities all around the world, to use as their first choice. Time to go to the airport? Better Uber it. Getting people around the world to use your company name as a verb to describe some of the most basic things we do in cities is, really, the ultimate, multi-billion-dollar goal. Want to know where you’re going? Better Google it.

Those who think about cities and digital innovation are often people like my Uber driver, busy coming up with start-up business ideas in this brave new world of tech-driven urban interaction. Many, it seems, focus their minds on new ways to do takeaway food. After all, people are time poor, but they also need to eat. Why not better service the needs of those who not only lack the time or wherewithal to cook, but would also prefer not to have to actually go fetch their order?

The success of digital food delivery apps has probably caught your attention. Australia is, it seems, becoming “an Uber Eats nation,” as one journalist puts it, with online food delivery services now worth 12 per cent of all sales in the $44 billion cafe, restaurant and takeaway food industry, and one in three adults living in Australian cities reporting use of food delivery apps.

No wonder, then, that moving around our major cities now seems to involve a lot of interaction with bike-riders carrying large square boxes of food to the time-poor customers. A relative of mine has told me that university campuses, like University of Sydney and UNSW, are hotspots for these delivery services, as many overseas students prefer the ease of using an app to order their lunches rather than having to negotiate campus food options.

Australian digital entrepreneurs are hoping to cash in on the trend. Two founders of a company called Kloopr have created an app that allows anyone travelling from point A to point B to become a delivery driver. Just think: you might be able to earn a bit of money on your way home, just by checking if one of your neighbours has ordered take-out. Others, like Bring Me Home, let you buy and pick up discounted surplus food from nearby cafes, restaurants, bakeries, groceries and supermarkets. This company is targeting Australia’s food waste problem in a way that’s also attractive to those who would prefer not to cook tonight or go out.

In other words, today’s digital platforms have made Australian cities attract spaces for disruptive new ideas about how to connect people differently. Most Australian citizens are now equipped with their own GPS receiver, bundled into the shiny, glowing, advanced computational device they carry around with them everywhere, otherwise known as the smartphone. On that phone are likely to be abundant maps, apps, recording devices, listening devices, maybe fitness trackers, maybe also air quality monitors. The phone many of us are carrying with us may also be listening to us in various kinds of ways — whether through the tiny microphones used to listen in on conversations (who knew?!), or by “listening” in the sense of analysing the information we churn through as we go about our daily business.

The translation of myriad kinds of urban interaction into data points for more sales is what attracts the brightest and the wealthiest to thinking about all kinds of new ideas for Australian cities. How can all this information be used to build new businesses, sell more, but also make our cities “smarter,” more responsive to infrastructural breakdowns, “closing the loop” between human interaction (or malfunction), infrastructure, services, and utilities?

Those people who come up with the best and brightest ideas for using data to make Australian cities work better are showered with investment money to help them scale as fast as possible. One such company, Neighbourlytics, offers “the data you need, to create cities people love.” Founded by two Australian women, this urban platform offers “simple ways to collect and understand rich digital data about what makes places thrive” by using social media data to capture community sentiment about a place. It’s particularly useful for real estate companies and city leaders who want to “see places through local’s eyes.”

Countless other digital platforms are also vying to change how we learn about, manage, govern, experience, connect and interact with each other in cities. For each, it is the data — the dayta — that drives innovation and new ideas about Australian cities. If data is the new oil, cities are the new goldmines, ripe for data-mining machine-learning, behavioural nudging and, ultimately, value-extraction.

Many who work in urban tech these days tend to think the possibilities offered by information technology are quite new. This, like my Uber story, is only partially true. Certainly, all the computational innovations that underpin our digitally mediated experience of cities today are new. But, at the same time, this way of seeing cities has its own peculiar history. In previous decades, it was spurred on by ideas from cybernetics, emboldened by the potential of clever “counting machines” to decode the complex webs of interaction that make up a city.

Will lots of things be missed? Historian Hugh Stretton. University of Adelaide

Despite their novel techniques, many urbanists railed against these computer-mediated visions, not because they weren’t passionate about better understanding complex urban problems, but because they worried what kind of city this way of seeing would bring into focus.

One such worrier was the Australian urbanist and historian Hugh Stretton. Paying close attention to the relationships between urban form, urban marketplaces and diverse urban sociality, Stretton was ambivalent about the use of “information” as a lens through which to understand Australian cities. In his 1970 book Ideas for Australian Cities, now half a century old, he reflected on what he described as a kind of urban “ideology” that looked to create objective measures of urbanity to plan and manage Australian cities. He wrote:

What are cities, essentially? They are systems of intense, hyper-efficient interaction. Interaction is quintessentially the transmission, reception and exchange of information. The basic unit of information is the simple clause or image, the “bit.” The basic unit of interaction is the transmission of one bit from one human to another. Call this basic transaction a “hubit.” Private, face-to-face hubits are not countable. But the public channels of communication are all metered, one way or another. Count the hubits they carry. Weight them for distance carried. Divide by time and population, and you have indexed the intensity of interaction. Indeed, you are on the way to a universal, abstract and reliable measure of urbanity, and a general theory of it. You also have a political program: to maximise urbanity.

Stretton saw problems in this way of seeing cities. It proposed that they could best be understood through the lens of science, specifically “systems analyses” that used mathematical methods to understand and manage things like traffic flows. These were fine, in some instances, but shouldn’t be used as the basis from which to understand other things about cities. The risk, as Stretton saw it, was that only some things would get counted. If cities are intense interaction systems, the kinds of interactions we would pay most attention to might end up being those that could be counted most easily. Lots of things might be left out:

Making love is an interaction; so is a business deal or a visit to the doctor or a sparkling conversation about art in somebody’s salon; so is every jostle on a crowded pavement, every bit of unwanted commercial soliciting, every exchange of complaints about the noise or pollution or segregation of the city; so is every eviction, extortion, blackmail threat, sale of dope, or crime of violence in the city.

In this way, as Stretton put it, “Objectivity begets its own politics.” Certain kinds of interaction may grab most of the attention, simply because they can be counted, and the counting of them becomes beneficial to some parts of society, but not others. So, to Stretton, here was the basis of a political program: “to maximise urbanity.”

To many of today’s urbanists, who look to the potentials of “smart cities” and data-driven methods of managing infrastructure and service provision, Hugh Stretton’s cantankerous views might feel a bit old-fashioned. Certainly, Ideas for Australian Cities is not easy to find (I had to borrow my father’s copy in order to re-read it for its coming anniversary). His reflections on information and urban science, in a chapter called “Ideology,” are tucked away in chapter six, after a series of quite quotidian reflections on the strengths of mid-sized Australian cities like Adelaide and Canberra.

And yet, re-reading his critical reflections on what we might call urban informationism today, Stretton’s writing feels urgent, and altogether necessary. With a wave of urban apps hitting the streets, encouraging us to stay home, watch Netflix, stay away from restaurants, and keep swiping, we’d do well to remember that all this data we’re producing, through our myriad ways of interacting digitally, may benefit particular ways of being “urban.”

Even if they are mightily convenient, these services may, in the end, not be in our best interests. During these years I’ve spent observing and writing about this new wave of “urban apptivism,” I’ve noticed how many of the best, most responsive digital platforms are those built by technology companies that have access to very large amounts of user interaction data. And they like certain kinds of interaction over others.

Take Uber. Over fourteen million trips occur on Uber’s platform each day, by people like me and my MBA student, who Uber counts as a “driver partner” of the company, a “micro-entrepreneur” out to hustle. Uber likes our transaction to be considered a mutually beneficial transaction between two individuals in a marketplace — not a service delivered by a global multinational company. The user experience Uber offers us is also unparalleled among Australian taxi apps — no surprise, considering the $22 billion in investor finance ploughed into Uber over the past decade.

As Uber extends its muscle into the hospitality business, Australian restauranteurs are now experiencing something akin to what Australian news media outlets have gone through, in the wake of Google and Facebook, recently the subject of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s digital platforms inquiry. They are finding their capacity to reach customers increasingly depends on nifty apps, which have figured out how to connect buyers and sellers, or readers and writers, in highly location-aware, responsive and “human-centred” ways.

With teams of global developers working to ensure the best user-interaction experience possible, it’s not surprising Australians love these apps. An ex-Google employee compares them to casino slot machines. With all this swiping going on, the data exhaust of our urban lives can in turn be ploughed into creating new, cleverer ways of interacting with each other. Like Stretton said: this is a program to “maximise urbanity” — except it’s an urbanity that amplifies the intelligence of machine-learning systems but doesn’t care much about our high streets, so long as we’re all interacting.

When I re-read Stretton today, I can’t help but wonder: who is championing our cities with these ideas in mind? His Ideas for Australian Cities influenced a generation of urban planners and policy-makers, including people like Tom Uren, who led bold interventions on behalf of the federal government to protect and champion particular mixed-use precincts in cities like Sydney, Fremantle and Hobart. This wasn’t anti-development, it was strategic intervention to protect what worked best.

Today’s cities likewise need a strategic government intervention to better shape their data infrastructures. Specifically, we need a new deal on city data, to ensure urban digital innovation doesn’t also mean digital feudalism.

And if Australian cities are going to be hotbeds of data-driven innovation, we would do well to remember Stretton’s cautionary words. To remember to cherish that which can’t be counted as possibly among the very best things that make our places thrive. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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Since my partner and I moved into our ninth-floor apartment thirteen years ago, around 30,000 more people have moved in around us, most of them into high-rise apartments of twenty storeys or more. The city centre has been transformed, with more life on the streets — new restaurants, bars and shops — and more crowding as well. Swanston Street, just around the corner, is often congested with pedestrians.

While the residential market has been cooler over the past eighteen months, high-rise approvals from the pre-2017 boom have been coming to completion and developments like the Aurora continue to dramatically reshape the city’s skyline, just as they are doing in other major capitals. Another twenty-four towers are under construction in Melbourne’s city centre alone.

One of them, the hundred-storey Australia 108 building in Southbank, will be the tallest residential tower in the southern hemisphere — so tall that the original design had to be cropped by eight floors to avoid interrupting the flight path to Essendon Airport, nearly twenty kilometres away. Its proponents promise future residents an idyllic life:

We are all born with the ability to soar, but only the brave trust their wings. Australia’s tallest tower will go where no development has gone before, offering a cloudbreaking lifestyle 319 metres above the glittering Melbourne streetscape. With the city’s amenities within easy reach below and the boundless freedom of endless sky above, those who reside here will be part of a world that few others can imagine.

No longer are apartment towers found only in the centre of Australia’s capital cities. Sydney’s Parramatta and Melbourne’s Box Hill are being transformed into second central business districts, with high-rise developments central to the strategy. Twenty-storey developments are under way in regional centres like Geelong and Newcastle, with thirty-storey towers also under consideration.

This break with past patterns of development is dramatic. Australian cities developed at low densities compared with their European and Asian counterparts, creating significant sprawl and a high reliance on cars. Long commutes are the norm. But policies to promote urban consolidation and arrest this trend, first introduced in the 1990s, have become the planning orthodoxy. The Victorian government and the Greater Sydney Commission are seeking to create “twenty-minute” and “thirty-minute” cities, respectively, by establishing multiple urban centres where people can fulfil their daily needs on public transport, bicycle or foot within twenty or thirty minutes of home.

Integral to achieving these objectives is the high-rise residential tower. The terminology is often used loosely in Australia, with eight-storey buildings that would be dwarfed in the central city referred to as “towers” in the suburbs. Globally, it’s agreed that “skyscraper” refers to buildings more than 150 metres high, or about forty storeys, with buildings of more than 300 metres called “supertall” and those over 600 metres “megatall.” The Australia 108 building will be Australia’s first supertall skyscraper (although Q1 on the Gold Coast is 322 metres with its spire, and 275 metres without).

Increasingly, skyscrapers are for residential use. In 2012, an estimated 59 per cent of the world’s one hundred tallest buildings were residential towers, American journalist Tom Vanderbilt reports, up from around 20 per cent a decade earlier. Most of Australia’s major cities have been reviewing their central-city planning policies to respond to pressure for change. Perth, Sydney and Geelong are currently re-examining their central-city development controls, while Melbourne, Adelaide, Darwin and Newcastle have undertaken reviews in recent years.

Nearly 330 people are moving to the greater Melbourne area each day, making it Australia’s fastest-growing city. It is likely to be more populous than Sydney in ten years’ time. Along with the urgent need to reduce the carbon footprint of the city, the pressure to accommodate these new arrivals makes a compelling case for well-designed, high-density cities.

Melbourne is under pressure at a time when trust in planners is low. Planning schemes can be impenetrably complex and jargon-ridden, and approvals for new developments frequently appear to break the rules, especially on height. Victoria’s planning system is founded on performance assessments rather than prescriptions. In theory this is sound: clearly established design and strategic objectives are typically supported by preferred height limits and other controls. Developers are required to demonstrate that their proposal delivers sought-after outcomes rather than necessarily conforms to strict specifications.

In practice, this means that a thirty-storey building can legitimately be approved in an area with a fifteen-storey limit if it is demonstrated that the development meets overarching objectives. If a planning control states that a new development “should” be no taller than a specified height, that simply means it would ideally be that height but doesn’t have to be. And that means it is often much taller.

While the more everyday meaning of the word “should” creates an expectation that buildings will be delivered up to the maximum nominated height, and no higher, performance-based rules have the advantage of supporting design flexibility and site-by-site assessments. But the lack of certainty can undermine confidence in the planning process and create an unproductive tension between the community, local government decision-makers and the development industry.

Strategic planning reviews often rest on a vision for new urban character or a way of delivering new jobs and housing. Implicitly, though, they pose questions about what we value — about what we seek to create and what we seek to protect. At their heart, these are questions about identity, belonging, community, social equity and our relationship to the environment. As each urban area is analysed and new developments are proposed, we are implicitly being asked: what type of cities do we wish to be citizens of?

The proposal for a 210-metre luxury hotel development in central Hobart last year — within an eighteen-metre height-control area and four times the height of the tallest building in Hobart — angered community members who felt strongly that the proposal was at odds with the city’s human scale and valued heritage character. According to the architect, Peter Scott, that was exactly the point. “It’s not going to blend in,” he said. “It will be a prominent building. I’m not here to suggest that won’t be the case. It will become something that Hobart is remembered for.”

As those comments highlight, the debate is essentially between a future focused on iconography, tourism, lifestyle opportunities and the movement of global capital, on the one hand, and local cultural values and respect for history on the other.

As the new planning policies develop, broader community engagement can become more difficult. A high degree of technical literacy is required, together with the resources and capacity to prepare submissions or objections in a complicated legal and political process. Broader, more open-ended questions about a city’s future are constrained by the technocratic language that surrounds planning.

Many of the towers that sprang up near our apartment were assessed against lax planning controls that operated in Melbourne’s CBD between 1999 and 2016. When I toured major cities on a Churchill Fellowship in 2014, I found that towers like these could not have been built in Hong Kong, New York, Seoul and other recognisable high-rise cities — a finding that attracted much coverage when my report was released in 2015.

A review of central Melbourne’s building controls was initiated that year by the new Labor planning minister, Richard Wynne. High-rise towers in central Melbourne were being developed at four times the densities allowed in Hong Kong or New York. Fifty-storey towers were rising straight from the street-front, creating windy, overshadowed public spaces. Skyscrapers were constructed as close as four metres apart. Within the apartments were bedrooms with no windows. It was a low point for a city proud of its design legacy and its frequently touted livability. The elasticity applied in assessing developments against building-height and separation controls had stretched to the point of being meaningless.

Certainty returned with the introduction of density controls that cap a site’s overall “yield,” and mandatory requirements for minimum building separation. Restrictions on overshadowing now protect the Yarra River and key public spaces. The 2015 review also introduced incentives for public benefits, including new open spaces, laneways, community spaces and affordable housing, though the inclusion of commercial floorspace on that list has been contentious.

New apartment standards, introduced in 2016, include pragmatic measures such as minimum bedroom, living room and balcony sizes, minimum storage requirements, daylight standards and energy-efficiency requirements. But although they stress the importance of building separation, they don’t provide specific, measurable guidance.

Largely missing from these policies were measures to deal with the growing crisis in affordable housing — a term that wasn’t defined in the Planning and Environment Act until 2018. That’s an important step forward but is backed only by a voluntary affordable housing contribution for new developments. This leaves local councils with the responsibility to establish clear affordable housing strategies and targets and to encourage developers to deliver. The planning tools have been established, but there are no real carrots or sticks. It’s not a question of whether this approach will work, but of when the government will concede that a voluntary approach, without sufficient subsidies from state or federal governments, can’t deliver the required scale of affordable housing. Broadly, though, Victoria has established firm foundations and has the opportunity to refine its policies and practices.

Somewhat surprisingly, one question that hasn’t been asked often during this process is whether high-rise towers are suitable for people to live in. The question is poorly understood and relatively unexplored by researchers. Understanding the experience of living in high-rises is complicated by factors including economic status, the degree of control residents have over where they live, the location of the building in the neighbourhood, population density, life stage, gender, culture and dwelling design. Of the studies that have been done, many involved people — students or public housing tenants, for example — who didn’t necessarily choose what type of housing they live in, which may have distorted their conclusions.

Much of the stigma associated with high-rise housing dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, when tower living was first embraced as an efficient, cost-effective method of delivering affordable social housing. This modernist vision of high-density living was driven by a desire to impose order, rationality and standardisation, to take advantage of mass production, and to provide clean air and light.

The reality did not match the lofty expectations, with growing concerns about crime, health and safety, and children’s welfare. In Australia, this housing type was soon seen as unsuitable for family living, and high-rise housing as a preferred public housing model was abandoned. Internationally, high-profile demolitions of high-rise public housing estates such as the Pruitt–Igoe complex in St Louis in 1972 became signifiers of the dramatic failure of modernism’s utopian high-rise vision.

This perspective had shifted again by the 1990s. High-rise housing was no longer developed primarily for residents with little or no choice, but rather for those with the widest range of choices who sought luxury living in the best locations. This shift aligned with the adoption of compact-city policies and changes in lifestyle preferences. High-rise housing in the central city, with easy access to trendy, vibrant neighbourhoods, became a place of privilege, and new high-rise residential developments were marketed on the basis of amenities and facilities both within the building and within the neighbourhood.

The Aurora, for example, offers the opportunity to experience a “new paradigm in urban living,” with a twenty-five-metre lap pool, sauna, steam room, sundecks, plunge pool jacuzzi, gymnasium, yoga zone, dance barre studio, private dining and lounge spaces with self-catered kitchens, BBQ deck, karaoke room and a private cineplex. The building is the first in Melbourne to have a direct underground link to Melbourne Central station and the future State Library metro station — the kind of access that is already common in Hong Kong, Singapore and other high-density cities with mature metro rail networks, and is not only practical but also appealing to residents who like to feel they live in a large, contemporary, connected metropolis.

The scale of these developments requires complex financial models and construction programs. Residents of the Aurora tower, for example, moved into the lowest floors six months before the upper structure was complete — a form of staged development now common as a financing strategy, enabling contractual settlement of lower-floor apartments to help pay for the construction of upper floors. Residents live with craned building materials sliding past their windows for the first year, separated from the construction noise by twenty empty floors.

Implicit in these housing models are assumptions about who lives in high-rise housing at the moment and who will live there in the future, and a broad acceptance that residents are happy to trade off apartment size against amenities. In 2016, almost 30 per cent of apartment residents were in the twenty-five to thirty-four age group, while 11 per cent were children aged up to fourteen years. Buildings are still largely designed to appeal to professional singles and couples, younger people and students, rather than to families, with all studies of behavioural problems identifying higher rates of incidence among children living in high-rises (although some problems are alleviated by access to green open space).

But the perceived disadvantages of high-rise living tend to reflect more obvious everyday concerns: dependence on unreliable or slow elevators, for example; physical safety above ground level; who one’s neighbours are; a sense of overcrowding; and feelings of detachment from a sense of home or community. Many of these issues can be dealt with through building design.

To help overcome these perceptions, high-rise buildings are often marketed as “vertical villages” that allow a range of social encounters distinctly different from other housing types. But whether jacuzzis, karaoke rooms and swimming pools provide the opportunity to form community is poorly understood. In developing programs to address social isolation in apartment buildings, the City of Sydney found that just over half the residents of apartment buildings felt that they could get help from neighbours if needed.

Also relatively unexplored by researchers are other perceived advantages to high-rise living, including views, a sense of getting away from street-level life, relative peace and quiet, enhanced privacy and opportunities for anonymity, and the convenience of not having to perform maintenance tasks. What evidence we do have suggests that residents will be happy in high-rises if they don’t have small children, don’t plan to stay long and are socially capable.

The resident-only facilities in these buildings, which are becoming more luxurious, contrast with serious failures in building quality. Significant safety issues associated with high-rise buildings include flammable cladding and structural failure that have resulted in recent high-profile evictions of residents from their homes. In July, the Victorian government committed $600 million to deal with flammable cladding in the 500 private buildings identified as the highest risk. The problems posed by the cladding and by structural shortcomings in buildings are also making it harder for apartment buyers to secure loans. These shortcomings are combining to significantly undermine confidence in the high-density apartment market.

The latest wave of apartment living has spread quickly in Australia, and much of the research has occurred in cities that have been building high-rises for much longer. The results can be intriguing: one study found that living on the eighth floor of an eight-storey building is perceived as a different experience from living on the eighth floor of a twenty-storey building. “Those who live on high floors experience the advantages of height absolutely and not relatively,” reported the researchers, “and therefore incorporate them into their image; while those who live on the lower floors would seem to experience the disadvantages of large numbers of people to a greater extent than those who live higher up.” In Hong Kong, the average apartment dweller prefers to live no higher than the twenty-ninth floor, while in Singapore it is the twentieth floor. Perceptions of height seem to change over time as the urban context changes.

These findings imply an evolving relationship between the identities and experiences of residents living at heights. But few people are asking how living in high-rise buildings shapes residents’ imagination and their perspective on the city and the wider world. Does living in close proximity to others in highly managed communal spaces lead to more open-mindedness and acceptance of others? Or could it be bad for social cohesion? How does our city’s psyche change as we build taller and taller?

The high-rise apartment is still a home. A key attribute of a well-designed home is the capacity to adapt it over time to suit residents’ needs as they change over the life course — as they study, work, have families and grow older. But high-rise buildings are very difficult to adapt. High-rise housing is located in the parts of our cities that have the highest level of services and access to jobs. Does it make sense to create buildings in the best-serviced parts of the city that only suit a limited segment of our diverse population for a limited period in their lives?

Even in the relatively small building I live in, with its thirty-five apartments, negotiating significant maintenance expenditure or dealing with rare cases of antisocial behaviour can be complicated, time-consuming and potentially expensive. Multiply the number of apartments and the challenge of dealing with problems can be immense.

High-rise housing is a particularly long-lived asset, extremely difficult to adapt, redesign or demolish. Potentially hundreds of individual owners need to agree to any proposed changes. Globally, only five residential towers taller than one hundred metres (approximately thirty storeys) have been demolished, the most recent in 1978. Regardless of their quality, the towers emerging across the city are here to stay. Whether they are good for people to live in is therefore an urgent question.

In 2016 almost one in ten people in Australia spent census night in an apartment. Among people aged twenty-five to thirty-four, the figure was one in five. As well as reflecting urban policies designed to create sustainable communities, the high-rise apartment is an increasingly common and conspicuous marker of how cities are being redefined and societal values questioned. They represent financial and technical innovation but also raise difficult questions about the long-term social sustainability of Australian cities.

A sensitive and rarely considered question is the degree to which resistance to taller buildings is a proxy for other concerns. As buildings become taller and neighbourhoods denser, community profiles change. Is the fear and anger in community resistance partly a rejection of the “others” who may come into an established community? It’s a question that needs to be tackled more openly and honestly.

Higher residential densities bring the opportunity to deliver sophisticated planning outcomes. They include opportunities for density bonuses and value capture, which involve contributions from developers towards community benefits in exchange for additional development yield or height. These smart mechanisms can deliver affordable housing and improved livability, including new open spaces. Increasing the number of high-density neighbourhoods in our inner cities has the potential to reduce long commutes, reduce high car dependency and create the opportunity for more people to live in the best-serviced parts of our cities.

We need good high-density housing models to prove this can be done, and these can include well-designed towers. As Melbourne and other Australian cities continue to evolve, we need more public debate about the cities we want to create and more research and proven models to demonstrate how high-rise, high-density housing can best meet the long-term housing needs of our diverse communities. As Alexandros Washburn, the former chief urban designer of New York City says, “density has to be likeable” — it can’t simply serve a rational city-planning purpose. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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As a longitudinal survey, HILDA puts the same (or similar) questions to the same people each year to build a long-term picture of life in Australia. In research terms, this is a top-shelf methodology — but it’s also expensive and difficult to maintain. A lot of hard work and significant government funding goes into HILDA.

The central challenge with any survey of this type is making sure that the people being asked the questions look the same as the general population. When it was set up, HILDA’s pool of respondents reflected the Australian population of 2001; every year, as people leave Australia or arrive, it has become a little less representative of the population as a whole.

The team that runs HILDA at the Melbourne Institute is acutely aware of this. A 2006 research paper estimated that by 2011, HILDA’s tenth year, the percentage of recent arrivals falling outside the original sample would be about 6.6 per cent. After fifteen years, this was expected to be 8.3 per cent. HILDA attempted to solve this problem with a top-up of the sample in Wave 11 of the survey, designed to ensure a good representation of the Australian population in 2011.

So far, that has been the one and only top-up, and HILDA has been becoming slightly less representative each year since then. This is not a criticism of the team at the Melbourne Institute but a call for more funds to conduct another top-up in order to make sure the survey represents all Australians.

How big is the problem? Between June 2011 and December 2018, Australia’s population grew by 13 per cent, from 22.3 million to 25.2 million. Of those extra people, about six in ten were migrants, which means that HILDA is roughly in the same position in relation to new arrivals as it was in 2011.

But perhaps more of a concern is how migration trends have changed. While the total number of arrivals might be similar in the two periods, 2001–11 and 2011–18, the two sets of migrants are different in important ways.

When HILDA was first established in 2001, new migrants tended to arrive on a permanent visa and settle into Australia. People still come to Australia this way however the migrant intake now includes a higher share of people who arrive on a temporary visa and then move to a permanent visa. These people represent a challenge for HILDA because many of them change their residency intentions after arriving in Australia. This means they are more difficult to categorise as either overseas visitors or long-term Australian citizens. The share of permanent visas granted to people in Australia has shifted from fewer than one in three in 2001 to about one in two by 2018.

For a bunch of survey questions, these trends probably don’t matter too much at the moment. Income dynamics are unlikely to be seriously affected by eight years of undercounting, for example — though the effects will become more serious if no top-up is carried out for another decade. But in a handful of areas, undercounting is more worrying. Take two topics, congestion and welfare.

According to the Parliamentary Library’s analysis of the most recent HILDA report:

 There has been a notable increase in the time spent commuting in Australia from an average of 48.8 minutes per day in 2002 to 59.9 minutes per day in 2017. Of the major capital cities Sydney has the highest average commuting time at 71.1 minutes in 2017 which compares with 60.6 minutes in 2002.

A lot was made of this finding, with politicians and media analysis focusing on the increase.

But the evidence shows that migrants arriving since 2011 are more likely to cluster in inner-city areas (or near universities, in the case of international students) even compared with arrivals between 2001 and 2011. With the growth in housing supply — mainly apartments — in the inner suburbs, these recent arrivals are probably closer to work or other regular destinations, on average, than the existing population.

If that’s the case, HILDA is undercounting potential reductions in commuting times. It’s true that the general increase in commuting times documented by HILDA is substantial, and would not be erased by the potential effects of recent migrants, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want to capture the full picture of commuting and congestion in Australia.

Welfare is another area where new arrivals and the existing population will differ. Legislative change in 2018 now means people who gain a new permanent visa are restricted from receiving Newstart for four years, a doubling of the waiting time. This obviously means that recent migrants are less likely to access Newstart (whether or not they are unemployed) compared with Australian residents, and so HILDA potentially overcounts the proportion of households receiving that payment.

The past decade’s rise in migration to Australia by New Zealand citizens, who are largely excluded from welfare support, is also likely to be affecting HILDA’s results. In the medium term, all these effects will start to play bigger roles in household and income analysis.

HILDA is heavily relied on by researchers and generates much attention because of the critical role it plays in providing a record of how Australians are tracking. The survey underpins research across multiple fields and is closely followed by all levels of government, the bureaucracy, business and civil society. It is simply too important for us to watch as more years tick by without another top-up and it slips from being a truly representative sample of the Australian population to a representation of an Australia frozen in time.

The inability to factor migration trends into evidence and research is not restricted to longitudinal surveys. For a country shaped by migration, we are strangely ignorant about the effects of migration on our social and economic experience, and on our environment. Bureaucrats often ignore the impact of migration, mostly because they lack a strong grasp of the basic data. And this leads to the charge that “elites” are deliberately pushing a big Australia down the throats of an unwilling public.

More importantly, the vast majority of public decision-makers simply don’t know what’s going on, whether in terms of urban planning, higher education or the labour market. In a small way, HILDA is contributing to this ignorance and deserves a funding bump to make sure it looks like modern Australia. •

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More often than not, the critics are also ready with a diagnosis, often starting with something about the wrongheadedness of planned cities. When journalist and former political staffer Martin McKenzie-Murray launched his polemic against Canberra in its centenary year, he located the origins of Canberra’s supposed shortcomings in Walter Burley Griffin’s 1912 design for Australia’s new capital. “What was splendid in the vision,” wrote McKenzie-Murray, “was sterile in the living. Griffin had designed a city that pre-empted the primacy of the car, which was both prophetic and pathetic.”

It may seem natural enough to hold the planner responsible for how the plan turned out — and, in conflating the Griffin Plan with Canberra today, McKenzie-Murray was only following common practice — but this is to misunderstand Canberra completely, including its ability to alienate. Canberra only embodies Griffin’s distinctive vision in a very partial sense, and it is the gap between plan and reality that explains the way the city looks, feels and functions today.

During his stint as director of federal capital design and construction between 1913 and 1920, Griffin laid out the triangle that defines the heart of Canberra (marked today by Parliament House at its apex, with Commonwealth and Kings Avenues extending across the lake to meet Constitution Avenue at the base). But rather than establishing a parliamentary triangle, these lines were intended to be the borders of Canberra’s central business district. It would certainly be a unique CBD, with the distinctive purpose of representing the will of a nation, but it would be no less intense and energetic, majestic and monumental, for that.

In Griffin’s original plan, a stadium was to be located on the shore of the lake at the end of today’s Anzac Parade. (This is the point where Griffin’s land and water axes intersect, which could be considered the centre of the city.) As Griffin specified in his 1913 report on the preliminary city design, the stadium would be “recessed into the slope of the bank, where it does not interrupt the continuous vista along the land axis.” It was to be flanked by a theatre and an opera house and then, extending along the foreshore, museums, galleries, public baths, a gymnasium, and even a zoo.

Walter Burley Griffin’s design for the Federal Capital of Australia, from his 1913 preliminary plan. National Library of Australia

Running along this cultural and recreational precinct, Constitution Avenue was to have formed Canberra’s main street. A grand boulevard, as important to Canberra as Swanston Street is to Melbourne, and just as busy and built up, it would have joined the two main nodes of Griffin’s municipal city: Civic at one end and the central train station and main shopping and commercial precinct (where Russell and the nation’s defence headquarters now stand) at the other.

Griffin designed a city that would respond to the natural landscape without resiling from the fact of being a city. As well as being the gateway to the capital, Canberra’s railway station was intended to be a grand edifice imbuing the city with a monumental unity. Griffin even countenanced the idea of buildings rising above the train station on what’s now called Mount Pleasant.

On the south side of the lake, Griffin’s “Government Group” was to have housed the entirety of the public service, forming a major centralised employment centre, buzzing with activity and connected with the rest of the city by streetcars running along Kings and Commonwealth Avenues. Additional bridges would have joined Acton Peninsula and Albert Hall, Kingston and Russell, and Black Mountain Peninsula and Weston Park.

Today, Griffin’s immense triangle marks the centre of Canberra, but it is largely empty of the things — buildings, businesses, night-life even — he imagined filling it. The incongruity largely explains the capital’s capacity to confound. When visitors to Canberra arrive only to ask, “Where is it?” what they are really experiencing is the absence of Griffin’s city, like the disconcerting twitch of a phantom limb.

When Canberra’s stadium was finally built in the 1970s, it was situated not on the shore of Lake Burley Griffin but at the Australian Institute of Sport in Bruce, a suburb of one of Canberra’s satellite towns. Canberra Station was never relocated from the nebulous region where Kingston blurs into Fyshwick; the main street that was to extend along the base of the triangle never materialised; the theatre ended up in Civic, the national museum on Acton Peninsula, and the zoo at Scrivener Dam; and the opera house remained a pipedream.

The buildings Griffin imagined populating the triangle were not replaced by other buildings so much as parks, car parks and a variety of nondescript spaces of indeterminate use. Where Griffin envisaged the city, as both national capital and municipal centre, filling out the triangle and encircling the lake, Civic hangs off one corner of the triangle and only by a thread. The triangle that was meant to be the centre of Canberra is instead a rarefied space, largely removed from the daily life of the city, suffused with a strangely deserted feeling.

Yet the Griffin Plan continues to get the blame. “Whisper this,” began a recent critique of “Car-berra” in the Canberra Times. “I wonder whether Walter Burley Griffin got it quite right. There, I’ve said it.” Canberra is indeed a city in which going to the football and then the pub, or the art gallery then a restaurant, or the train station then a hotel, often entails a car journey. But this is precisely because it lacks the dense concentration of activity in the city centre that Griffin provided for.

In Griffin’s city, the northern shore of the lake would have been “filled with crowds of people spilling onto its concourse to go about their daily business; to attend sporting events in the National Stadium; to visit the opera, theatre or museums; to go shopping,” according to James Weirick, professor of urban development and design at the University of New South Wales and an expert on the life and work of Walter and Marion Griffin. Instead, the atmosphere today is better evoked by Secret City, the political thriller based on the novels by Chris Uhlmann and Steve Lewis, in which the lake’s foreshore consistently features as an uninhabited location for clandestine meetings between spooks, hacks and pollies.

In Griffin’s design, the activities of the federal government were to form an integral part of Canberra’s CBD. His 1913 report contains a diagram in which all the major departments are aligned along Federation Mall, with subordinate departments behind them. Griffin’s mall was to acquire definition from the government buildings lining it, but only two of them were ever built, and Federation Mall dissolves into more open space: parks, gardens, traffic islands, ground-level car parks (ten, no less, in the parliamentary zone) and areas, not quite parks but definitely not ovals, that host occasional games of lunchtime touch football.

Walter Burley Griffin’s layout of government buildings, from his 1913 preliminary plan.

As rich and vital as the national cultural institutions are, their location in this otherwise empty landscape only compounds the dispiriting feeling that what was intended to be the nerve centre of the nation has turned out to be more like a theme park for Year 6 civics excursions.

Griffin saw the Molonglo Valley as forming an irregular amphitheatre, with the peaks of Black Mountain, Mount Ainslie and Mount Pleasant representing the upper balconies, and the dress circle sloping down the northern banks of the Molonglo. Griffin’s stadium was the front row, looking across to the other side of the lake where Parliament House was to be situated on the natural rostrum of Camp Hill, and the great drama of national life would play out.

“What you would have along the base of the triangle would be the everyday life of the city and the cultural life of the city and the freedom of public space,” Weirick tells me, “and then the convergence of the avenues would express in physical form the will of the people… And the government is across on the south side of the lake because the people put them there under our system of representative democracy.” The government buildings were to be set out “like a diagram of the Australian Constitution,” he goes on. “Everybody who worked or visited Canberra, as they moved around the city, would understand its fundamental functions, the rights and responsibilities, and the institutions created under our Constitution. The city would be self-evident.”

Today, there is neither stadium nor drama nor diagram, and Parliament House stands alone, surrounded by the moat-like State Circle. Attending a protest there feels like entering the civic version of a padded cell. Corralled into a special spot hundreds of metres away from a building that is itself removed from the rest of the city and insulated by the empty expanse of the parliamentary zone, inside a capital distant from the affections of the nation, it is as though expert choreography is ensuring that the rituals of democratic participation can play out without causing any disturbance. As Kim Dovey, professor of architecture and urban design at the University of Melbourne, has argued, politics has been abstracted from the polis.

Griffin’s plan was buffeted in the first instance by two world wars and a depression. When, at long last, prime minister Robert Menzies threw his weight behind the city’s development, it finally became feasible to realise Griffin’s vision in full; the lake was created and the public service fully relocated to the capital.

At precisely this moment, though, the newly formed National Capital Development Commission, or NCDC, created a new plan that would overlay Griffin’s. The Y Plan stipulated that Canberra would be made up of town centres, separated by large swathes of bushland and joined by freeways. So at the very moment when it became possible to complete the centre of Griffin’s Canberra, the NCDC determined that the city would have multiple centres; and just when the departments of the federal government finally moved to Canberra, it decided to locate them almost anywhere but in the triangle that Griffin had made to house them. The architects of the Y Plan believed they were faithfully applying Griffin’s principles on a larger scale, but in practice it meant that Griffin’s plan for the centre of Canberra would never be realised.

In 2004, the NCDC’s successor, the National Capital Authority, published The Griffin Legacy, in which its authors captured Canberra’s predicament perfectly. “The Griffin Plan sought a seamless connection between the functions and setting of the ‘federal city’ and the everyday life of the ‘municipal city,’” they wrote. But, today, “physical barriers and empty undeveloped spaces separate federal and local activities, tourists and residents, and ‘town and gown.’” A critical element of any potential solution, the authors argued, was to extend Civic down to Lake Burley Griffin; “build Griffin’s West Basin promenade to serve as a waterfront focus”; and “activate the foreshore area with a broad mix of retail, residential and tourist accommodation, including restaurant, cultural and entertainment uses.”

The eight- and twelve-storey apartment complexes now under construction around City Hill are the first signs that The Griffin Legacy’s proposal to extend the city to the lake is finally being realised. Development is slated to continue over the series of asphalt car parks and clover-leaf turning circles that consume prime land between City Hill and Parkes Way; and land-bridging over Parkes Way will provide vehicle and pedestrian access into West Basin, the strip of foreshore running between Commonwealth Avenue Bridge and the National Museum.

At West Basin itself, plans are in place to reclaim almost three hectares of the lake to create a waterfront development with 2000 residential apartments, a public promenade, and lakeside dining and cafes, as well as community facilities and parks. This nascent development will, in effect, expand the New Acton precinct (centred around the unconventional Nishi building which has already done much to challenge preconceptions about Canberra) across Parkes Way to the water in one direction, and across London Circuit and Commonwealth Avenue to merge with the rest of the city in the other.

New Acton’s Nishi building under construction in 2013. Nick-D/Wikimedia

Griffin’s vision — in which the city and the triangle are one — may be lost, but the development of West Basin is potentially transformative. If the consequence of the half-implementation of the Griffin Plan is that Civic, the lake and the national capital area largely function in isolation from each other, this is the point at which all the city’s major elements can be reunited, to form the centre Canberra has never had. Where, at present, Canberrans have to make a special effort to visit the lake, often by car, the development of West Basin could recast it as the natural backdrop of daily life, as local residents enjoy their neighbourhood, workers spill out of offices into pubs, bars and restaurants, and tourists and revellers are drawn to the waterfront.

While what happens at West Basin won’t alter the triangle itself, it could at least create an interface between the national capital area and the daily life of the municipal city. In particular, it means that Commonwealth Park — one of Canberra’s most beautiful spots — could become much more accessible and well-used.

The potential for West Basin to become the clear central point Canberra currently lacks is heightened by the prospect of two other (albeit complicated and expensive) schemes. The proposal to relocate Canberra Stadium to the site of the ageing and ailing Civic Pool (not so far from the spot Griffin specified a century ago) would do much to create demand for restaurants, bars and hotels, and generate the concentration of activity that cities exist for. And when stage two of Canberra’s light rail eventually runs down Commonwealth Avenue past West Basin, and then on to Parliament House and Woden, the parliamentary zone will become more integrated into the life of the city.

The attempt to pin Canberra’s faults on the Griffin Plan is really part of a larger mistake. The bashers want to dismiss Canberra as flawed in its very conception. It was hubris to think Canberra could avoid the pitfalls of urban life, they gloat; instead, it has only created its own unique defects. But this is wrong. Infidelity to the Griffin Plan doesn’t discredit the plan itself, and nor does it diminish the virtues to which Canberra aspires more generally. The vision of a bush capital — a city that converses with its natural setting rather than seeks to conquer it, that does not relegate the environment to the periphery but incorporates it into its core, that refrains from towering over its citizens and instead speaks to them as equals, that privileges public space in a manner commensurate with its commitment to public service — is as urgent and compelling as ever. Canberra is not an experiment that has failed, just one that requires some thoughtful recalibration.

But some Canberrans don’t think any recalibration is called for. They like Canberra just the way it is, and see in the proposed development of West Basin an attack on the public space, bush setting and human scale that give Canberra its distinctive character. At a public seminar in March entitled “Developing Away Our Bush Capital?” the proposed development was described as an “apartment estate of high-rise buildings — permanently blocking or privatising public vistas of and across the lake” and leading to the destruction “of lakeshore public parklands including over one hundred trees” and “the picturesque, naturalistic lake edge.”

The critic was Richard Morrison, a member of the Lake Burley Griffin Guardians, a community group committed to “safeguarding the open space of Lake Burley Griffin and its lakeshore landscape setting.” Morrison, who has an extensive background in heritage conservation, also pointed out that the development plans are continuing apace while a 2010 nomination for West Basin’s Commonwealth Heritage Listing is still yet to be assessed. For the Guardians, the proposal to develop West Basin is not much more than a real estate development that will turn public parkland into luxury penthouses.

They are not alone in their concern that Canberra is losing its distinctive identity as dilapidated public housing blocks are demolished, vacant lots are sold off, land is rezoned, building height limits are increased, and high-rise buildings shoot up throughout Canberra’s city centre, town centres and along Northbourne Avenue, the main boulevard down which the newly minted tram now runs. Many Canberrans are expressing alarm at what one op-ed called chief minister Andrew Barr’s “fast track from Bush Capital to concrete jungle.” The former speaker of the Territory’s Legislative Assembly, Greg Cornwell, expressed a sentiment shared by many when he lamented that “sections of the business community and the ACT government itself seem determined to develop Canberra into another Sydney or Melbourne in the name of progress.”

When I meet Mike Lawson, a long-time Canberra resident and Guardians member, at West Basin, he places the plan to build the city to the lake in this context. “The ACT government needs $600 million a year in land sales to float,” he says. “So selling off ACT land is one of the prime industries in the ACT… Selling for economic value to the ACT government; increasing the value of that land; creating jobs for people in the construction industry; creating profits for developers; and creating an urban centre which then becomes an increasing tax base.” Why do three hectares of Lake Burley Griffin need to be reclaimed, Lawson asks. “Because it creates more land for development.”

James Weirick agrees about West Basin. “In my view it should stay as a public park, and they shouldn’t fill in the lake, and they should keep it as part of the open space system of Canberra,” he says. For Weirick, the critical issue is Parkes Way. As the authors of The Griffin Legacy identified, the six-lane freeway along which Canberrans speed between the city’s widely dispersed town centres is an obstacle that inhibits movement between the city and the lake.

A 2013 report for the ACT government by the Sydney architects Hill Thalis proposed that Parkes Way be turned into a split-level boulevard. Its gradient would be lowered, retaining its function as a major traffic artery, while a grid of local city streets would run over it at surface level, providing easy pedestrian and vehicle access to the lake. But Weirick believes such a proposal is far beyond the means of the ACT government. “The fact of the matter is that it’s an extremely expensive proposition to take the city to the lake, and the scheme has been stymied because everybody who has looked into it has realised the cost involved.”

Artist’s impression of Hill Thalis’s 2013 City to Lake plan for the ACT government. Hill Thalis

When the expense piles up, he says, the ACT government will inevitably give in to pressure from developers for more floor space in West Basin. “As has happened at Barangaroo [in Sydney], the developer keeps saying ‘give us more’ and Barangaroo has essentially doubled in floor space from where it started,” Weirick says. “And that’s what’s on the cards for City to the Lake.” The result will be “high-rise towers of a scale and footprint of the Nishi building and so on, and you’ll get awkward, misshapen, assertive buildings dominating the symbolic centre of Canberra.”

The person ultimately responsible for the development of West Basin is the head of the ACT’s City Renewal Authority, Malcolm Snow. Unsurprisingly, he offers a very different picture of what’s in store for West Basin. Snow has considerable experience in regenerating urban waterfronts, including at Brisbane’s Southbank. “Good waterfronts around the world exhibit some common qualities, and top of the list of those common success factors is really a priority around public space,” he says.

When Canberrans think lakeside development, their first point of reference is likely to be Kingston Foreshore. While Snow believes some Canberrans judge the development at Kingston harshly, he concedes that “certainly, mistakes were made and we’re going to learn from those mistakes.” Namely? “I think principally that they built the buildings first and then came back and did the public spaces later,” he says. He points out that, by contrast, the development of West Basin has begun with a new public park next to Commonwealth Avenue Bridge.

Snow is not prepared to quote exact percentages of residential and retail space but says, “What’s going to be absolutely critical is that this place works not only during the week; it works at night and it certainly works on weekends. Now if it’s to be that people magnet… it’s the diversity of use that’s critical.” The buildings, Snow insists, will not be “high-rise as those who perhaps regard themselves as detractors of the scheme would say.” They will be a maximum of six storeys along Commonwealth Avenue and Parkes Way and slope down to one or two storeys closer to the water, he says. The National Capital Plan also requires that buildings are set back at least fifty-five metres from the shore.

Snow calls attention to the fact that much of West Basin is currently consumed by car parks. This isn’t the only place where Canberra displays this puzzling indifference to the lake — something between outright rejection and a failure to notice it is there — and nor is it the only point where the capital offers incredible views for parked vehicles. At Russell, a sea of car parks is situated so as to distance the defence precinct from the water’s edge; at the Canberra Institute of Technology, the car parks are not even paved; Questacon, too, is set back from the lake, while the prime space by the foreshore is devoted to a car park; in Yarralumla, the shops are in the centre of the suburb while there is a large block of empty land next to Yarralumla Bay; the Australian National University expires around the Crawford School, maintaining a respectful distance from the water, and the spot where Sullivan’s Creek enters Lake Burley Griffin is virtually inaccessible. In this context, the West Basin development seems less like an assault on public space or natural bushland than an effort to address the wasteful underuse of space in the heart of Canberra.

It is true that there is also some pleasant park area at West Basin and a beach, of sorts. But, as Snow points out, “For those who want a non-urban lake experience there will still be approximately forty kilometres of undeveloped lake frontage.” The Guardians dispute that figure, but, suffice to say, Canberra has an abundance of naturalesque foreshore; it has parks; and it has open space. The development of West Basin will not change that. “Once complete,” says Snow, “the redeveloped waterfront will have approximately four hectares of new public space, including parkland.” It’s not parks or bush that Canberra lacks but their integration into the life of the city.

Near West Basin, Commonwealth Park is substantially cut off from pedestrian access by Parkes Way and Commonwealth Avenue. Similarly, Black Mountain Peninsula, a true highlight of the city and a place to which Canberrans should naturally gravitate, is dreadfully underused. The projected 5000 people that the redeveloped West Basin will bring to the lake’s shores each day, as well as improved pedestrian access to Commonwealth Park, should mean that more Canberrans will spend more time enjoying the city’s most beautiful public spaces. It is just possible that one day the lake’s shores will become the city’s playground in the manner Griffin envisaged.

Snow also takes issue with the Guardians’ claim that the West Basin development will block views to the Brindabellas. “This notion that the entire journey from City Hill to the lakefront is going to be obstructed is simply not correct,” he says, pointing to Henry Rolland Park, between Albert Street and the lake, which will remain undeveloped. Here, the Guardians do have a point: six-storey buildings will block the views across the lake as Canberrans drive along Commonwealth Avenue.

But Canberrans don’t suffer a shortage of nice views while they’re driving; the problem is that they are very likely to be driving when they experience nice views. Just as the lake is a place to drive to, the triangle is a place that, more often than not, Canberrans drive through. Canberra needs more opportunities to enjoy views of the lake and the Brindabellas from cafes, restaurants and pubs right by its shore.

As for Commonwealth Avenue itself, Snow is blunt. “I find Commonwealth Avenue, quite frankly, at the moment a really boring street, dominated by cars. It may as well be an arterial road. No street life whatsoever.” If you doubt Snow’s assessment, try walking from Civic to Parliament House. “Compare that, for example, to Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC,” Snow says. “Fantastic street.”

Will the character of the West Basin development ultimately be dictated by the demands of developers, as the ACT government seeks to recoup the cost of dealing with Parkes Way? “It is challenging from a technical standpoint,” Snow acknowledges. Something like the split-level boulevard proposal “would be hugely expensive. I mean many hundreds of millions of dollars.” But Snow argues that there are alternatives. He suggests decking or land bridges “that effectively straddle Commonwealth Avenue” as “a less costly but I would think, as an urban designer, an equally effective solution, in terms of improving connectivity.”

“What we are saying and will be saying to government is that this is a once-in-a-hundred-year opportunity to get this right,” Snow continues. “Parkes Way is a critical part of the transport infrastructure and the arterial road network of the city. It also, however, functions as a significant physical and psychological barrier. Overcoming that barrier in order to not just unlock development potential but also achieve a broader strategic urban objective, which is to link our CBD, the city centre to the best natural feature we’ve got in this city, called the lake, will itself generate other broader macroeconomic benefits for the city in the long term.” And very significant non-economic benefits, it can be added.

Whether the ACT government can be persuaded to adopt an enlightened long-term view of the project’s potential remains to be seen. As the City Renewal Authority negotiates a land swap with the Commonwealth and refines the West Basin master plan, it is good that the Lake Burley Griffin Guardians and others are keeping vigilant watch. There are obvious grounds for concern when politicians and property developers are involved, the pressures on the ACT budget are very real, and there are those who really do want to turn Canberra into just another city. The influential property developer Geocon, for instance, is perfectly open in its hostility to the ideals of the bush capital, and sometimes chief minister Andrew Barr gives the impression that he’s in its corner. (His proposed removal of Canberra’s ban on billboards is one worrying example.)

But it is wrong to defend Canberra’s distinctive character to the point of advocating the preservation of a foreshore dominated by car parks. It is a mistake to see the “best of town and country” where the actual existing layout of Canberra separates its citizens from the natural beauty of their city. And it is defeatist to hold that the difficulties involved in dealing with Parkes Way mean that this unfortunate barrier between the city and the lake should forever remain unaddressed.

The ideal of a bush capital proposes the arresting coexistence of what we had previously thought were incompatible opposites, a tension between open space and built form, natural environment and urban density, provincial stillness and cosmopolitan intensity. And it is precisely this tension that Canberra lacks as a result of the half-implementation of the Griffin Plan. Griffin replaced the traditional city centre of high-rise buildings with a lake and public parks, thus inverting the normal allocation of this space to the most powerful of private interests. In reconfiguring the traditional city, he was inviting us to relate to nature and each other in a new way.

As a capital, Canberra patriotically asserts its uniquely Australian setting while evoking a touch of antipodean irony about the very notion of being a centre. Today, though, Australians are more likely to take Canberra’s self-effacing nature as a sign of aloofness than of humility. Instead of a paradox, many just see a category mistake; rather than beholding a city unlike any other, many question whether Canberra is really a city at all.

The tantalising possibility in the extension of the city to the lake is that the tension between opposites at the heart of the bush capital ideal will be recovered, the paradox restored. Walter Burley Griffin’s fate was to be twice wronged: first, his vision for Australia’s capital was betrayed; then forever after he has been impugned for the flaws of a city he didn’t design. But idealists, by their nature, play a long game. It may be that the spirit of Griffin’s plan, if not the letter, is finally about to be realised. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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Opposing the proposal to widen the suburb’s Jersey Road was a mainly middle-class group of people who had founded one of Sydney’s first resident action groups, the Paddington Society, in 1964. Remarkably, they were victorious and Jersey Road was saved, though the threats persisted. This book is a tribute to the society and to the beauty and distinctiveness of the suburb that it saved.

In the usually flat urban landscapes of suburban Australia, Paddington is a rare and exotic gem. Clustered in serried, bricked ranks around the hills close to the heart of Sydney, its Victorian and Edwardian housing survived early twentieth-century urban development because of its unfashionable working-class habitation. Backyards too small for playing cricket were unappealing to self-improving Sydneysiders, who preferred the greenfield developments on the ever-widening edges of the city. As the illustrations in this handsome book show, the result of Paddington’s complex history was a close-knit mix of terrace housing in a treeless setting that looked far from attractive in the 1950s and 60s, and ripe for gentrification.

Ably drawn together by Greg Young, this collection of essays fittingly commences with a study of the original owners of the place. The space between the sandy hilltop and the harbour was occupied by the Cadigal people, who fished in the streams and bay and lived in the wooded valleys. In “Aboriginal Paddington,” Paul Irish documents the tenacity of these Indigenous inhabitants in the face of the invaders’ expansion, which eventually forced them to move to La Perouse.

Paddington as depicted in the Atlas of the Suburbs of Sydney, 1886–88, prepared and published by Higinbotham & Robinson. National Library of Australia

After Bill Morrison’s scene-setting “Mapping Paddington,” succeeding chapters deal with aspects of Paddington history, illustrated with clear maps, lavish photographs (both historical and contemporary), architectural drawings and other artworks. In a lively overarching chapter, Garry Wotherspoon and Paul Ashton explain how the lack of a railway or wharfs meant that Paddington escaped industrialisation and “simply dozed in its dust between two world wars and into the 1950s”; and how, by 1966, the suburb enjoyed “a livelier and richer ambience” thanks to the one-third of its population who were of non-British origin.

In “Early Paddington,” Robert Griffin describes Governor Bourke’s vision of the area overlooking Rushcutters Bay as a suitable site for residences for government officials. A few of these early nineteenth-century villas remain, notably the house now known as Juniper Hall. The layout of these land grants would govern the shape of the present suburb. Another crucial factor in Paddington’s history was the selection of a site on the ridgeline, on sandy soil unsuitable for agriculture, for a new military establishment. Construction of Victoria Barracks began in 1841 and a village grew up nearby to house the workmen involved.

I particularly enjoyed and was enlightened by Griffin and Robert Brown’s chapter, “The Victorian Suburb,” which like other contributions to this book owes a well-acknowledged debt to Max Kelly’s pioneering Paddock Full of Houses (1978). Griffin and Brown explain how the mixture of street alignments, varying block depths and small-scale building construction resulted in a surprising variety of designs, avoiding the boring uniformity that might otherwise have emerged. In contrast to other suburbs, where building societies and large-scale developers financed long rows of identical terraces, in Paddington a builder of modest means “would complete one terrace house on his land then live in it while re-financing before completing others in the row.” By 1885 some 60 per cent of the suburb’s rental houses were owned by landlords whose holdings did not exceed four houses.

Stables at the rear of 30–32 Oxford Street, Paddington, on 17 July 1900. State Archives and Records New South Wales

Sharon Veale and Peter McNeil show how in Paddington, as elsewhere in Australian cities, a powerful shaping force has been gentrification after working-class tenanted properties fell into disrepair. “Between 1959 and 1966 nearly half of Paddington terraces changed hands,” they write, and new owners, including a number of influential gay men and women, shaped the terraces to their needs. One of the features to reappear was “Paddington lace” — as the photographs show clearly, the opening up of the closed-in balconies and the return of their cast-iron railings dramatically changed the visual appeal of the Victorian terraces. And the garden and street trees that appeared also enhanced the picturesque nature of the suburb.

A central and very readable chapter by Sheridan Burke, “Conserving Paddington,” tells the story of the creation of the Paddington Society in 1964 and its running battles with planners to save the fabric of the suburb. Burke shows how a vigorous and professional resident action group could prevail over the bureaucrats. Here and elsewhere, the book pays due credit to the individuals who launched the society, including writer Patricia Thompson and potter Marea Gazzard and their architect husbands John and Don. Sandra Hall’s chapter, “Bohemian Paddington,” peoples the book with some of the suburb’s resident counterculture inhabitants, and Peter McNeil introduces us to the creative men and women who made Paddington their home, including violin-maker Alfred Walter Heaps, poet Christopher Brennan, composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks and painters Margaret Olley, David Strachan, Donald Friend and many more. Viennese-born art dealer and bon vivant Rudy Komon opened his gallery in Paddington in 1959, and others soon followed, turning the area into a distinctive artistic hub.

In the final sections, Helen Armstrong’s “Changing Landscapes” shows us how Paddington looked over time, Peter Spearritt muses on the prospects for Paddington’s survival, and Robert Griffin provides an in-depth analysis of the varying forms of the suburb’s terrace housing over the period 1840–1910.

The structure of Paddington: A History inevitably results in some repetition. I also found the index disappointingly slim and was sorry to see that Walter Pulkownik, purveyor of Paddington Chocolates, was not mentioned. But these are minor criticisms of a handsome and worthwhile production. It is both an evocation of a much-loved Sydney suburb and an insight into the history of urban development in Australia. •

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On the approach to a small concrete bridge a faded sign reads South Creek Catchment Area. Might this be a bridge over the famous Badgerys Creek? I peer over the railings. The creek bed is dry and choked with bulrushes — it’s midsummer, so no surprises there. Yet it’s hoped that the South Creek catchment will provide a “green spine” for a new city being planned for these parched parts. Where will the water come from to fill the creek to cool the people who will live in the Western Parkland City?

Across the road from the bridge, another sign, much bigger and bolder, reels off numbers with which I’ll soon become very familiar — 28,000 jobs by 2031, ten million passengers by 2031. The airport-with-benefits billboard.

A few hundred metres along the road, just past Tony’s Duck Farm, a local estate agent has put up a placard advertising land for lease: Site 5000 sq. m. House and Yard. Centre of Aerotropolis. The placard shows a plane taking off, but falls short of explaining what an aerotropolis is.

There’s probably no need out here. After six decades of political bickering and dithering over whether and where to build a second airport for Sydney, it’s all systems go. People who own land surrounding the 1780-hectare site of the Badgerys Creek airport (properly called Western Sydney International (Nancy-Bird Walton) Airport, after the pioneer aviator) know they’re sitting on a goldmine. That’s what an aerotropolis means out here: money.

Pan out, though, and the concept is more controversial.

Put simply, an aerotropolis is an airport city — as opposed to a city airport. Traditionally, airports have served their cities but not been part of them. In most cases (Sydney’s existing Kingsford Smith Airport is an exception) they’re located on the empty or sparsely populated periphery of existing cities, and the idea is to get in and out of them, and away, without dallying. They’re noisy and polluting.

From the early days of civil aviation, certain urban planners (among them Le Corbusier) and airport designers thought that cities should and would grow around airports. People and businesses, they argued, have always clustered around transport hubs, whether they’re ports, railways or highways. But the airport city didn’t get lift-off until the early 1990s when a professor of business at the University of North Carolina, John Kasarda, revisited the old airport city dream, tweaked it to suit the emerging global economy and came up with the aerotropolis model. It’s his brand.

Briefly, this is the idea. Thirty-five per cent of the value of global trade is freighted by air. Locating offices and warehouses and other essential infrastructure near airports gives companies faster access to their customers and suppliers. It could be that they are shifting heirloom tomatoes or sushi-grade tuna or circuit boards around the world, but equally their cargo could be corporate executives, investors or marketing bigwigs. The higher the value of the goods and services involved, the bigger the gains, according to Kasarda. In other words, time is money.

Goldmine: land sales on Badgerys Creek Road. Alex Nemeth

Kasarda’s aerotropolis model has considerable reach. The Chinese are mad for it. Zhengzhou Airport Economy Zone has been developing on aerotropolis principles since 2010 and has spawned dozens of similar projects across China. Hong Kong University geographer Max Hirsh, author of Airport Urbanism, says that when it comes to designing airports, the “aerotropolis” is “one of the most influential development models out there.” Other places usually cited as exemplary aerotropolis developments are Zuidas, near Schiphol Airport in the Netherlands, and Songdo International Business District near Incheon Airport in South Korea.

But not everyone is a believer. There are dozens of failed aerotropolis projects on nearly every continent, writes Hirsh in the American corporate real estate magazine Site Selection. “Among airport planners it’s an open secret that the aerotropolis concept — which looks great on paper — actually doesn’t work very well in practice.”

But get used to seeing this word, ungainly though it is, for all the indications are that Kasarda’s model has carried the day in Western Sydney.

It might be a cliché, but the prospect of a new twenty-four-hour international airport, scheduled to open in 2026, really is a game-changer for the region. It’s the first major metropolitan airport to be built in Australia for fifty years and it’s caught the attention of political and business leaders in a way that nothing else in this region has for decades. Since 2014, when the federal government approved the Badgerys Creek site, the notion of the aerotropolis has been woven tightly into planning not just an airport, but greater Sydney itself. From a standing start five years ago, it’s become an important driver of a political narrative of “rebalancing” the economic and social opportunities of the greater metropolis so that more of them fall Western Sydney’s way.

From the moment the operators of Sydney’s Kingsford Smith Airport let it be known that they would not take up their option to build and operate the new airport (too risky, they judged), it was clear that this project was not just a state matter. Malcolm Turnbull’s government stepped quickly into the breach and announced it would build the airport at arm’s length. In May 2017 it allocated $5.3 billion off-budget and set up a fully owned government corporation called WSA Co to get the job done.

Later that year, the government directed the corporation to work collaboratively with state and local government and the wider community to “realise the wider social and economic benefits for which the airport will be a catalyst.” By the early 2030s, it specified, the airport should generate 28,000 jobs, directly and indirectly (a headline number drawn from an analysis by consultants EY published in August that year). WSA Co staff, including senior staff, should work out of offices in Liverpool or nearby, and the design of the airport should be such that Western Sydney residents would be “justifiably proud of this facility and consider that it reflects the confidence and the aspirations of Western Sydney.”

And then, only four months later, two “visions” for the future of Western Sydney were released in short succession — the Western Sydney City Deal (a collaboration between the federal and NSW governments and eight Western Sydney councils) and the Greater Sydney Commission’s A Metropolis of Three Cities. These documents, the latter an intensive and large-scale piece of planning, allocated Western Sydney a new place in the metropolis envisaged for 2056, a city of eight million people with half of them living west of Parramatta.

Effectively, the planners divide what is now thought of as Greater Western Sydney between two new cities — Central River City (with Parramatta at its centre) and the new Western Parkland City, to be established on the strength of the new international airport and the aerotropolis. (The Western Parkland City is named for a stub of open space squeezed between the M4 and Prospect Reservoir, which is all that remains of another ambitious plan, Sydney’s once much-admired Green Belt.)

In a leap of faith, the commission’s three-cities vision gives this frontier city equal status with the established Eastern Harbour City (with Sydney’s CBD at its core) and the emerging Central River City. Or, if you want to look at it another way, it brings Greater Western Sydney, with its long history of neglect, into the metropolitan fold.

The plans acknowledge the untapped economic potential of a region with one of the highest population growth rates in the developed world. Carved off, it would be Australia’s fourth-largest city. But there’s a subtext to this planning bonanza that is never expressed in so many words. It’s a belated recognition of the significance of nearly two million people who live in the “middle of nowhere,” people who have long been regarded as fringe dwellers by those who live in the charmed ring of suburbs around the old city centre — that is, if they have thought about them at all.

I once worked for an editor of a national magazine who said he wasn’t interested in anything west of the Gladesville Bridge, seven kilometres from Sydney Town Hall. Seriously. You wouldn’t broadcast that kind of attitude today, given that so many people in high places think that this is Western Sydney’s time, but it still informs the “culture of governance,” according to UNSW urban policy professor Sue Holliday. She should know. She’s a former director-general of NSW planning.

It’s a commonplace that you can tell which way the political wind is blowing by putting up your finger in Sydney’s western suburbs, that elections are won or lost in that vast urban sprawl where the city is growing fastest and needs are hardest to meet. Both state and federal elections are looming here (23 March in New South Wales and within three months nationally), and we would normally expect much hyperventilating around all things western, until the shouting fades after votes are cast.

This time round, though, the campaigning is not so much around piecemeal electoral handouts. The state and federal governments have jointly committed billions of dollars to building a road network to support the airport and the emerging suburbs of the Western Parkland City. They’ve also promised the first stage of a metro-style north–south rail link connecting travellers from the airport and the aerotropolis to St Marys, twenty kilometres north by car, and the rest of Sydney’s rail system. These are grand projects with long timelines and they’re woven into planning for the airport, the aerotropolis and the Western Parkland City via the City Deal.

Western Sydney Airport and the City Deal broadly have bipartisan support. Two years ago federal Labor give a glimmer of hope to those who adamantly oppose a new twenty-four-hour airport by promising to minimise the impact of aircraft noise and raising the prospect of a no-fly zone over communities between 11pm and 6am.

But that was before the aerotropolis came to town. Labor policy now proposes replacing the City Deal with City Partnerships, but there’s no suggestion of the deal’s commitments being shelved. It’s a rebadging exercise, in other words, though Labor has traditionally had a stronger commitment to cities than the Coalition. “I would have thought both sides of politics at the federal level would be reasonably attracted by this type of approach because it allows them to spend money when they want to spend money,” says the Grattan Institute’s transport and city analyst Marion Terrill.

The Western Sydney City Deal, signed in early March last year by Malcolm Turnbull alongside NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian and eight Western Sydney mayors, is not a binding commitment. But it does represent a relatively new degree of collaboration between the three tiers of government. It’s primarily a mechanism for investing in long-term transport and job-creation projects across a semirural region that captures existing townships in Greater Western Sydney — from Campbelltown in the southwest across to Liverpool and up north to Penrith. This is where the people are heading, with planners foreseeing 500,000 new residents by 2041 in just two areas: the South West Growth Area (between Badgerys Creek and Liverpool) and the North West Growth Area (north of Penrith).

Hope of the side: members of KARI perform during the Aerotropolis Investor Forum in Sydney on 28 May 2018. Mark Kolbe/Getty Images

The Western Sydney City Deal isn’t the only City Deal in Australia — four others have been signed (with Townsville, Launceston, Darwin and Hobart), and another three (with Darwin, Geelong and Perth) are in the works. But Terrill says politicians and bureaucrats have more confidence in the Western Sydney City Deal than the others. That’s not just because the deal has the longest time frame and involves several mega-projects. It’s also because of the depth of planning behind it. (Townsville’s City Deal, for instance, was primarily about delivering a stadium that was “an uneconomic project but it made electoral sense,” says Terrill.)

The Western Sydney City Deal is also an extremely close match with the Western City District component of the Greater Sydney Commission’s three-cities “vision” and was pulled together in the same time frame, between 2016 and 2018. The GSC, the city-wide planning authority, came into being in January 2016 and soon floated the concept of “rebalancing” the city. The final draft of its three-cities vision was released just a couple of weeks after the Western Sydney City Deal was signed. It shares many of the same aspirations as the City Deal for Western Sydney, including the Western Parkland City and “the 30-minute city,” the latter being shorthand for cities that are engineered so that home, work and play are all accessible within thirty minutes — an ideal that is laughably far from the reality for many Western Sydney residents now.

The GSC plan was released concurrently with Future Transport 2056 and the State Infrastructure Strategy 2018–2038. “Having three cities, each with supporting metropolitan and strategic centres, will put workers closer to knowledge-intensive jobs, city-scale infrastructure and services, entertainment and cultural facilities,” the visionaries announced.

The chief commissioner of the GSC is Lucy Turnbull, a former mayor of Sydney and chair of the Committee for Sydney during 2012–15. “Malcolm Turnbull would not have thought about Western Sydney without Lucy,” says Holliday.

Rob Roggema, an expert on sustainable urbanism and climate adaptation who has held positions at Melbourne and Sydney universities and is now professor of spatial transformation at Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen, is blunter in his criticism: “It’s not a planning proposition, it’s a political proposition which is an extension to do with the new airport.” If you want to build an airport in Western Sydney, he says, “you will come up with a story about three cities, and about how wonderful things will be in the third city. If you are a planner, you would see you don’t want to go further west.”

Ian Watson, a veteran labour market analyst attached to the Social Policy Research Centre at UNSW, is sceptical on other grounds: scratch the surface of all these proposals, he says, and you’ll find pressure for property development.

John Kasarda, in his 2015 aerotropolis feasibility study for the Sydney Business Chamber, stressed that “aerotropolis success rests as much on fast and efficient local and regional surface connectivity as it does on speedy national and global air connectivity. The fundamental metric for aerotropolis planning is not space and distance but time and cost.” In other words, to make it work, you’ve got to be able to move people quickly from A to B.

The way things stand now, even with the state government playing massive catch-up with rail (Sydney Metro) and road (WestConnex) construction, the estimated travel time between the new airport and Sydney’s CBD is approximately an hour by car or train — regular commuter train, that is, not high-speed rail. And there’s no direct link between the two airports. On 4 December, the NSW state government announced that it would deliver a fast rail regional network in its next term of government — should it be given one — but no mention was made of the Western Sydney Airport.

Let’s put scepticism aside for the moment, and look at what the planners imagine when they talk of “a global city, enriched by its heritage and connected to the world.” The Western Parkland City is forecast to be about the same size as Adelaide, with a population of 1.5 million, by 2056. It will have new schools and vocational training facilities and a university campus. It will have “city-shaping” transport (as opposed to roads and rail lines that all lead to Sydney’s CBD); and the rejuvenated South Creek catchment — the “green spine” — will be the city’s playground. The city will be “an epicentre for liveability,” they say. To back up this ambitious goal, there’s a pot of $150 million for local councils to do their own environmental and town centre upgrades, the so-called Liveability Program, drawing $60 million each from the federal and state governments and a minimum of $30 million from City Deal councils.

In January, when the state’s Western Sydney minister Stuart Ayres announced the successful projects in the first round of “liveability” funding, he rhapsodised about the deal’s support for the region’s growth, and its “ability to attract national and international investment.” Ayres is the state member for Penrith, whose council picked up $24 million for upgrades to Regatta Park on the banks of the Nepean River.

The magnet for investment is a place identified as the Western Economic Corridor in the GSC’s Western Parkland City Vision. This corridor seems to be an umbrella term for the airport and aerotropolis (the terminology does get confusing). “[It] will attract globally significant defence and aerospace activities and contribute to a strong trade, freight, logistics, advanced manufacturing, health, education and science economy. This will produce knowledge-intensive jobs close to areas of high population growth.”

The aerotropolis, which at its fullest extension is forecast to cover 11,200 hectares around the airport, is a last-minute entrant to the saga of the second airport, but it turns out that now the airport decision has been made, it is the aerotropolis that is the hope of the side. The old justifications for Sydney needing a second airport at Badgerys Creek — rehearsed endlessly over sixty years, with much debate over how best to get passengers quickly from the airport to other destinations — seem to have receded into the background. The airport development seems not so much to be solving an airspace and city congestion problem as providing a miracle fix for the problems of Western Sydney.

Across the planning spectrum, the number of jobs the aerotropolis will contribute — or “supercharge” — for Western Sydney within twenty years is given as 200,000. That number is writ large on billboards around Western Sydney promoting the airport and the aerotropolis. It’s a big promise to keep.

Watson says the numbers are vastly inflated — “ludicrous,” he says. In Jobs for the West, a report published in August by the community organisation Jobs for Western Sydney Working Group, he dismantles the job projections for the airport in meticulous detail. The planners predict 28,000 jobs for airport operations by 2031 (a figure also written on billboards across Western Sydney). Watson examines the operations of airports of a similar size, including Adelaide’s, and comes to the vastly lower estimate of about 920 airport jobs for Western Sydneysiders by 2031.

The case being made by governments for the airport and aerotropolis is classic “jobs blackmail,” he says. You accept our twenty-four-hour airport, and we give you jobs. On both environmental and economic grounds, this is not a future that is in the interests of the residents of Western Sydney. High-speed rail, he says, would generate many more jobs for Western Sydney. But isn’t it a done deal? “The earthworks have begun, but until the tarmac is laid for the first runway, all bets are still off,” he says.

(Watson lives in the lower Blue Mountains, where the local council’s active anti–Badgerys Creek airport campaign, Clear Blue Sky, didn’t stand in the way of its signing the City Deal. In the first round of “liveability” funding, the Blue Mountains picked up $18.7 million to restore bushland and upgrade township streetscapes and play areas. That’s called politics.)

Western Sydney University geographer Phillip O’Neill has made it his business, and that of the university’s Centre for Western Sydney, which he directs, to highlight the complexity of Western Sydney’s problems. In a 2015 report on Western Sydney’s “jobs slide” he wrote that the region’s problems — a tangle of jobs loss, poor transport planning and high population growth — were “too large for scant,­­­­ off-hand pronouncements claiming a solution is near.”

He is dismissive of what’s been put on the table by the City Deal and the three-cities planners: “Converting green colours on a map to pink where that equals urban development… doesn’t convert to jobs.” He summarises for me four major building blocks for the creation of jobs in Western Sydney: proper planning controls; twenty-first-century infrastructure; major enduring investment in education; and a commitment by government to co-invest with the private sector (he mentions the example of Silicon Valley). He’s asked the GSC for more detail about how exactly the aerotropolis will drive jobs creation, but thus far it hasn’t been forthcoming.

The western suburbs, or what O’Neill calls “Australia’s great urban experiment,” have been growing much faster than jobs, transport and social infrastructure since the middle of last century. They were, and still are, a site for a very basic hope, the hope of a better life in a better place.

Back in the 1960s, the suburb of Birrong, twenty-two kilometres southwest of Sydney’s CBD, was full of such hope. My husband Alex had a schoolfriend called Hans, a migrant kid like him, whose parents had shifted there from Glebe. They left a cramped and crumbling rental in the inner west for a brand-new house with a yard. Hans’s father was a machine operator and his mother, whom Alex remembers as a very clever woman, got work in a factory. There was work everywhere then — at the Chullora rail yards, the biscuit factories, the car factories, the fridge factories, the you-name-it-we-make-it factories. The state government was so optimistic about Birrong’s future then that it built not one but two high schools and an Olympic-sized public swimming pool, and this was before all the roads were sealed.

I hadn’t heard of Birrong before I met Alex. That was in the early 2000s and he had been “out there” (my geography of Western Sydney was very hazy at the time) running a pharmacy since the late 1970s. His commute was forty minutes both ways, but he didn’t seem to mind. He listened to ABC radio in the car. His working day was long, and unpredictable. Bad things sometimes happened at the pharmacy, which had a post office sub-branch. Armed robberies were worryingly frequent. The shine had long worn off Birrong’s new-suburb promise. A lot of manufacturing jobs had moved further west or disappeared altogether, and it belonged to a middle ring of western suburbs between Bankstown and Auburn that were often in the headlines, for all the wrong reasons, mostly involving angry, violent young men and/or drugs.

But Alex enjoyed his job. He worked with a bunch of local women who were loyal and good-humoured and surprisingly tough when they had to be. The customers who came into the pharmacy reflected how the suburb had changed and how it had stayed the same. (The 2016 census shows that around one-third of Birrong residents speak only English at home. Other languages spoken, in descending order, are Vietnamese, Arabic, Cantonese, Mandarin and Macedonian.)

Alex is not a man prone to exaggeration. He learned early in life how to defend his corner and expects to have to do so. But when he’d describe his working day, I often felt as if I were listening to a foreign correspondent. He moved between worlds. It wasn’t just a spatial disconnect — the term planners often use to describe the experience of Western Sydney residents with long commutes — it was a cultural disconnect too. That sounds elitist, but most of those Alex rubbed shoulders with at work didn’t want to trade places with him. They weren’t passing through Birrong on their way to somewhere better. They had friends and family in the community, and they had rich lives. That’s what we who live closer to the city so often fail to see because our minds are cluttered with images of Western Sydney as a place of disadvantage.

Western Sydney has always been driven by surges of overseas migration and land release, and both are at full throttle now. Blacktown, for instance, thirty-four kilometres west of Sydney’s CBD, added almost 20,000 overseas migrants to its population of around 350,000 between 2011 and 2016, according to demography experts at .id, which has partnered with Phillip O’Neill at Western Sydney University. Between this year and 2036 Blacktown’s population is forecast to increase by more than a third. The people are coming from everywhere, but a sizeable proportion is from India and China. “These people are young, skilled, fertile,” according to .id founder Ivan Motley. The group growing most quickly in Blacktown in the next ten years will be in the ten-to-fourteen age bracket.

Some of these young migrants are cashed-up enough to buy into the new dormitory suburbs with pastoral names like Willowdale and Emerald Hills that are spooling out between Liverpool and Campbelltown. (By the time you get to Campbelltown you are forty-two kilometres southwest of Sydney’s CBD as the crow flies.)

“You’ve got to have ambition”: new development in Granville, south of Parramatta. Alex Nemeth

A lot of Western Sydney residents, however, are shut out of the housing market. Suburbs like Granville, which has had a pretty seedy reputation in its time, are now up and coming. Western Sydney has seen a sharp increase in both rental stress (the electorate of McMahon, which includes Blacktown, is the third-worst in Australia on this measure) and homelessness. The Western Sydney Community Forum’s Build Beyond Bricks initiative estimates that nearly 40 per cent of homeless people in New South Wales live in Western Sydney. Well over half the state’s 14,000 homeless people are aged between twelve and twenty-four. The causes of homelessness are complex, but for young people, low rates of school completion and a halving in the number of full-time jobs for fifteen- to nineteen-year-olds since 2008 are among them.

Job shedding in Western Sydney began in the mid 1970s when Australian manufacturing started restructuring. It hasn’t stopped. Between 2006 and 2016, 15,000 manufacturing jobs were lost from Western Sydney. Manufacturing is still crucial to the region, but most of the new jobs in the “new economy” have bypassed Western Sydney, says Watson. Of the 60,000 new jobs in professional, scientific and technical services created in that decade, fewer than 10,000 went into Western Sydney.

More and more people who live in Western Sydney have a bachelor or higher degree. But there aren’t enough jobs there for the well educated (nor for the poorly educated, but that’s a whole other matter — “the education story in the southwest is not a good one,” as O’Neill says). In Blacktown, for instance, residents working in retail, in blue-collar jobs and in professional health and education jobs tend to work locally, but Watson says that half of all computer programmers, for instance, or around 1000 people, commute to inner Sydney to work.

O’Neill estimates that if things go on as they are, there will be 210,000 fewer jobs in Western Sydney than there are resident workers by 2036. Related to this jobs deficit is the number of people who leave Western Sydney every day to go to work in other parts of the city, Blacktown’s computer programmers among them. Depending on your source, it’s between 150,000 and 300,000 people each day, and what’s usually said in the same breath is that nearly three-quarters of them take their car.

The Grattan Institute’s Marion Terrill sees it differently. In October she produced a report that poured cold water on the popular image of low-income commuters from the outer suburbs of Australia’s biggest cities forced to travel ever-greater distances to work, clogging up transport arteries. Fewer than 20 per cent of working-age people in Sydney have a job in the CBD, she says, and only 10 per cent work in suburban employment hubs, the importance of which is frequently overblown by government planners. Her research finds that three-quarters of all jobs in Sydney, as in other big Australian cities she analysed, are dispersed all over the city.

In fact, the average commute distance barely increased in the five years before the 2016 census, and there’s been little or no change in how long people spend travelling to and from work. People are not hapless victims of population growth, dependent for their wellbeing on governments building the next freeway or rail extension, Terrill says. They adapt and choose where they live and how they get to work based as much on their values as on any other factor.

So what of the City Deal’s claim that “smart” jobs will spread across the aerotropolis precincts and employment hubs in Liverpool, Penrith and Campbelltown, and smaller centres like Windsor and Katoomba? “I hope they’re starting with an accurate baseline,” says Terrill. “I just looked at the way the world is now, and I don’t think it is well described in these documents.”

Neither does O’Neill. By world standards, generating 200,000 new jobs is exceptional, he tells me. Take the new Bankstown campus being built by his university, a fifteen-to-twenty-storey building expected to open in 2022 and create up to 200 jobs. (O’Neill is the provost of Western Sydney University’s Bankstown campus.) “Lend Lease put $5 billion into Barangaroo, and expects to create about 25,000 jobs — so you’d need eight Barangaroos [to arise] from the dusty plains of Western Sydney.”

Rob Roggema, who remains closely connected to Western Sydney via a six-country project investigating the relationship between agribusiness and ordinary neighbourhoods, questions why on earth you’d be building a new city on those dusty plains. Take Penrith, for example. Fifty kilometres west of Sydney’s CBD, a long way from sea breezes, it suffers from sweltering summer temperatures.

On 8 January last year it was widely reported that Penrith had been the hottest place on earth in the previous twenty-four hours, with the temperature reaching 47.3°C. Average mean maximum temperatures have increased by 1.1°C in Penrith since 1980, and with ANU climate scientists predicting that Sydney and Melbourne will experience temperatures as high as 50°C during summer heatwaves after less than 2°C of global warming, it can only get worse.

“What are we doing putting people in a place where it’s over fifty degrees in the summer?” asks Roggema. “And if we do, we need to make it a cooling environment rather than heating it.” He’s referring to the urban heat island effect that comes into play in densely built, sparsely shaded urban environments.

In April, the NSW government pledged to plant five million more trees across Sydney by 2030, its own research having shown that morning summer surface temperatures in treeless areas are 12.8°C higher than in vegetated urban areas. WSROC (a regional collaboration of Western Sydney councils) has just introduced a Turn Down the Heat strategy in anticipation of temperatures reaching crisis point within five years — which is not long enough for trees to grow to maturity. While mature trees will provide shade and survive in 50°C, says Roggema, not many trees will grow to maturity at that temperature.

Sue Holliday is thinking along similar lines. “I don’t know how they’re going to get water into that creek,” she tells me, referring to Badgerys Creek. “Who is going to take responsibility for making the South Creek precinct happen?… It’s hot now. Imagine what it’s going to be like when there is an airport and an aerotropolis and roads and concrete. You can’t rely on developers to plan for greenery. They clear-fell and expect individuals to plant.”

In her forty years of experience in Western Sydney, Holliday has seen a lot of wishful thinking get pushed aside because there’s no money it. “If we’re not careful we’ll get a Western Sydney full of warehouse sheds and no offices, and not many people work in warehouse sheds. They take up a huge amount of land, put trucks on the road, and in the very near future, the jobs in those warehouses will largely be automated.” (O’Neill says there’s a ten-to-one jobs-to-hectare ratio in these kinds of workplaces, and that will drop further.)

Andy Marks, who is Western Sydney University’s assistant vice-chancellor (strategy and policy), grew up in Blacktown. He couldn’t afford to go to university in central Sydney, so he headed north to Armidale, where he wrote a PhD thesis on politics and identity. “The Western Sydney issue that demands real action from government isn’t about big kit,” he says. (Marks used to drum for the Australian band Crow in the 90s, and the old rocker in him seems to want to break out of the chancellery.) Three months before Turnbull’s government signed the City Deal, which undertakes to “skill our residents in the region and initiate new education opportunities,” it froze funding of domestic higher education enrolments for 2018–19. Western Sydney University was about to open a new high-rise campus in Liverpool and was forced to absorb the cost of 1000 extra students. “We can’t keep doing that,” says Marks. “All we want is consistency and follow-through from both sides of politics.”

It’s very early days for passing judgement on all of this, of course. The authority in charge of driving local and international investment, the Western City and Aerotropolis Authority, wasn’t set up until November, with NSW Health Infrastructure chief Sam Sangster as its inaugural boss. That same month, the new authority’s interim chair, Geoff Roberts, who is also a GSC commissioner, was in London looking for early-bird tenants for the aerotropolis “core” among British defence and aerospace, agribusiness and advanced manufacturing companies.

By the end of 2018 firm interest in tenancies had come from American defence contractor Northrop Grumman, Australian pharma manufacturer Vitex, Sydney Markets, and a university consortium (including UNSW, Western Sydney University, and the universities of Newcastle and of Wollongong) that intends to build a STEM campus at the aerotropolis. Two Japanese multinationals, Mitsubishi Heavy Industry and Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, created major excitement when they signed memoranda of understanding in October.

Of the aerotropolis’s nine precincts, two commercial precincts — the core and the so-called Northern Gateway — have been selected by the state planning department for rezoning by the end of 2019. The first stage of the aerotropolis land-use plan also earmarked the “green spine” — the South Creek catchment area — for early development.

The core is sited on a 114-hectare parcel of land at North Bringelly that belongs to the Commonwealth, which makes it pretty straightforward. The ownership of the 344-hectare Northern Gate, described as “one of the largest single-owner land holdings” in the aerotropolis, is less clear. It once belonged to Roy and Ron Medich, who bought it from the CSIRO in 1996. But the Sydney Morning Herald’s Kate McClymont reported in August 2017 that the Mediches had sold it secretly to Chinese investors linked to Boyuan Holdings Ltd, which listed on the ASX in 2016. Roy Medich wouldn’t confirm the sale, rumoured to be worth $500 million, saying details were confidential; not long after, Ron was sentenced to thirty-nine years in prison for murdering his former business partner Michael McGurk.

It is indeed Boyuan Holdings that is proposing to develop the Northern Gateway site, along with its consortium partners Western Sydney University, logistics firm Logos, Scentre Group (which owns and operates Westfield in Australia and New Zealand), and the neurosurgeon Charlie Teo. According to an October 2018 report in the Urban Planner, Boyuan claimed the development would generate more than 55,700 jobs, an astonishing 28 per cent of the Western Sydney City Deal’s target of 200,000 jobs.

Another property group, Celestino, this one with a background in poultry farming, has already started building a Science Park on 280 hectares it owns at the Luddenham end of the aerotropolis zone. It values the project at $5 billion, and expects it to deliver 12,000 smart jobs, educate 10,000 students and provide more than 3000 homes.

Nearby Liverpool — an airport “edge” city, in the new lingo — is set to arrive too. It’s already sprouting high-rise apartment blocks, though it’s still a big country town, full of modest bungalows, and the new buildings don’t yet look at ease on the plains. As Watson points out, it’s hard to imagine senior executives living in the area anytime soon.

“Realistically, chief executives and general managers of corporations in industries such as these are unlikely to relocate to Badgerys Creek, nor travel there for regular meetings,” Watson writes in his Jobs for the West report. “These people currently live in Eastern, Northern and Central Sydney, and the expectation that they will move to South-Western Sydney, or regularly commute there, is far-fetched. It is far more likely that corporate Australia will continue to use Kingsford Smith Airport as their centrepiece, and leave WSA as a budget-airline and freight-airline centre.”

He elaborates for me: “I’m not being disparaging. I’m not saying that people are not genuine or that [the long-term planning for greater Sydney] isn’t a great initiative and [it’s] long overdue to have some of the money. It’s just that the impetus behind it is one that doesn’t offer genuine equality between the east and the west. Sydney’s west will always be the poor cousin.”

David Borger, a former mayor of Parramatta and one-time NSW government minister who now straddles political and corporate worlds as the Western Sydney director of the Sydney Business Chamber, has a completely different take. Sure, some of the planners’ ideas mightn’t get up — he is more convinced by the prospects for agribusiness, tourism and logistics in the aerotropolis than by the hopes for some other industries for which great expectations are frequently expressed. Sure, Western Sydney is “bloody hot” and that has to be dealt with head-on. His own view is that temperature-reduction targets should be built into development. If people don’t meet the target, they don’t get the funding.

He’s a glass-half-full guy. Five years ago no one wanted to hear about what was happening in Western Sydney, he says. “Now every second conversation on George Street is about Western Sydney.”

Parramatta will be “completely transformed” within five years, he tells me. The suburb’s 7000 square metres of office space will blow out to 1.2 million square metres within that time span, he says. Universities and professional firms are staking a claim in Parramatta’s downtown. The knowledge base is still in the centre of Sydney and out at Macquarie Park, in Sydney’s northwest, “but you’ve got to have ambition, you’ve got to put up a balloon and get excited about a better future.”

Even Parramatta writer Felicity Castagna, who like many long-time Western Sydney residents mourns the passing of the old streetscapes (what a friend of hers calls “steamrollers flattening the whole culture”), grants that the arts out west have never had it better. There’s a bigger and wealthier ratepayer base, for one thing. “A lot of people who once didn’t know where Western Sydney was are now forced to work here,” she says. “And artists and filmmakers and musicians and playwrights are moving into this area… There are jobs for artists, and bigger audiences for their work.”

During the Powerhouse controversy (still in play, with NSW opposition leader Michael Daley undertaking to retain the Powerhouse Museum at its Ultimo site while also spending $500 million on a new “cultural institution” in Parramatta), Castagna got pretty worked up. In the Sydney Review of Books, she wrote about the inability of people who live closer to the city to imagine Parramatta and its surrounds “as anything but a region that is full of aspirational working-class people with no particular claim to culture. We get so tired of being told this story about ourselves.” Her essay is titled “We Are Here and We Are Significant.”

If nothing else, that message has made it through the one-way glass. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Australia’s great urban experiment appeared first on Inside Story.

Ryan-Collins demonstrates that neoclassical economics has a blind spot when it comes to land. Unlike Adam Smith, Henry George and other early economists, most modern economic theory ignores the distinct features of land: we can’t make more of it, and it doesn’t depreciate. Instead, land is treated like any other form of capital, and the windfall gains that naturally accrue to landowners in a growing economy — generally referred to as “land rents” — have been allowed to grow.

Ryan-Collins also points out that the way most economics textbooks treat banks — as institutions taking the money of savers and lending it to willing borrowers — bears little resemblance to reality. Money is actually created when banks make loans — a point made recently by both the Bank of England and our own Reserve Bank. And so the real limit on credit is not savings but banks’ willingness to make loans (subject to the whims of regulators).

These two factors meant that the deregulation of banks in Australia and elsewhere led to an explosion in household debt that was channelled overwhelmingly into housing. The expanding credit created a bidding war, driving up land values, and those higher prices led to more demand for mortgage credit, which further pumped up land prices, and so on.

The Australian experience bears out much of Ryan-Collins’s thesis. Australia’s ratio of household debt to GDP has rocketed, from 70 per cent in the early 1990s to more than 190 per cent today. And house prices have followed suit — more than doubling in real terms over the past twenty years, mostly reflecting rising land values.

Many of Ryan-Collins’s policy prescriptions to tame housing markets echo those made by Grattan Institute in recent years: levy higher recurrent taxes on land, provide more secure rental tenancies, scale back the favourable treatment of housing provided by negative gearing and the capital gains discount, and include the family home in the age pension assets test.

But Ryan-Collins also pushes a more radical idea: a return to the Keynesian “golden period” where most countries adopted “credit guidance” — essentially controls on credit for mortgages. He cites approvingly the examples of Germany, Austria, South Korea, Japan and Singapore, where household debt has grown slowly and house prices have fallen relative to incomes since the 1990s.

There’s little doubt that restricting credit further would reduce house prices. With Australian banks clamping down on lending in response to the Hayne royal commission and tighter macro-prudential rules, and new housing construction reaching record levels, prices here have gone into reverse. And lower household debt reduces the risk of our banks getting into trouble, with all the economic chaos that would create.

But the book doesn’t engage seriously with the arguments for liberalising mortgage markets in the first place, and the costs of turning back.

Deregulating the banks meant that those who were not wealthy or well-connected could also obtain finance to purchase a home. Homebuyers were no longer restricted to borrowing only two or three times the value of their annual income. Greater access to credit may have bid up land values, but it’s also a big reason why most of us are better housed in larger and better-appointed homes than we have been in the past, even if we’re now paying more for the privilege.

Reining in mortgage credit would not make housing more affordable for everyone: people who could still obtain a mortgage would be winners because housing would be cheaper to buy; people who couldn’t get a loan would be the losers. And tighter credit controls could also raise the costs of credit, boosting banks’ profits at the expense of borrowers. The Productivity Commission found that recent macro-prudential rules restricting growth in investor and interest-only lending led to higher interest rates, boosting bank profits by $1 billion.

Such costs may be justified in an effort to secure more affordable housing. But Ryan-Collins’s argument would be much stronger if he’d addressed the potential downsides to his proposals.

And one wonders whether his objective of more affordable housing could be achieved without such collateral damage. Higher taxes on land could bring down house prices without constraining our ability to finance the construction of more and better housing, or hurting the economy.

But most importantly, his book neglects the potential for planning rules to boost housing supply, reducing rents and house prices. After all, while land may be scarce, housing doesn’t have to be if we’re willing to build denser cities. Instead of increased mortgage debt fuelling higher house prices, it could lead to more home building instead.

A recent study by the Reserve Bank of Australia estimated that land-use planning rules restricting what can be built, and where, added as much as $489,000 to the cost of the average house in Sydney. Other studies in the United States and New Zealand have found that restrictive planning rules inflate house prices.

Of course, land-use planning rules benefit other land users by preserving the amenity of existing residents or preventing increased congestion. But studies assessing the local costs and benefits of current rules generally conclude that the negative externalities are much smaller than the costs of regulation.

Recent Grattan Institute research shows that relaxing planning rules to allow more homes to be built near the centres of major cities where people want to live would make housing more affordable. Today’s record level of housing construction in Australia is the bare minimum needed to meet record levels of population growth driven by migration.

Past episodes of rising housing demand did not see such rapid increases in house prices. Rapid population growth in Australia in the 1950s was matched by record rates of home building. House prices barely moved. Similarly, the postwar expansion of mortgage credit in the United States led to more houses but not higher house prices. Perhaps the same would hold true today.

It’s no coincidence that many of the countries with the biggest declines in house prices in the past two decades, such as Japan, have also built the most new housing.

Why Can’t You Afford a Home? is a powerful call to arms to younger generations worried about worsening housing affordability. Ryan-Collins is right that radical change is needed to make housing more affordable: higher taxes on land, more secure tenancies and less favourable tax treatment of housing would all make a difference. But policymakers should be cautious about adopting all of his policy prescriptions without considering their costs, and should remember that they will also need to set planning rules to allow enough new building for a growing population. •

The post Why houses cost too much appeared first on Inside Story.

The information was released to Benson amid heated public debate about Australia’s rapidly growing population. Claims were being made that immigration was the primary cause of such social ills as escalating house prices, rising crime, falling wages and increased traffic congestion.

Yet home affairs minister Peter Dutton didn’t say that he’d cut the intake because the nation needed fewer migrants. He put it down to new integrity measures. Apparently, fewer visas were issued because his department had been scrutinising applications more closely to exclude “fraudulent claims” by those who sought entry based on exaggerated qualifications, sham relationships and the like.

Without further detail, expert observers found this tough talk unconvincing. The recent release of the official report on the migration program throws more light on what has been going on, though it still leaves many questions unanswered.

According to the report, the number of migration applications finalised was “only marginally lower” than in the previous year, but “shifting risks and an increased focus on integrity” resulted in “the number of visa refusals and withdrawals increasing significantly in 2017–18.” Decoded from the bureaucratese, this means that the department processed roughly the same number of visa applications but knocked back a much larger proportion of them — in fact, a whopping 46 per cent more than last year. As a result, far fewer visas were issued overall.

While this news is consistent with Dutton’s claim that he has “tightened up the eligibility criteria,” it does not adequately explain why so many visas were denied last year in particular. Had the department been approving dodgy applications previously? This is what the report says:

There is now a higher proportion of high-risk cases across our programs, with applications lodged by individuals with complex immigration histories, including extensive travel histories, unsuccessful visa applications and/or periods of being unlawful in Australia. These require increased scrutiny, including more character and bona fides checks to ensure that the Australian community is protected.

Why were there more “high-risk cases” than in 2016–17, for instance? And was a decision made to prioritise the processing of these more questionable claims in order to weed them out of the system? This is feasible, since skilled visa applications are not processed in the order in which they are lodged — first come, first served — but are prioritised in a manner “that the minister considers appropriate.” Setting priorities in this way would not only fit with Dutton’s security-minded approach to immigration but also serve to produce a politically convenient cut in the migrant intake, without going through the contentious process of revising planning levels set in the budget.

But if the minister did direct his department to focus first on potentially problematic applications, he has not made this public.

According to Home Affairs, the top processing priority is the Regional Sponsored Migration Scheme, or RSMS. This makes sense given the stress that prime minister Scott Morrison and former immigration minister Alan Tudge (now the man in charge of cities, infrastructure and population) have put on the need to get skilled migrants out of big cities — Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane in particular.

But another curious aspect of the data in the report is that only 6221 RSMS visas were issued in 2017–18, a sharp fall from the previous year and only about half the number issued in 2015–16. While new applications in this category dropped last year, the number waiting in the pipeline rose by 21 per cent to more than 22,000.

So, we have a government that says it’s determined to send skilled migrants to regional areas yet slashes the number of visas issued in the stream of the migration program that enables this to happen. This defies logic. The report states that the RSMS program was “particularly impacted” by integrity issues without giving further information about why this would be the case. Still, if the RSMS is the top priority, then why not approve more of the applications that do pass muster?

On the available evidence, the government seems to be allowing its most significant existing regional migration option to wither on the vine in advance of bringing in its proposed and much-hyped alternative — a provisional visa that would require migrants to live in regional areas for up to five years before gaining permanent residence.

Despite repeated suggestions that he is about to “unveil” this plan, Alan Tudge’s speeches, whether as immigration minister or population minister, remain disappointingly short on detail. Meanwhile, he continues to recycle his unsubstantiated claim that “87 per cent of all skilled migrants are going to Sydney and Melbourne.”

The minister has offered no support for this “fact.” The report on last year’s migration program shows that 32 per cent of skilled migrants intended to settle in New South Wales and 25 per cent intended to settle in Victoria. The share of these two states relative to others has been increasing over time, but even if all these migrants went only to Sydney and Melbourne — which is improbable — the combined total of 57 per cent still falls well short of the minister’s figure of 87 per cent.

Perhaps the minister has evidence that these migrants will eventually wind up in Sydney and Melbourne in the years to come. If so, it would be helpful to know the time frame involved and see the data that supports this conclusion.

Partner visas, meanwhile, make up the vast bulk of the family stream of the migration program. Last year, Home Affairs granted 8000 fewer of them than in the previous year. The fact that the report provides no explanation seems odd, given that more than 80,000 applicants are waiting in the queue. Did more rigorous checks really detect such an increase in fake relationships? Or was this program cut for some other, unstated reason?

Prolonged delays for partner visas can be distressing, and the uncertainty can affect major life decisions such as buying a house or having a child. Along with child visas, partner visas are listed as the top processing priority within the family stream. Since the interests of Australian citizens and permanent residents are at stake, as well as those of migrants, it would be troubling indeed if administrative measures were being used to slow the rate at which partner visas are granted in order to deliver a de facto cut to migration numbers.

Finally, the department’s more stringent approach to permanent migration appears to have two other consequences. With rejected applicants lodging appeals against the department’s decisions, it has probably increased the number of people in Australia who are on bridging visas. (The number of migrants in Australia on bridging visas rose 28 per cent year on year, from 137,000 in June 2017 to 176,000 in June 2018.) And the time visa applicants must wait before getting a decision from the department has blown out. In April 2017, for example, three-quarters of all applicants who applied for the RSMS visa from within Australia could expect an outcome within nine months. Now it is fifteen months. Processing times have also increased in the family stream. In April 2017, three-quarters of permanent partner visas (subclass 100) were finalised within thirteen months; now the wait is seventeen months.

If Home Affairs is required to be more rigorous in assessing visa applications, then perhaps it needs more resources to process them promptly. Or if fewer visas are being granted because the minister wants to use administrative measures to cut migration for political reasons, then perhaps he should own up to this.

The failure — or refusal — to speak plainly and honestly about immigration decision-making only adds to growing public distrust of government and the democratic process. •

The post Migration by numbers appeared first on Inside Story.

Earlier in 2017 the Old Fitz Hotel down the hill in Woolloomooloo had been the venue for the first (and, so far, only) production of Louis Nowra’s This Much Is True. Though the play is the third part of Nowra’s Lewis trilogy, following the acclaimed Cosi and Summer of the Aliens, it was a perfect match for the hotel’s tiny basement theatre. Nowra depicted his local drinking mates in all their eccentricity and neediness, and after the show you might have found the author himself drinking at a table in the bar upstairs.

As theatre blogger Kevin Jackson remarked, Nowra’s play recalls the Australian naturalist plays of the 1950s in both subject and style, depicting a male underclass battling drugs, madness and poverty. It seems part of a wave of nostalgia for white inner-city poverty that pulls us back to the years before the poor moved to the outer suburbs. Despite decades of change, the ’Loo remains a pocket of extremes where film stars can be seen lining up for coffee after a morning run near the early risers from the Matthew Talbot Hostel. The hostel, along with the public housing near the Old Fitz, ensures that some of the atmosphere of poverty remains, but you have to wonder how long that will last.

A few months ago Belvoir St Theatre added Pyrmont to the list of theatre’s lost and lamented inner-city slums. Alana Valentine’s The Sugar House confronted the voracious building developments in the old industrial suburb and the loss of a human side of the city. Her story of a family of Irish-Australian Catholics making their haphazard way up the social ladder from the petty criminal underclass reminded a middle-class audience how recently their own family’s arrival in the professional classes may have been. The feisty grandmother at the play’s centre fought to protect her family, struggling to make a living and keep everyone out of the hands of the law. Her granddaughter grew up to become a successful lawyer, of course, inspecting one of the stylish apartments in The Sugar House, once the refinery where her grandfather worked and now an expensive warehouse-style block in one of Sydney’s most desirable suburbs.

This play, too, drew on the staging traditions of kitchen-sink realism, recalling Peter Kenna’s A Hard God and even Séan O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, with the central figure of the tough, intelligent and self-sacrificing matriarch played with her usual conviction and energy by Kris McQuade (who does tend to be typecast in these roles). Valentine tried to balance the simple moral commitment of the grandmother with the more complex political understanding of the educated granddaughter, but McQuade’s powerful performance suggested that the lost working class may have been more admirable than its educated descendants.

And so, when the Sydney Theatre Company’s The Harp in the South opened in September, it seemed like too much of a good thing — or, too much of a nostalgic thing. This ambitious two-part adaptation by Kate Mulvany of Ruth Park’s postwar novels was staged at the Roslyn Packer Theatre, itself built on the site of a pair of warehouses that once serviced the wharves across the road. Not far from the theatre, public housing tenants are being cleared from their homes and, over the road, the wharves have been transformed into some of the most luxurious apartments in Sydney. Billed as “a portrait of Sydney as it once was,” the play romanticises the old slum life in those Surry Hills terrace houses that are now worth millions.

Some of the people in the audiences for these plays have no doubt paid a great deal to live in Surry Hills, Pyrmont, Potts Point, Darlinghurst or Millers Point. Where I live, in the old slum suburb of Erskineville, the nearby industrial estate has become half a dozen apartment blocks in a matter of a few years. When I moved in, as one of the new professional apartment dwellers, the locals were still a mix of old people, migrants, Aborigines, homeless men, eccentrics and university students. In half an hour, I can walk up to the housing commission towers of Redfern and still see some of these people on the streets.

Traces of the Erskineville slums remain in the old terraces (some of them so tiny that it is hard to believe a family could ever have lived there) and the pocket parks that the Danish ballerina Hélène Kirsova set up in the 1940s when she noticed the local street urchins had nowhere to play. We’re all proud of the suburb’s history — the local Labor Party branch runs a history walk every couple of years, popular among genteel contemporary residents, that recalls violent home evictions during the Depression, the Catholic missions to the poor, and the creation of the “opportunity school.”

Theatre companies and playwrights seem to have picked up a widespread nostalgia among middle-class Sydneysiders for the suburbs that disappeared under the onslaught of their own rise in prosperity. When the first of Ruth Park’s novels was published in 1948, Sydney was suffering a major postwar, post-Depression housing crisis. Park interviewed people in the slums to produce a prime example of the kind of writing that Patrick White later derided as the “dreary, dun-coloured offspring of journalistic realism.” Her depiction of poverty was greeted with shock and horror by the good citizens of Sydney and was one of the factors that led to slum clearances in Surry Hills — and the building of those public housing towers that still stand close to Belvoir St Theatre.

The STC production is a long way from dun-coloured journalism, with the first play bright with ensemble activity and music — so much so that you almost expect it to become full-blown musical theatre. With clever staging and a large and disciplined cast, the production brings to life the novel’s soap-opera narrative of hard times, with its range of stereotypes and token figures: the good-hearted brothel madam, the quiet but generous Chinese shopkeeper, the solitary Aboriginal man making his way. There’s an unsettling figure of a deceitful Jewish boy, too. Bruce Spence, Heather Mitchell and other familiar performers relish the opportunity to show their virtuosity, with Mitchell astonishing in the Kris McQuade, Irish mother part. (Mitchell more often plays upper-class characters like A Place to Call Home’s Prudence Swanson.) The second play, however, stretched the idea too far, exposing the weaknesses of this sentimental material. The afflictions of Dolour Darcy accumulated and the music was reduced to repetition of the dirge-like “The Last Rose of Summer.”

No doubt the second play was intended to remind us that poverty is not a song-and-dance show, and to give a more overtly feminist perspective, with the nuns bowing to the priest’s power and evidence that charming Irishmen like Hughie Darcy can be feckless and generally useless to their women. Yet the warm response to the play could hardly amount to outrage at current poverty, when Sydney’s poor mainly have moved out to the fringe suburbs.

Perhaps, in a kind of remember-where-you-came-from moment, the STC was reminding its well-heeled patrons that they might be the descendants of such people (like the contemporary characters in The Sugar House). But I had the uncomfortable feeling it was celebrating the Old Australia, when the Irish immigrants were the poor and white people dominated society from bottom to top. It was a reminder of the elite nature of Australian theatre, with its blindness to popular culture and the changing life outside. There are still pockets of public housing in the inner city and the city’s homeless problem is difficult to ignore. But the inner city is overwhelmingly the province of those able to manage a hefty mortgage. Does a romantic slum past add to the pleasures of living there?

It is not only the subject matter of these plays that gives pause for thought. Their invocation of the theatre styles of the past seems to reflect a nostalgia for the kind of drama that flourished before television. As it happens, The Harp in the South has been produced twice for television — as a single play on the BBC as long ago as 1964, and by the ABC as a miniseries in 1986, with Ruth Park herself as one of the writers. The Australian director of the British version, Alan Burke, even wrote a musical version in the 1960s, but he couldn’t get it staged; he wrote the script for the musical Lola Montez and has the distinction of writing the book for Australia’s first original television musical about convicts and officers, Pardon Miss Westcott, broadcast by ATN7 in 1959.

What would be today’s equivalent of Park’s novel? SBS’s Struggle Street documentaries about the poor in Western Sydney and outer suburbs of Melbourne and Brisbane seem the nearest equivalent. Like Park’s novels, they faced the criticism that they offered up the sufferings of the poor for the entertainment of wealthier observers. Maybe the ABC’s Redfern Now series might be a better fit, with its stories about Aboriginal families struggling in the inner city, though it, too, drew on British social realist traditions. One thing television does so much better than the stage is portray material detail, particularly material deprivation, and so appeal directly to viewers’ sense of injustice.

At the Hayes, the Old Fitz and Belvoir St, the small performance spaces forced the audience into close proximity with the actors, to share at least their physical struggle to perform if not the material conditions they were portraying. The STC production explores the theatrical possibilities of the stage, dazzling us with the actors’ shifts in character and the movement of a large cast, and contents itself with mere gestures towards the material conditions of poverty. The Roslyn Packer Theatre calls for larger movements and bigger performances, and the STC’s production turns poverty in Surry Hills into bright entertainment.

Perhaps the musical is the ideal form for these nostalgic depictions of the past. Darlinghurst Nights was a delight, and Madeleine St John’s Women in Black had already become a successful musical, as Ladies in Black, before Bruce Beresford’s film finally made it to the cinemas a few weeks ago. You can enjoy the sweet simplicities of the film knowing that David Jones is still there, despite being taken over by a South African company that plans to redevelop the site. It appears that the lower floors will be preserved, sacred to our memories of shopping in one of Sydney’s last palaces of consumerism. Some developers understand the value of nostalgia. •

The post Going back to where we came from appeared first on Inside Story.

“Cholets,” combines “cholos,” the racially charged epithet applied to indigenous Bolivians, with the word “chalets.” Mamani — himself from the Aymara people, one of Bolivia’s largest indigenous groups — finds the term offensive. He prefers to describe his work as “Andean new architecture.”

Mamani’s architecture emerged at around the same time that Evo Morales, an indigenous Aymara former coca grower, was elected Bolivian president in 2006. The country’s indigenous people — historically humiliated and racially abused — occupy a central position in Morales’s political project, and his period in office, which continues to this day, has given the indigenous community a renewed sense of pride.

During those years, Aymara people have migrated to El Alto from rural areas in increasing numbers, engaging in trade and accumulating considerable wealth. “They are transporters, merchants, businesspeople who have transformed El Alto into a space of commercial surpluses, accumulation of wealth and investment,” sociologist Pablo Mamani (no relation to Freddy), from El Alto Public University, tells me. “They are the clients of Freddy,” he says, wealthy enough to pay for the architect’s work, which ranges in price from US$200,000 to US$1 million or more. “These wealthy individuals have become a new Aymara bourgeoisie for whom the architectonic work of Freddy Mamani has become a cultural and economic artefact.”

Or, as the architect himself puts it, “I come from that culture. I know their needs and their experiences.” He is aware he has become a role model for the Aymara society. “I take care how I behave,” he tells me.

Despite his international accolades, the fifty-three-year-old is shy and softly spoken. Back in his hometown of Catavi, in Bolivia’s southwestern tin-mining region of Potosí, his father was a builder and his mother a weaver. As a child, he began his “building education” fashioning mud into small-scale cities, roads, squares and streets. He moved to El Alto when he was fifteen. His career as an architect had its genesis in a period working as a builder’s assistant before he enrolled in civil engineering at the Bolivian University of Informatics.

Mamani’s distinctive style emerged in the early 2000s after a client suggested a building incorporating Aymara symbols. “I thought to start using symbols from the Tiahuanaco culture because I identify myself with this culture, I feel proud of it,” he tells me. As an architecture style, he says, it reflects “a particular lifestyle that seeks to show all its economic power and cultural heritage.”

The Alteños now have an architectural identity, says Freddy Mamani. Antonio Castillo

All of his buildings follow the same logic. The ground floor is commercial, designed to generate income for its owners. The second and third floors are also commercially oriented, and are often rented out as professional offices. Then, on the top floor, the famous “chalet” rises, as close as possible to the hanaq pacha, or upper world, though with practical benefits too. “We make the villas above because of the weather,” Mamani says. “The city of El Alto is cold and we try to take advantage of the light,” as well as the view of the snow-peaked Illimani Mountain. He tells me that the buildings are an “urban version of the adobe rural houses that once hosted the animals on the ground floor.”

For Mamani, “El Alto is the city I’ve grown up in and I’ve seen it growing up.” For many years it had “a very depressing and monotonous image,” and he wanted to “give it life and fill it with colours.” The Alteños — as the people who live in El Alto are known — are “entrepreneurial, inventive, and hard workers.” Now, he says, they have an “architectural identity.”

Eighty per cent of El Alto’s population is Aymara. It is a chaotic and gritty place, its streets largely unpaved and dusty. Criminal activity is high and the homicide rate is above the Latin American average, but it is also one of Bolivia’s industrial and commercial centres. “El Alto is the socioeconomic centre of the Aymara society,” says El Alto Public University’s Pablo Mamani. This commercial drive stemmed from the Aymara’s historical distrust of the Bolivian political elite. “They don’t depend on the state for their subsistence.”

Osvaldo Ticona, one of Freddy Mamani’s clients, is among those who don’t trust the Bolivian political elite. He has accumulated a small fortune making leather shoes, which he and his wife crisscross the country to sell. An Aymara, he and his family moved to El Alto fifteen years ago.

Ticona’s words — like his wealth — are used sparingly. He doesn’t want to tell me how much he spent on his five-storey building, revealing only that it was expensive. “It is the quality of the material I wanted,” he says. “I wanted good iron, you know — good and expensive material.” As soon as he saw one of Freddy Mamani’s buildings, “I wanted one.”

Sitting under a striking ceiling in his building, the Rey Otan Palace on El Alto’s 1st of May Avenue, Ticona tells me it was “an investment for my children and for my old age.” The building’s facade uses stone of different sizes and shades to emulate an Aymara Andean weave. But like most of Mamani’s work, and despite the decoration, it is essentially a “functional” structure. The ground floor is occupied by a general store — “At first we thought to have a restaurant there, but my wife was a bit tired so we opted to open a grocery shop” — and the upper levels are taken up with function rooms. The building is “the envy of the neighbours,” says Ticona. “But you have to be humble.”

Overly decorative? The interior of Osvaldo Ticona’s Mamani-designed Rey Otan Palace. Antonio Castillo

El Alto boasts around 120 of Mamani’s buildings, with a dozen more in the making. (Another sixty projects have been completed elsewhere in Bolivia, and a further twelve — including works in Brazil, Chile and Peru — are on the drawing board.) The largest number can be seen in the Villa Adela area, in the city’s third municipal district. A walk down the Avenida Bolivia, for instance, reveals the extravagant Imperio del Rey (Empire of the King), which belongs to the Quisberth Flores, one of the wealthiest families in El Alto.

“Since I started building there are certain sectors in El Alto that have criticised these buildings,” Mamani tells me. “[They say] that it’s only the elite who has access to my work. I don’t see it that way.” He has also made “low-cost housing of single-floor houses,” he says. He believes that the media in particular has overemphasised the larger and more expensive houses he has built. “Anyone can access my work.”

He looks pleased, and perhaps a bit flustered, when I tell him he is being described informally as “the Andean Gaudí.” He tells me he admires Gaudí — “he has made monumental architecture” — but points out that, unlike the Spaniard, he has never set foot in a university architecture school. Instead, he finds inspiration in the culture and ruins of Tiahuanaco, the ancient indigenous Andean society, creating a style that goes against the conventions of institutionalised architecture. “I rely on the indigenous fabrics and the geometric iconography of these ruins. For me, El Alto is like a modern Tiahuanaco.”

Mamani uses traditional indigenous symbols — the condor, for example — and green and yellow, the colours of prosperity and hope in Andean tradition. His baroque constructions feature straight lines, diagonal arrangements and geometric shapes — such as the chakana, or Andean cross — and incorporate the rich colourful palette of the aguayo, the piece of embroidered cloth that indigenous women wrap around their shoulders and drape down their back to carry anything from babies to shopping.

Surprisingly, he also draws inspiration from the 1980s American television series The Transformers. Or perhaps that’s not so surprising: his buildings certainly evoke those mighty robots able to change themselves into all sorts of shapes.

According to Javier Bedoya, who teaches architecture at the Bolivian San Pablo Catholic University, “Mamani has generated a new mixed housing typology that has no major concern for structural or spatial systems, prioritising simply the exterior image and the interior decoration as a symbolic system.” For Bedoya, Mamani’s work reflects “the semiotic architecture of the sixties and seventies.”

A different tradition: one of Freddy Mamani’s buildings under construction in El Alto. Antonio Castillo

Architectural historian Elisabetta Andreoli describes Mamani’s style as “Neo-Andean.” Mamani, she writes, “does not work with the aesthetics of the Bolivian elite, which is why they consider it picturesque and not very serious. Few understand this trend can be part of the identity of this country.”

Not everybody is impressed by Mamani’s architecture. There are those who reject it because it strikes them as kitsch, or overly decorative. Frederick Cooper, former dean of the architecture school at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, says Mamani’s work lacks architectural value and rests on a decorative form, “product of the educational crisis in Bolivia.”

Mamani isn’t bothered by his critics. “For the academia my architecture is somehow iconoclastic and so they don’t accept it,” he says. “I’m fine that I’m not accepted by the establishment as long as the Aymara community accept my work.” Those who criticise him “don’t understand our culture has a different tradition.”

Mamani, who sometimes refers to himself in the third person, tells me that “the architecture of Freddy Mamani is entering a new era.” His largest project so far has been the Prince Alexander Events Hall, designed for Alejandro “Chino” Quispe, which opened in El Alto in June 2014. This massive building includes a soccer field, two apartments, and two lavish function rooms for weddings and concerts. Now, he is building the first hotel in El Alto for “clients who are very young and are investing a lot.”

He has also been working on an installation for the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris. “We are going to do a replica of my work in El Alto inside the foundation,” he says. “Personally it is one of the most important works I have done.” It will open in October.

“Freddy Mamani will always be centred in El Alto,” he tells me. And it is here that he will develop another project, a “Freddy Mamani art school,” where he will pass on his architectural vision to young people. “We are going to teach innovation with construction tools, painting and how to utilise traditional material. I see it as a school of innovation.”

Through his architecture, he tells me, “I wanted to recover a society ignored, the Aymara society.” His buildings are not mere physical constructions. “They are part of a newly recovered sense of pride among indigenous people and the recovery of an Andean identity from historical neglect, humiliation and racial discrimination.” Mamani’s Andean architecture is, as he says, “a form of protest to show who we are and what we want.” ●

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A few hundred metres away at McDonald’s, two large central tables are occupied by a group of teenagers whose recent origins lie in Africa. Only one of them is a girl, and the boys are jockeying for her attention. Their bantu knots make their heads seem knobbly. They touch each other’s heads and punch each other’s arms. The girl shows off her tight braids. The boys are in tracksuit pants and hoodies, and they are very tall and very dark.

They swarm outside, and take turns to ride a hoverboard around the carpark. Customers coming and going from the restaurant have to navigate around them. Snatches of conversation float by: it’s fuck this and fuck that. Someone messages them from Werribee station and suggests they catch the bus over there. Suddenly one of the boys starts chasing the girl around the table inside, everyone laughing. A bag of chips and a thickshake go skittering across the floor.

It’s here on the westernmost edge of Melbourne, according to last summer’s headlines, that Australia fractured. The Australian described it as a “summer of hate.” The reporting of this supposed crisis took in Tarneit and other suburbs across Melbourne, roping together terrifying home invasions in a number of suburbs, a party out of control in the southwestern suburb of Werribee, and violence thirty-three kilometres east on St Kilda beach. What each incident had in common were “African youths.”

Writing in the Herald Sun in December, Andrew Bolt used offences ranging from a central-city mugging to an attempted murder to argue that “integration” has clear limits “when the intake is of poorly educated people from a tribal and warlike culture.” It was Tarneit, according to the Herald Sun, that best symbolised the state’s “youth gang crisis.” Nine’s A Current Affair screened shocking CCTV footage of young black men beating up one of their number in a local street. Locals, said the two outlets, were living in fear of violent, rampaging African gangs.

At the dawn of the new year, home affairs minister Peter Dutton weighed in with a blast for the state’s Labor government, which faces an election later this year. He claimed that people in Melbourne were scared to dine out at night because they were followed home by gangs. Prison sentences were a joke, he said, and the police were acting on “politically correct” instructions from the state government. Gang violence was out of control and growing.

Premier Daniel Andrews and the Victoria Police denied there was a crisis but responded as if there were. Andrews said crime was under control but then went on television to condemn thuggery and promise firm action. The police rejected the idea of “gangs” but set up a taskforce of African community leaders.

People in the inner suburbs protested on social media at Dutton’s apparent racism and lampooned any suggestion that they were afraid to go out at night. They loved going to restaurants. They even went to African restaurants. But, for once, the inner suburbs — those safe Labor seats populated by the knowledge class — were completely irrelevant to this furore.

Police speak to young locals outside the Ecoville Community Park in Tarneit on 1 January this year. David White Photography/Newspix

It was a long silly season last summer: no catastrophic bushfires, no floods, and the Sydney-to-Hobart yacht race passed without mishap. Perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the media discerned another kind of newsworthy trouble and made the journey west to Tarneit.

Four months later, after the summer of hate had disappeared from the headlines, I went to Tarneit and spent many hours there at all times of the day and night. I was looking for trouble.

To get to Tarneit from the city you drive west on a highway that runs swift and wide between concrete sound barriers. Along the broad, walled-off river of traffic, trucks have left strips of shredded tyres like hard black lizard skins. Turn off after twenty-five kilometres and the first buildings you see are supersized warehouses and factories that dwarf the people who work in them.

Massive billboards rise out of abandoned farming land, offering three-bedroom house-and-land packages from $435,000 (or, as the local council’s website puts it, 27,800 smashed avocadoes). Earthmovers perch dinosaur-like over the skeletons of houses under construction, pine frames awaiting plasterboard, cladding and render. There’s a mosque, and a new grammar school. A plain brick house serves as an evangelical church; a pub-and-pokies palace offers a bland rendered wall to passing traffic.

This is the City of Wyndham, the fastest-growing local government area in Victoria, and one of the fastest-growing in the country. Thirteen babies are born each day in this sprawling municipality, and more than 13,000 extra people move here each year. In just five years, the population has grown by 37 per cent. It is Australia under construction, and Tarneit is its newest product.

From the new Tarneit Central shopping centre, opened just six months ago, the skyscrapers of the city are visible across the ancient lava plain. They are the distant point against which everything — housing prices, commuting times, job opportunities, visibility and power — is calibrated. Opposite the shopping centre, the Tarneit railway station looks like a spaceship landed in the paddocks. Here you can catch a fast regional train to the city for the same price as a suburban fare. On the opposite corner is the new Julia Gillard Library, and just down the way the promisingly named Prosperity Street travels past warehouses and piles of earth before ending at a farm gate.

The new suburb spreads out on the other three sides of the shopping centre. Each spanking new house has a little portico relieving its box-like features. The gardens are newly planted, and some of the neatest lawns, on closer inspection, are astroturf. There hasn’t been time to put down roots, not only because of migration but also because of stretched lives.

This is not a particularly poor suburb. On indices of social disadvantage it is in line with the rest of Melbourne, and it is ahead of Wyndham as a whole and several of its surrounding areas. The unemployment rate is slightly higher than Melbourne as a whole, but so too is the workforce participation — those in work or looking for work. Almost all families have two incomes and most people over the age of fifteen are employed full time, most commonly in healthcare, social assistance, transport, warehousing and retailing. These are the shift workers who service the city and look after the ageing. The cars start early in the morning and late at night as people travel to work, dropping their children at childcare centres at all hours.

If you’re on the street in the evening or the early morning you can be startled by garage doors opening suddenly, triggered by remote. A car appears and drives in, the door closes, the house lights up and the blinds are drawn. The street is empty again.

On Poplar Boulevard, a few hundred metres away from the shopping centre, a house has been vandalised or has met with some other misadventure. The portico has been stove in and the render is lying in sheets, the structure revealed. The walls are made of foam blocks held together by render and welded rods. One knock, and half the house is collapsing.

Half a century ago, the folk singer and activist Pete Seeger sang a song about the development of suburbia.

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes, all the same…

But that was a song sung by a white middle-class man about the white middle class — a satire about conformity. This is different. Apart from the ticky-tacky of rampant property development, and behind it the cold, hard calculations of cost, price, profit and compromised building standards, it could hardly be more different.

More than half of the residents here were born overseas, and they come from 162 different countries. Combine that with the fact that it has the youngest population in Victoria — a median age of just thirty — and it means almost all the adults and most of the youth are new Australians. Fewer than half of the residents here speak English at home. The dominant ethnic group is not Africans or Sudanese, but Indians, who make up about 23 per cent of the population. After Australians and British migrants, Filipinos come next, at 4 per cent of the population, closely followed by Chinese. From there the ethnicities are more or less even in proportions — Italians, Irish, Maori, Maltese, Punjabi. Sudanese are the biggest African group and well down the list of population groups, at just under 2 per cent, or about 500 people at the last census.

In January, in the midst of the “summer of hate,” a scuffle at the Tarneit shopping centre appeared on the Daily Mail’s website as “the latest gang flare up” involving African teenagers. “EXCLUSIVE: Police SPAT ON and Abused as Officers Arrest African Teenagers Outside a Shopping Centre in Melbourne’s West in Broad Daylight — in Latest Gang Flare Up” read the headline. Pictures showed black youths being restrained by police.

Two days after the article was published, the Victoria Police executive director of media and corporate communications, Merita Tabain, wrote a confidential email to the editors of Melbourne’s main media outlets expressing concern that aggressive behaviour by journalists might “exacerbate the current tensions.” She used the incident at the Tarneit shopping centre as an example.

The incident, she said, had been provoked by the photographer’s decision to “move in to take close-up photos of a group of African teenagers socialising.” The teenagers, she went on, “had been doing nothing of public interest prior to the photographer’s decision to move in and take the photos and [the group] reacted to the photographer and what he was doing. This led to police being called in and a scuffle ensued in which police were spat on and arrests were made.” The photographer had apologised for provoking the incident, Tabain reported, but the published article makes no reference to this.

Today, on a warm weekend in April, the most noticeable people gathering outside Tarneit Central shopping centre are men in immaculate suits and gleaming shoes. They are real estate agents. On any weekend, they are among the most prominent people in Tarneit, erecting open-for-inspection signs in seconds and ferrying young families — women in headscarves, men in turbans, all kinds — around the quiet streets.

Inside, the centre is gleaming. The signs in the shops speak of lean meats and fresh vegetables. Anglo faces are in the minority. Many women wear headscarves. It seems as though every shopper has a toddler at foot or in a pusher, and as though every second woman is pregnant. If this is Australia under construction, then it is possible to feel proud. It is busy, diverse, moderately prosperous and harmonious.

If it differs from older shopping centres in established suburbs, it is in the degree of sociability. Dutton worried about people going to restaurants, but the truth is there aren’t many restaurants in Tarneit, other than the fast-food chains. There are cafes in this shopping centre, and they are almost empty. People come here, do their shopping, and leave.

Two cops stroll through in high-vis vests, with truncheons, pepper spray and all the other accoutrements of the modern police officer on the beat. They are looking at their mobile phones as they walk. If this place was not flat, bright and neat, they would surely trip over. They could hardly be more relaxed.

What do people here think about the media attention their suburb received over summer? Is this a safe place to live?

A couple living on the improbably named Camelot Drive, about a kilometre from the shopping centre, arrived from the Philippines five years ago. She works in aged care. He drives a truck. Their children are cared for by an enormous new childcare centre a suburb away. In the mornings they wake early to juggle shifts and responsibilities. Their evenings are spent inside, sleeping, watching television or Skyping with relatives in the Philippines.

Australians, they say, don’t know how lucky they are. Here there are no shootings in the street, no armed war on drugs, no homes lacking toilets or running water. The gangs? There were some teenagers who got out of control. It’s quiet now.

Mr and Mrs Fletcher are doing their shopping at Tarneit Gardens. They have lived in Wyndham all their lives, and they don’t like the way it is changing. Chief among their complaints is traffic congestion, the amount of time it takes to reach the highway from home. But they are also concerned by all the different groups, and the feeling that the newcomers don’t socialise. They are living adjacent to, rather than with, these new Australians. And the African youths — yes, they are frightening.

A short walk away, in Rippleside Terrace, estate agent Rajesh Kumar has a seven-year-old townhouse for sale, a “stunning” residence “enjoying a lakeside view” over what the maps call Sayers Drain, an agricultural drainage channel now made the centre of a big, grassy park. The townhouse is one of the oldest residential buildings in Tarneit and is part of a high-density, two-storey cluster. The sign says it’s “perfect for executives, busy families or investors.”

The sellers are a Chinese family with young children looking to move to something larger. Is there ever any trouble in the park over the road, I ask? Kumar tells me that the park is fine. Tarneit is fine. Then, unprompted, he mentions Ecoville Community Park. The trouble, he says, was over there. Perhaps I read about it in the papers. The African teenagers wrecked it. “But now there are police there all the time. I live in Tarneit. Tarneit is fine.”

All human stories take place in a landscape. All are partly about land — how we use it, usurp it, mould and are moulded by it.

The focus of media attention in Tarneit over summer was on one piece of land, Ecoville Community Park: the “heart of darkness,” as one media report described it, the “symbol of the state’s youth gang crisis” according to the Herald Sun. This very local story made it into the Australian’s national affairs section: “A gang of youths have vandalised the community centre and park at a new Victorian estate, terrorising families with nightly crime sprees… The youths, mostly of African appearance, have trashed the Ecoville Park in Tarneit…” And on it went, linking the vandalism in this park with the out-of-control party in St Kilda, and an assault of a police officer at another western-suburban shopping centre.

Responding to the incident, premier Daniel Andrews vowed that those responsible for the damage would feel “the full force of the law.” The Australian’s editorial writers weren’t reassured. “It should be abundantly clear by now that a zero tolerance approach that puts the public interest first is sorely needed to bring order back to Melbourne’s suburbs,” said the paper. “Yes, most of the offenders are young. But they are old enough to accost shopkeepers with knives and shotguns, and commit armed robberies and indecent assaults, cause serious injuries and endanger lives, and kick police officers in the face…”

The paper’s coverage was illustrated with pictures of the Ecoville community centre showing broken windows, bashed-in walls, torn-apart furniture and walls scrawled with graffiti. “Like many other incidents in Victoria,” the paper concluded, “the young Africans’ recent rampages are the work of a small percentage of immigrants from less civilised societies, where violence is routine. But their backgrounds are no reason for authorities to turn a blind eye to their criminality.”

The park has its own story, which began back when the Ecoville housing estate was first conceived by the Resimax Group. The company’s website still carries the advertisement for housing sales, in which the park’s “community pavilion” features prominently beneath an impossibly blue sky. Soaring white sails shelter a sparkling building:

The architecture of this community pavilion creates a strong statement about the progressive nature of the municipality it belongs to. The designers have embraced the ideals of eco-sustainability with a contemporary approach to outdoor establishments. The design is intended to create a landmark feature and to become a beacon for future property developments in Australia.

Today, driving past the little boxes to the community centre, the white sails soar over the houses, but they are grubby and scrawled with graffiti. The skatepark, the tennis court and the basketball court are strewn with rubbish. The grass is unmown. The community centre is boarded up. But young people are clearly still gathering in what the developers grandly described as an “amphitheatre” — a neglected sunken area in front of the community centre.

What went wrong? The story emerges from the minutes of the Wyndham City Council. Once the suburb was built and the houses sold, the park was abandoned by the developer. Officially it belonged to the owners’ corporation, to which all the recently arrived owners of the surrounding houses belonged. It was private space, which meant council had no power or responsibility for its upkeep. But the owners are owners only in law, not as a lived reality. They do not gather, they do not associate. The owners’ corporation is run by a group that specialises in such things, based far away in Port Melbourne. When council ordered clean-ups, the owners’ corporation complied. But now the owners’ corporation has asked council to take over the park. Council has refused.

The park was a modern-day folly, a developer’s marketing device. It has no part in council’s open-space plans. It is too small to be a “district park” and not modest enough to be cheap to maintain. It was in even worse condition back in summer, says Wyndham councillor Kim McAliney, who holds council’s portfolio for community safety. When the “African gangs” crisis hit the headlines in summer, she took it personally. She visited Ecoville Park and was “not happy.” An abandoned car body was sitting in the middle, rubbish was everywhere and the community centre was wrecked. It might still look dreadful, she acknowledges, but it is better than it was.

Some of those who hung around the park and caused the trashing were certainly Sudanese youth, she says, but the problem was longstanding. The vandalism had been happening for at least eighteen months. Of course young people gathered, says McAliney. There were toilets, water, electricity and free wi-fi. And, of course, the Sudanese stuck out. “They are tall. They are thin. Shopkeepers worry when they hang around in a way they wouldn’t worry if they were Italians, for example.”

After the attention given the park by the national media, police began to patrol it constantly. Council cleaned it and boarded it up. More importantly, council organised for the owners’ corporation to turn off the services and free wi-fi that had encouraged young people to gather. In the wake of council’s refusal to take over, a case to wind up the owners’ corporation and sell the park is before the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal. It will probably be sold to another developer and used for more housing.

McAliney is concerned about law and order in Wyndham. She has been campaigning for a long time for a new police station at Point Cook — an initiative that was funded in the recent state budget. But the main safety issue in this suburb, she says, is not gangs but family violence. “And in that we are not alone.”

And the attutude of the police themselves? Until the day I interviewed him, Russell Barrett was commander of Victoria Police’s northwestern region, which includes the City of Wyndham. For months before the Herald Sun discovered Ecoville Park, he says, police had been talking to council and the owners’ corporation about “the way we are using that space, the way suburbs like this get constructed, and what the developers leave.” Police had brought the parties together to try to resolve the issues it was causing.

Then the Herald Sun discovered it. Barrett is reluctant to criticise the media. The offences they reported across Melbourne did occur, and some of them were serious. “Victoria Police has never shied away from the fact that serious crime was happening. I think that when they highlighted areas like Tarneit and Ecoville it placed pressure on the totality of the community, and made them feel, I suppose, a little bit more vulnerable and on edge. That then really challenges the strength and fabric of community.” He doesn’t say this, but part of the problem is surely that there is not much fabric there.

The police began to get a new kind of phone call from people in Tarneit. One night there was a call at eleven o’clock complaining that there was a group of “African” youths playing basketball in the school grounds at Tarneit — just a stone’s throw from Ecoville Park. The police attended. The young men were not doing anything wrong. The court was well lit, and it is understood that students can use it after hours. The police spoke to them, and that was that.

It is possible, thinking of this incident, to feel sympathy for everyone involved. Imagine the schoolyard at Tarneit on that hot summer night. Like the whole suburb, it is new. Take a wrong turn around here and you end up in farming land still in the process of being subdivided. At night, the sound of crickets is so loud that you need to raise your voice to be heard. You can see foxes on the streets. The suburb has yet to entirely obliterate its rural origins.

The young Sudanese men gather to play basketball. It is hard to imagine anything less antisocial for them to do in this suburb of deserted after-dark streets. But the neighbourhood is frightened. It has been told it is in crisis. And the crisis is just over there, it seems, just a street away…

A call is made. Then, out of the blue, the police are there. They talk to the young men but make no arrests. Perhaps they suggest that 11pm is not the best time to be playing basketball.

The neighbours have rung the police because they are scared. The police have responded because that is their job. The young people have done nothing wrong. Yet all it takes is a few incidents of this kind and the police will be accused of racial prejudice and racial profiling. But who is racially profiling? The police, or the neighbourhood?

Stories like this abound in Tarneit. I spoke to three brothers who caught the train at Tarneit station. They are tall young men — tall enough to have to duck as they enter the carriage. When they got on board, three families moved to another carriage. Or there are the two young men, sitting in a car in a driveway, not doing anything wrong, just talking. The police pulled up. Someone had rung saying that there was an African gang outside.

On the day I interview Barrett, he was promoted to assistant commissioner for police complaints. The post had fallen vacant after it was revealed that his predecessor, Brett Guerin, had been making social media posts, under a pseudonym, laced with sexually explicit comments. It was the end of a month in which the media had also carried reports of brutality by police — a disabled pensioner pepper sprayed, an African man beaten and kicked while lying handcuffed on the floor.

Barrett doesn’t want to talk about the challenges of his new post. When I ask him for his response to allegations that the police racially profile, he replies smoothly. The police focus on the offence, he says, not the race of the offender. “You know, in terms of policing, if offending is taking place in a geographical area, and the intelligence points to a cohort of young people, then we will talk to those young people. Not all of them will be committing offences.”

Barrett doesn’t believe there is a crisis among Africans. Many of them are already doing very well, he says, and in twenty years they will be an accepted part of the community, just like the Indochinese and the Greeks and Italians before them.

Meanwhile, they have shallow roots. Barrett thinks about how his own children found their first jobs, their first footholds in society. It was through family friendships and connections, something the Sudanese, so recently arrived, clearly lack. Not surprisingly, some young people become alienated and go astray.

Over the past few decades, Victoria has moved away from the idea of a police force and towards a police service — community policing. Police are community workers, bringing in social services to try to change the circumstances that lead to crime. But can that possibly work when at the same time police must do the gritty, frontline tasks of finding and arresting offenders? Barrett acknowledges a tension. The “interface,” he says, is “challenging.”

He tells his people to do their jobs — arrest the offenders and begin the processes of criminal justice. But after that, he says “They should be looking for the causal factors for this crime. What are the vulnerabilities within their family network? And start to link that person with other support agencies who actually provide the necessary services.” A large part of his job is interacting with state and federal government policy, to try to talk about what is needed in the way of such support.

But for police to be able to do this on-the-ground community work, he says, they must have the trust of the community they are dealing with. That is difficult when it is also their job to prosecute offenders. “Ultimately we can do a lot but if the young person isn’t willing then we’re not going to be effective.” And in that difficult relationship, incidents like the young men playing basketball and being spoken to by police don’t help.

Nyadol Nyuon is an example of what Barrett describes as a Sudanese young person doing incredibly well. She came to Australia as a teenager straight from a Kenyan refugee camp. She graduated from Victoria University and then Melbourne University, and now works for the law firm Arnold Bloch Leibler in the heart of the city’s legal district. She is a community leader. She has appeared on the ABC’s Q&A. She hears all the time about racial profiling by police. It is hard, she says, to be constantly called on to express gratitude to Australia — to be conspicuously thankful — while facing implicit racism.

Nyuon lives in the southeastern suburbs, far from Tarneit. But has she, with her professional qualifications and her confident manner, been subjected to racial profiling, here where she works in the centre of the city? It is hard to know. In the past year, she tells me, she has been stopped three times by police and charged with jaywalking. This could be because she is black. And it’s true, she was jaywalking. “I was in the wrong. I was doing the wrong thing. It’s hard to know.”

So are there African gangs, or is the whole thing a media invention? The coarse net of crime statistics is not, by itself, very helpful. The figures have been used by both those who want to create a sense of crisis and those who want to quieten the fears.

Those who say there is no problem point to the fact that overall crime fell in Victoria over the last year — the period in which some media outlets would have had us believe Victoria was in a crisis of violence and fear. Crime dropped by 6 per cent, the biggest drop in twelve years. The crimes that so many people fear — home invasions and burglaries — were also down, by 15 per cent to 46,311.

But this decline followed a long period of a slightly upward trend, meaning that the state is now back to roughly where it was in 2014. For crimes against the person — assaults and other violence — though, the picture is slightly different. Numbers had been relatively steady for years, but rose last year by 1.5 per cent, driven by an increase in sexual offences, and with domestic violence a key factor.

On one reading of the statistics, Sudanese-born people are over-represented — and this is how the numbers have been reported. Sudanese make up just 0.1 per cent of the state’s population, or about 6000 people, but the data shows that they are responsible for more than 1 per cent of all crime in Victoria and are particularly over-represented in several categories. In the year to September 2017, among alleged offenders aged between ten and eighteen, Sudanese-born Victorians were involved in 3 per cent of serious assaults, 2 per cent of non-aggravated burglaries, 5 per cent of motor vehicle thefts and 8.6 per cent of aggravated burglaries.

But statistics can lie. First, they record only country of birth, not ancestry. Those of Sudanese background who were born in Australia show up as Australian offenders. If Sudanese ethnicity is a problem, the statistics probably under-represent it. On the other hand, the statistics reflect arrests and charges, not convictions. Some of those caught in the mesh may not have been guilty of the offences with which they were charged.

Finally, and most significantly, there is the age of the Sudanese population. The deputy director of the Centre of Social and Population Research at Monash University, Rebecca Wickes, describes as a “brute fact” a concept criminologists call the age crime curve. It represents what every parent knows — that people are most likely to get into trouble with the police between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four. Combine this with another fact — that the Sudanese are the youngest ethnic community in Australia — and their apparent over-representation in the crime statistics becomes not so much a brute fact as a questionable one.

Surprisingly, nobody has done the detailed modelling that would tell whether Sudanese — or any other ethnic group — are offending at greater rates than other populations of similar age distribution. “It’s a complex thing to do,” says Wickes. “You’d have to age standardise and you’d have to do a whole bunch of funky statistical tricks.” But without this work, she says, it is simply not possible to say with confidence that Sudanese youth are more likely to break the law than other young people. The apparent over-representation in the statistics would certainly be reduced and might even disappear if age distribution was factored in.

Meanwhile, the total number of offences in which Sudanese youth are involved is numerically small. “There is nothing in the statistics to support the idea that we have a crisis of African gang activity such as what’s been reported in the media,” says Wickes. “There’s just simply no evidence base for that whatsoever.”

Police and criminologists agree that a small number of young men of African appearance are responsible for repeated violent offences. “It’s a drop in the offender bucket,” says Wickes. “It’s serious, though, and it has consequences. If anybody has ever been held up at night or invaded in their home [they know] it’s terrifying and dangerous. It’s particularly terrifying in a country like Australia, where serious violence is not the norm.”

Russell Barrett agrees that the serious problem is not vandalism at Ecoville but “a very small cohort of young people from African-Australian backgrounds who we are seeing continually, and they are committing really high-harm crime.”

How big is this cohort? Wickes says the data doesn’t allow an accurate figure to be discerned, but her experience and contacts in law enforcement lead her to the conclusion that it is a few dozen — perhaps around forty. Her impression is that the police are pursuing these groups hard. “They want to see them locked up and off the streets.” Barrett declines to confirm that figure of forty explicitly, but says, “I wouldn’t argue with it.”

It is this group, overwhelmingly, that is committing the serious home invasions and assaults. Added to this are parties that get out of control, the minor crimes like vandalism, and the fact that some of them involve young men of African appearance. “We see parties that get out of hand in policing all the time,” says Barrett. The use of Airbnb properties for parties has made the problem worse. This is a Melbourne-wide problem, but he has observed that such incidents usually make the media only if African youths are involved.

Are the serious offenders of African origin forming gangs? Wickes and Barrett say that it depends partly on definition. There is no hierarchy or organisation within the groups, as there usually is in “gangs.” They don’t wear distinctive colours or move as a unit. A lot of the crimes are opportunistic, sparked by an unlocked house, for example.

Barrett prefers the term “networked youth offending.” In other words, “young people who communicate with each other by social media and come together for a purpose, which might be entertainment or sporting events or crime. They’re all using the same methodology.”

When the groups commit crime, he finds that the young people involved had often not met each other before. “They’ve communicated somehow. They’ve come together through a loose social connection for a short period of time and they’ve gone out and committed a crime together and it could be a really serious high-harm crime. But they don’t actually know each other. They might not have met each other till half an hour beforehand, but they’ve had a connection through social media.”

Early last summer there was a spike in the number of assaults and home invasions committed by such groups. This was the nugget of truth in media reports of crisis. Barrett says there is no discernible reason for that spike, which has now subsided. Summer school holidays are often a period of trouble, with young people on the streets. But the recent Easter school holidays passed without any increase in crime. As for the rest of the media’s talk of crisis, it was mostly breathless reporting of routine incidents such as out-of-control parties and vandalism.

But what about the fear in a place like Tarneit, with its shallow roots and its lack of places in which the people might come together to form a common understanding of the nature of their suburb? Rebecca Wickes says that international research on perceptions of safety consistently finds that people’s fear of crime and perception of personal safety has little to do with the actual crime levels. The research has used every plausible measurement, including researchers driving slowly around a neighbourhood recording incidents. Overwhelmingly, the research shows that the most powerful driver of people’s perception of risk is the level of poverty and ethnic diversity in a neighbourhood. “So I think we have a very strong ‘worried well’ population in Victoria. I think this is absolutely a crisis of perception,” says Wickes.

And Tarneit in particular? The state’s Crime Statistics Agency provided me with crime and country-of-birth figures, both for the City of Wyndham as a whole and for Tarneit specifically. (For privacy reasons, given the small number of offences, the agency would not provide a detailed breakdown of offences by country of birth for an area as small as Tarneit, but it provided that data for Wyndham as a whole.)

In 2017, the period that includes the “summer of hate,” people of Sudanese birth committed ninety-two crimes against the person and sixty-nine property and deception offences in the City of Wyndham. In Tarneit, the Sudanese-born were responsible for 7.2 per cent of all offences, which sounds bad — but the total number of offences was just fifty-one over the year, and it was down on the previous year.

On the other hand, the long-term trend shows sharply increasing percentages of offences committed by the Sudanese-born. At first sight it is alarming — until you match it with the Australian Bureau of Statistics census data. In 2011 there were just eighty-four Sudanese-born people living in Tarneit, and 112 who described their ancestry as Sudanese. By the 2016 census, it was 345 born in Sudan and 621 with Sudanese ancestry. Match this with the crime statistics, and a rough analysis suggests that the apparent leap in Sudanese crime in Tarneit is exactly in line with the increase in the Sudanese population.

It was easy, watching the group at McDonald’s that weekend, to imagine how their boisterousness, their egging each other on and their domination of space could get out of hand. It was easy to imagine them gathering at Ecoville Park before the constant police patrols began and the wi-fi was cut off. It is easy to imagine Ecoville getting trashed.

But in the two hours I watched and stalked these teenagers, they might have been a nuisance, but they did nothing illegal. Apart from their colour, there was nothing to mark them out from any other group of teenagers with nothing to do on a Saturday afternoon. This was the closest thing to trouble I found in Tarneit during three weeks of visits.

I stayed in Tarneit until late that night. Peter Dutton had said that people in suburbs like this are scared to go to restaurants. There aren’t any restaurants in Tarneit other than fast-food outlets, but they were doing a good trade. The kebab shop at the shopping centre had a United Nations of ethnicities queuing up to be served.

As midnight approached, Ecoville Park was in darkness, but something was going on. Voices echoed from the “amphitheatre.” A laugh, a string of swearing, the sound of broken glass being kicked.

It was a warm night. It took a while, but finally two figures emerged into the street light — teenagers, a girl and a boy.

It was clear what they were here for. They were flirting and snogging and feeling each other up, out of sight of parents. Who knows what happened on this night, what memories and futures they created in this liminal space, this social hole in this brand-new suburb?

The boy was very tall. He was of African appearance. The girl was white. ●

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Looking for trouble appeared first on Inside Story.

It will be a bizarre election in many ways. For one thing, it features a weird and wonderful line-up of candidates. Liberal-aligned pollster Gary Morgan is hoping he’ll be fourth time lucky, having stood against Doyle three times; councillor Ken Ong, another Liberal, has also thrown his hat in the ring. Colourful independent contenders include activist Phil Cleary, a former federal parliamentarian once tripped up by section 44 of the Constitution, and sporting identity Sam Newman, who is reportedly considering a tilt. Embattled state MP Jane Garrett was thinking of taking a stab too, but decided against it, leaving no Labor-backed candidates.

But the main contest will be between the Greens, who hold this turf at a state and federal level — their candidate is councillor Rohan Leppert — and the Property Council’s CEO, Sally Capp, who is formally unaligned but has backing from segments of both the Labor Party and the Liberals. Altogether, it is a strange contest for those of us accustomed to a fairly clear party divide.

In fact, none of the normal rules seem to apply to the City of Melbourne. Unlike other levels of government and most of its local counterparts, Melbourne elects its top office-holder through a direct, popular vote. Tasmanians and Queenslanders are more practised at this kind of thing — they directly elect all their mayors — but in Victoria mayors are generally elected from and by councillors. The state’s only other exception has been the mayor of Geelong, though that city reverted to indirect elections last year after things went sideways under its colourful mayor Darryn Lyons.

Then there is a quirk in the franchise for Melbourne Council elections. Both residents and ratepayers get a vote — that much is common in Australia (except in democratic Queensland, which abolished the property franchise in 1921). Where Melbourne gets strange is that corporations or joint property holders get a second vote. That’s one vote for people and two votes for businesses — a system that only Melbourne and the City of Sydney enjoy. As a result, says poll-watcher Ben Raue, businesses and non-resident property holders make up a majority of the votes — as much as 60 per cent, leaving just 40 per cent for residents.

This eccentric system makes Melbourne closer to the old rotten boroughs of England than a proper representative democracy. One person, one vote is nowhere to be seen. Or perhaps, if we’re being more generous, it is more like a medieval republic, with trades and guilds rather than citizens electing the Doge. Indeed, in Sally Capp we have one of the most powerful local professions — the Sacred Order of Property Developers — standing its leader for the top job.

Is Melbourne’s electoral system simply a relic of the past? In some respects, yes. The bias to propertied interests, for instance, is as old as the city itself. From 1863, votes were doled out only to ratepayers, with extra votes apportioned depending on the value of their rateable property. Some residents ended up with three votes; many had none.

For decades, that system allowed larger businesses to dominate. But by the 1960s bracket creep had given a majority of electors the full three votes. After plural voting was abolished in 1969, the franchise stayed attached to property rather than residence, and ward boundaries systematically favoured business districts over residential ones. That was the case through to 1982, when John Cain’s Labor government attempted to democratise the council.

In 1982 — yes, 1982 — all residents over eighteen years could vote in the council’s elections for the first time. Labor also watered down the business vote, but never quite eliminated it altogether. At times it crept back through quiet tinkering with the regulations — changes to boundaries, enrolment obligations and so on. By 1993 the pendulum had swung nearly all the way back on the franchise, with Liberal premier Jeff Kennett restoring plural voting with the two-votes for business arrangement we know and love now.

Kennett went further. Though well known for controversially amalgamating most councils, his government actually made Melbourne’s smaller and more intensely focused on the CBD, carving off parts of the surrounding suburbs where the left-wing gentry dominated. The business bias was strengthened further in 1995 with automatic enrolment of two voters per company and fines for a failure to vote. Democracy-wise, Melbourne was almost back to square one.

If the property franchise is ancient, direct election of the lord mayor and his or her deputy is a modern flourish. Steve Bracks’s Labor government introduced this and other changes in 2001. After the third sacking of the council in eighteen years, Labor was seeking deeper reform of the electoral system. It abolished Melbourne’s wards and introduced proportional representation alongside the directly elected mayor and deputy.

The changes made for a very different kind of council election. The first of them, in 2001, shared some characteristics with Senate elections under full-preference group voting. If Antony Green was worried by the massive 2013 Senate ballot paper, nobody show him the 170-page booklet, with its ninety-seven candidates, that was posted to all voters in that first Melbourne City Council direct election. Without wards, candidates also had to run city-wide, high-spend campaigns to have any hope of getting into office — bigger campaigns than had ever been seen in local government elections.

Developer donations have poured into the council’s elections ever since — so much so that in its previous term the council couldn’t assess nearly a dozen major planning applications because a majority of councillors had received donations from the applicant. Despite the appearance of being more democratic, the 2001 reforms probably made Melbourne’s councillors even more beholden to vested interests.

Even with the council’s positively Dickensian franchise and an electoral system reliant on big donations, some people defend the status quo. Stephen Mayne, the Crikey founder who went on to sit on the council, argues that a change to a resident-only franchise would result in an unacceptably left-wing, anti-business council governing the corporate and financial centre of Victoria. Former lord mayor Robert Doyle has argued that taking votes away from businesses would violate the highest democratic principle of all: no taxation without representation.

The local Chamber of Commerce has also railed against any curbing of business votes. Businesses are simply too integral to the city, it says, to be deprived of a say. Indeed, this is the view enshrined in law by the City of Melbourne Act: because Melbourne has “capital city status” and serves many interests that don’t live in it, giving votes only to residents would deprive many of the city’s stakeholders from a say in its governance. Multiple votes for business is part of a balancing act that gives all the important segments of the city a say.

Perhaps. But this sounds a bit thin when we consider the fact that people who work in the CBD don’t get any votes, and they are the biggest users of the city, bar none. Expanding the franchise to even more non-residents is hardly going to be a popular rallying cry, and it’s not something I’m advocating here, but the idea directs us to the big question we should be asking when we look at this election: who owns Melbourne? Nearly a million people live, work, study or visit the City of Melbourne every day — that’s nearly a million people with some kind of claim on the place.

Some claims are stronger than others, of course. Of that near-million, many thousands are regional or international visitors. But many others consider themselves Melbournians, have a real stake in the city and the decisions being made about it, and can only watch, disheartened, as elections like the present one unfold. And what about the Wurundjeri, the original custodians of the land? Perhaps they should get a vote, regardless of residence? Or two votes. Or three. The only influence that they, along with the rest of Victoria, have on the council comes via the state government, which intervenes in city matters from time to time.

But it needs to be asked whether there is any legitimate role for a tiny, gerrymandered business fiefdom in the governance of a modern, democratic metropolis serving millions. The answer is surely no. Whether we get Sally Capp, Rohan Leppert or, somehow, lord mayor Sam Newman this May, let us hope that they will be the last sovereign of this very rotten borough. It is a system well and truly past its use-by date. ●

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The book’s editors begin by describing Collins St 5pm, John Brack’s renowned painting of Melbourne in the 1950s:

A stream of dour faces all point the same way, in a ritual march from work to suburban homes. This picture depicts a city full of people and buildings, yet it is monochromatic and flat. It has become iconic not only because it captured a mid-twentieth-century conformity, but also because it stood for the loss of an intensive urbanity that had flourished in the period of “Marvellous Melbourne.”

Perhaps the conformism has changed form rather than disappeared, but the change — as documented in words and extensive images in this beautifully produced volume — has certainly been extraordinary. The editors acknowledge that the city still faces many challenges, but they’re not shy about claiming success. Central Melbourne’s transformation since the 1980s is a global success story,” they write. “Melbourne is now emerging as a city with a depth of character and urban buzz that is palpable…”

The laneways, once decrepit and forgotten, now “filled with hip bars, housing and art,” get most of the attention, but much more has changed than creation of a twenty-four-hour city. As the growth in residential towers attests, the central city has become a highly desirable place in which to live. The CBD’s population, less than 1000 in 1981, is more than 41,000 today. The city has embraced the river, claimed back space from traffic and brownfields, acquired new public spaces, revitalised retailing, grown greener (both literally and metaphorically), relinquished many on-street parking spaces, and integrated spatially with universities and other institutions.

Melbourne Choreography is an enthralling and rewarding read supported by a gallery of fascinating images. For the most part, though, it doesn’t seek to analyse how and why the changes happened. Few of the contributors — many of whom have been involved in managing the central city at various times since the 1970s — attempt to identify the transformation’s wider implications, including the key question of who has benefited from the changes.

In fact, this collection could more accurately be thought of as a heritage project: a collection of mostly personal perspectives that commemorates and celebrates a decades-long achievement. That sense is reinforced by the decision to devote sixty-odd pages to an extended, and somewhat soft, interview with one of the editors, Rob Adams, director of city design and projects at the City of Melbourne, in which he explains his views about planning and his work with the City of Melbourne since 1983.

The book’s strength is that it provides insider interpretations of what happened and why. The contributors include a former lord mayor of the City of Melbourne, Lecki Ord; the head of the state planning department from 1982 to 1988, David Yencken; and, of course, Adams. They provide useful — and often fascinating — perspectives.

Ord provides an absorbing, informative account of “taking council” in the early 1980s and the development of the council’s 1985 Strategy Plan; David Yencken looks at central city planning in the 1980s from a state government perspective; and Marcus Spiller contributes a welcome but all-too-brief survey of wider structural forces. Even the interview with Adams by fellow editor Kim Dovey, which the uncharitable might see as an editorial misstep with the potential for excessive self-congratulation, is a worthwhile and wide-ranging read.

The weakness of this approach is the possibility that the viewpoints would be self-serving and unreceptive to alternative explanations. It could mean the book offers limited insight into how the experience of central Melbourne might apply to other urban areas. All the contributors are believers, but some of them readily acknowledge the complex forces that led to the revitalisation of the central city.

The Nieuwenhuysen liquor-licensing reforms under the Cain government in the 1980s; the exodus of finance jobs to Sydney in the 1990s; the international growth of the knowledge economy; the changes in the rules governing tertiary education; the complex shifts that rendered much railway land surplus; the relatively permissive attitude of successive state governments to large residential towers — most of these factors are nodded through with limited elaboration. Yet they were key drivers of change, and some of them even warrant essays of their own.

The Nieuwenhuysen reforms, for example, meant that bar operators were freed from paying very high licensing fees. No longer needing to seek the economies of scale provided by large premises, they could now operate small bars profitably. With low-cost premises of varied sizes to be found in Melbourne’s laneways and inner-city streets, the proliferation of food and drink outlets gave operators the scope to specialise and offer unusual and idiosyncratic experiences. Partly as a result, the number of on-premises restaurant licences in Victoria ballooned from 571 in 1986 to 5136 between 1986 and 2004.

Urban Choreography largely gives the glory to the custodians of the physical environment: the planners, architects, environmental activists and, in particular, the urban designers. Whether or not the book overstates the designers’ contribution, it’s a great story very ably told in a stand-out essay (clocking in at sixty-five pages!) by landscape architect Ronald Jones. Jones is particularly insightful in recounting some of Melbourne’s great struggles with public space, like the saga of the city square.

Given the prominence accorded to urban design, it’s perhaps unsurprising that local government emerges as the book’s hero. That sense is reinforced by two of the editors being closely associated with the City of Melbourne. They rightly give a former state planning head, David Yencken, a chapter, but the weight of the volume leans heavily towards the part played by the politicians and bureaucrats in city hall.

That’s contested territory. Some former senior state government bureaucrats give much of the credit for central Melbourne’s design transformation to the progressive government of Labor’s John Cain, and particularly its first planning minister, Evan Walker. Cain came to office in 1982, three years before the date nominated in the book’s subtitle; on one view, the council mostly filled in the gaps between the strategic beams laid by Walker and his team.

This is the book we have, and there’s much in it that’s interesting, useful and important about the contribution made by good urban design to central Melbourne over the last thirty to forty years. The central city is a much better place because of that valuable work.

But this isn’t the book we need. The change in central Melbourne since the early 1980s has been dramatic and it’s not an exaggeration to say it’s caught the attention of the rest of the world. A rigorous and detached account of the relative contribution made by the various structural forces — and the various players — could have provided important lessons for public policy elsewhere. The question lingers: has urban design been a key driving force of central Melbourne’s vitality, or should the city’s transformation be characterised as primarily a consequence — perhaps even an inevitable one — of broader influences? ●

The post How Melbourne became cool again appeared first on Inside Story.

This conventional wisdom is wrong. Recent Australian research claiming that most new housing built in Australia is targeted at the top end of the market is flawed because it groups price deciles by the number of Local Government Areas, rather than by the number of dwellings. And claims that more housing doesn’t help low-income earners are at odds with international literature showing that market-rent housing remains the largest source of affordable housing for low-income earners.

This matters, because many people are using the recent research to argue that governments should focus on increasing the subsidies for affordable housing rather than tackling politically difficult planning reforms. This would be misguided policy, based on misguided analysis.

Much of the conventional wisdom is underpinned by a study released in May last year by housing researchers Rachel Ong, Tony Dalton, Nicole Gurran, Christopher Phelps, Steven Rowley and Gavin Wood for the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, or AHURI. According to the authors:

Most of the growth in housing supply has been taking place in mid-to-high price segments, rather than low price segments. There seem to be structural impediments to the trickle-down of new housing supply.

To support this conclusion they present analysis of building approvals in each Local Government Area in Australia. They count the number of new housing and apartment approvals made in each of 2005–06 and 2013–14 in each LGA, and then rank LGAs from lowest to highest according to the real median prices of houses and apartments. They then divide the LGAs into ten groups (or deciles), each containing the same number of LGAs.

The authors find that over the past decade almost 90 per cent of houses and 95 per cent of units were built in the 50 per cent of LGAs with more expensive housing. By contrast, less than 5 per cent of new homes were built in the 20 per cent of LGAs with the cheapest housing. They conclude that most new housing has been supplied at mid-to-high prices relative to the existing stock, and that this effect has become more pronounced between 2006 and 2014.

The critical flaw is that when they group LGAs into deciles, the authors fail to weight the LGAs by the existing number of dwellings in each.

This is more than a rounding error, because LGAs have very different populations, ranging from sixty-two people in Maralinga Tjarutja in far-west South Australia to 1,184,215 in the LGA covered by Brisbane City Council. While just 5 per cent of Australians live in the smallest half of all LGAs, half of all Australians live in the 10 per cent of LGAs with the largest populations — all of which are in or close to our major cities.

Small LGAs are not randomly distributed around Australia. Most LGAs with small populations are in rural and regional areas. With relatively few jobs being created there, these aren’t the places where we would expect much new housing.

According to the AHURI analysis, LGAs in the bottom six deciles according to median house price covered just 28 per cent of all houses in 2013–14. By contrast, the LGAs in the top three house price deciles — almost all of which are in or close to capital cities — account for 54 per cent of the existing housing stock.

It is hardly surprising that most new housing is built in the top three LGA deciles — they already house most of the population. These LGAs represent the vast bulk of Australia’s major cities, where population and jobs are growing faster than regional areas. And so it is misleading to conclude that new housing has been disproportionately built to serve the top end of the market.

The skew in the analysis introduces significant distortions. A suburb with the same median house price as Australia overall ($571,000 in October 2014) would not fall in the authors’ middle LGA decile, as you might expect it to, but in the ninth LGA decile. The Australia-wide median apartment price — $490,000 — would sit in the authors’ highest LGA decile. No Australian capital city has a median house price within the bottom half of LGA deciles by median house price. And only Hobart has a median unit price that would fall in the bottom half of LGAs by median unit price.

Our new analysis of the data, updated to 2016–17, shows that two-thirds of new houses have been built in the cheapest half of all suburbs, and most new units and apartments have been built in Sydney and Melbourne, where median prices are higher.

The chart below creates weighted price deciles for houses and units, so that each price decile has approximately the same number of dwellings (according to 2006 and 2016 census data). In 2016–17, almost half of the new houses were built in the third, fourth and fifth price deciles, where the median price ranges from $343,000 to $541,000. This is a typical price for a new house and land package in new greenfield suburbs on the edges of our major cities, and includes LGAs such as Casey, Wyndham and Melton in Victoria, Moreton Bay and Redlands in Queensland, and Swan and Wanneroo in Western Australia. Because Sydney’s fringe LGAs (such as Campbelltown and the Central Coast) are more expensive, they sit in the sixth decile.

And whereas the authors claim that less than 1 per cent of new homes were in the cheapest 20 per cent of suburbs in 2013–14, we found that 16 per cent of houses were in the cheapest suburbs. We also detected only a small change in this supply pattern between 2005–06 and 2016–17.

Not surprisingly, new units and apartments tend to be built in more expensive LGAs. Sydney, where median dwelling prices are highest, has seen a construction boom in recent years: about 85,000 new apartments have been built in the past four years, including 60,000 in inner and middle-ring suburbs. And these apartments aren’t just being built in high-end suburbs: new apartments in LGAs like Parramatta, Penrith and Liverpool are still in the eighth and ninth unit-price deciles nationally.

In Melbourne and Brisbane, many new apartments are being built in LGAs in the seventh and eighth deciles. Across Australia, less than 60 per cent of apartments and townhouses were built in the LGAs in the eighth, ninth and tenth price deciles (compared to 84 per cent in the original AHURI calculations for 2013–14).

New housing should be disproportionately located in suburbs that are more attractive (both in access to jobs and quality of life). And precisely because they are more attractive, such areas are likely to be more expensive. It would not be good to disproportionately build housing in LGAs with the lowest median house prices — typically rural and regional areas or fringe suburbs of our major cities — where job prospects are often poor. The fact that units and apartments are mostly being built in established desirable suburbs is good for affordability: units and apartments are generally cheaper than existing detached housing, so this makes housing in those suburbs more affordable overall.

Of course, new housing needn’t be targeted at lower price points to improve overall housing affordability. More housing supply — even at the top end — should ultimately free up less expensive housing stock. The people who move into newly constructed, more expensive housing are either existing residents who move out of less expensive housing, or new residents who would otherwise have added to the demand and pushed up the price for existing housing. Irrespective of its cost, each additional dwelling adds to total supply, which ultimately affects affordability for all homebuyers.

There is good international evidence to suggest that this “filtering” does occur in practice. For example, a recent study published in the American Economic Review found that the US housing stock

filters down at a rate of roughly 1.9 per cent per year in real terms. At that rate the real income of an arriving occupant in a fifty-year-old home would be 60 per cent less than the income of an occupant in a newly built home.

Other studies reach similar conclusions.

Data from the American Housing Survey show that 45 per cent of homes that were affordable to very low-income earners in in 2013 had filtered down from owner-occupier or higher rent categories in 1985. Expensive homes gradually became cheaper as they aged, and were sold or rented to people with more modest incomes. Without those extra homes, far less affordable housing would have been available to low-income earners.

Unfortunately, there is little Australian literature on filtering. Australia lacks an equivalent to the American Housing Survey, which has tracked a consistent set of homes, and the characteristics of those who live in them, every two years since 1985. The last dedicated survey of the Australian housing stock was conducted almost two decades ago. Nor do we know what happens to particular homes over time. But it’s a fair bet that market-rent housing is an important source of affordable housing here, as it is in the United States.

Of course, new expensive housing might not improve the balance between supply and demand if it merely induces additional demand, presumably from overseas purchasers. But there is little evidence that overseas purchasers are increasing demand by much more than they increase supply. There is clear evidence that they are not the only purchasers of more expensive housing. And while gentrification can push up prices in a particular area, the construction of more housing in total should lead to prices lower than otherwise.

Filtering may be slower if house prices rise rapidly and overall housing supply is restricted. For example, in a 2003 paper American housing academics Tsuriel Somerville and Christopher Mayer concluded that:

restrictions on the supply of new units lower the supply of affordable units. This occurs because increases in the demand for higher quality units raise the returns to maintenance, repairs, and renovations of lower-quality units, as landlords have a stronger incentive to upgrade them to a higher-quality, higher-return housing submarket.

These studies underscore the importance of more housing supply to keep housing affordable for low-income earners — even if much of the new housing is too expensive for them.

Previous Grattan Institute research shows that worsening housing affordability is hurting low-income earners the most. Those at the bottom of the income spectrum are much less likely to own their own home than in the past, are often spending more of their income on rent, and are more likely to be living a long way from where most new jobs are being created.

Until recently, the supply of new homes in Australia wasn’t keeping pace with demand. Planning rules and practices made it reasonably easy to build apartments in the CBD and to develop new housing estates on the city fringe. But they made it relatively difficult to redevelop the inner and middle-ring suburbs of major cities, where many people would prefer to live because they would have better access to jobs. Overall population growth outstripped housing growth. Not surprisingly, house prices rose.

Development in middle suburbs has increased in recent years, especially in Sydney. But development at today’s record rates is the bare minimum needed to meet Sydney and Melbourne’s housing supply targets over the next forty years, given that population growth is back up towards record levels.

While more market housing can make housing more affordable for all Australians, including many low-income earners, some level of subsidies will always be required for the worst-off Australians.

The social housing stock has not kept pace with population growth. The stock of social housing — currently around 400,000 dwellings — has barely grown in twenty years, whereas Australia’s population has increased by 33 per cent over the same period. Social housing as a proportion of the housing stock peaked in about 1997, and has fallen from about 5.6 per cent to 4.8 per cent over fifteen years.

But the public subsidies required to make a real difference to the supply of social housing would be large: boosting the stock of social housing by 100,000 dwellings — broadly sufficient to return the total affordable housing stock to its historical share of the total housing stock — would require additional public funding of around $900 million each and every year. Even then, it would still house less than a third of the bottom 20 per cent of households.

Increased rent assistance would be a fairer way to help low-income renters. No low-income renter would get a lot of support, but everyone would get a little help. Rent assistance is based on recipients’ rent levels, the payment can be well-targeted to need, and the support can move with people when they move homes. That’s why the Henry Tax Review instead recommended that rent assistance be increased to a level “sufficient to support access to an adequate level of housing.” But even a $500-a-year boost to rent assistance would cost the budget $700 million a year, and a larger boost is probably warranted.

Inclusionary zoning could provide more affordable housing at no direct cost to government budgets. But inclusionary zoning is not cost-free. It may increase rents in the private rental market a little, which would mean that people are allocated affordable housing would be much better off but other low-income earners could be a little worse off.

In practice, no plausible amount of public funding can shield low-income earners from rising housing costs. But making housing cheaper overall will reduce the amount of public subsidy needed to bridge the gap between development costs and what low-income earners can afford to pay. Even better, boosting housing supply doesn’t cost the taxpayer anything.

Housing supply isn’t the only solution to make housing more affordable for low-income earners. Larger subsidies are needed to help low-income earners cope with rising housing costs. But without more supply for everyone, housing won’t become much more affordable, especially for low-income earners. ●

The post The conventional wisdom is wrong: building more housing does help low-income earners appeared first on Inside Story.

It seemed hard to imagine — this couple who had worked so hard to build up their fruit stall, which they took turns on, keeping it open from 8am until 10 or 11pm every day. Unlike many rural migrant workers in China’s big cities, they had brought their children with them, pursuing their dream of an urban life for their family. Had they really gone back to a province where they hadn’t lived for years?

The crackdown prompted public protests, outspoken online criticism and a letter signed by more than one hundred intellectuals, the type of collective action that has become increasingly rare under Xi.

It was a reminder of the precariousness of urban life for many of China’s rural migrants — an estimated 200 million people, or some 15 per cent of the population. They have played a major part in China’s economic boom, particularly in the manufacturing and construction sectors, and now hold most low-paid urban service jobs too. But China’s antiquated household registration (or hukou) system still classifies the majority of them as rural citizens, meaning they are not entitled to the same welfare — or, often, the same education for their children — as those born in the cities.

It’s more than three years since the Chinese authorities pledged to gradually abolish this divisive system and allow one hundred million rural people to become urban citizens by 2020 — a move officials said would boost real estate sales and consumption. But a series of recent incidents have shown just how difficult this process could be.

Highest profile were the events in Beijing in November and December, when tens of thousands of mainly migrant workers were forced out of their homes in the suburbs, which were then demolished. According to the government, it was part of a crackdown on illegal and unsafe structures following a fire that killed nineteen people in a workers’ dormitory. But the sight of people being evicted from their homes, and often having their possessions forcibly removed, caused widespread anger. For many, it came as a shock in the era of president Xi Jinping, who has sought to convince people that he is offering a more equal society in exchange for a reduction in civil liberties.

The crackdown prompted public protests, outspoken online criticism and a letter signed by more than one hundred intellectuals, the type of collective action that has become increasingly rare under Xi. Even state media offered some support to the evictees. The action may also have damaged the career of Xi’s protégé, Beijing mayor Cai Qi, after a leaked video showed him calling for “rough confrontation” to remove recalcitrant residents and city authorities were accused of targeting what official documents had previously called China’s “low-end population.”

The authorities suppressed much of the online response and the outpourings of sympathy, which included irreverent t-shirts proclaiming the wearer to be part of the “low-end population.” But the incident was a reminder that the national government’s efforts to clean up cities and create a more orderly society can bring it into conflict with the aspirations of many citizens.

Beijing’s emphasis on fire safety as a justification for the evictions was seen by many as a cover for implementing its plan to cap the city’s long-term population at twenty-three million people in 2020 (up from 21.7 million in 2016), which officials say will improve the quality of life for those who remain. This target will be partly met by transferring some of Beijing’s government functions to a new city in neighbouring Hebei province. But it will also entail a reduction in the capital’s downtown population, with several Beijing districts each planning to cut their population by an average of at least a million people. Many traditional local markets have been closed, leaving traders little choice but to leave the city.

In Shanghai, the sudden closures and demolitions have been less geographically concentrated, and the targets have been shops and businesses more than homes. The authorities have emphasised the need to crack down on illegal structures and businesses without licences, partly under the umbrella of Xi’s ongoing anti-corruption campaign. But the policy has certainly begun to bite increasingly hard over the past two years, and it’s not been uncommon to see — as I did by chance last summer — a line of law enforcement officials in hard hats cordoning off part of a street while a row of small shops is swiftly demolished.

Other businesses have simply had their shopfronts bricked up. One entire block of bars, shops and restaurants opposite the city’s modern, prestigious Culture Square concert venue has remained crudely bricked up for more than a year. Buildings owned by government departments are among the targets: as part of Xi’s crackdown on graft, they have been ordered to stop making money from commercial leases. As a consequence, a number of popular galleries, restaurants, spas and other businesses have vanished almost overnight. The crackdown has also caught out businesses that have been operating in a legal grey area since they opened fifteen or twenty years ago, when private enterprise was relatively new in China and rules were not as clear or strictly enforced.

A banner in Shanghai reads, “In accordance with the law, resolutely rectify illegal and unlicensed buildings; resolutely ban irregular and unlicensed businesses.” Duncan Hewitt

Not all the loss of this type of informal economy will be lamented by local residents. Few will regret the departure, for example, of a store that used electric saws to cut metal window frames on an otherwise quiet residential side street in the former French concession. And some older buildings in the district now undoubtedly look cleaner and more elegant, something the government says is part of a project to “restore [the area’s] historic appearance.”

Yet some residents bemoan the disappearance of many neighbourhood noodle shops, snack stalls and small hardware stores, for example, which less wealthy local people have grown used to over the years. “The street is so quiet,” said one old woman in the former French concession. “There’s almost nowhere nearby to go to buy things now.”

And the process can seem quite random. In some old neighbourhoods, officially decreed top-down gentrification has led some local favourites to be closed down, while other new restaurants or shops are opened. And near my home, one small but busy noodle restaurant, whose owners had invested a lot of money on a shiny makeover not long before, was suddenly bricked up one morning — only to be unbricked and reopened a few months later. On another occasion, I was sitting upstairs at a cafe when a uniformed official appeared and pasted a notice on the balcony outside, ordering the removal of both the balcony and the external staircase that was the only access to the upper floor. After a few months of closure, the staircase, though not the balcony, reappeared — and the upper floor reopened.

For many businesses, there is no way back — and some are questioning how this will affect the functioning of the city. Shanghai’s wave of new construction is far from over, but one company I know that had built up a booming business in interior decoration was recently evicted without warning from its suburban studio. The nearest place it could find similar premises was a couple of hours’ drive out of the city, across the Yangtze river in Jiangsu province. A carpenter producing design works for local stores also saw his studio demolished as part of suburban rezoning and ended up moving a couple of hundred miles out of Shanghai.

Along with the longer-term and continuing destruction of some of Shanghai’s historic inner-city neighbourhoods, the crackdown on illegal structures has made it harder for many migrants to find affordable places to live or work in a city where rents have spiralled in recent years. Some have lived on the fringes of the city, in urban villages an hour away by electric bike, but even those homes are harder to find now. Many people, like the fruit-sellers in my neighbourhood, have little choice but to return to the countryside, or to smaller towns in their home areas.

Of course, huge numbers of migrants are still living in Shanghai — more than nine million in 2015 — but the numbers have recently fallen slightly for the first time in years. And the treatment they’ve received only adds to their sense of insecurity and of being unwanted. As the local key-cutter put it, “It seems they don’t care much about us poor people here these days.”

This may be part of the government’s plan. One of the strategies outlined for the urbanisation process is to move people to smaller cities and prevent the major cities, most of which have seen population growth of at least 50 per cent since the start of this century, from bursting at the seams.

“Shanghai has very little space left, it’s basically full up,” one academic at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences told journalists a couple of years ago, noting that while the government was setting a target of twenty-five million people for 2020, the city’s population had already nearly reached that level. (Official figures put it at over twenty-four million by the end of 2015.)

It may be no coincidence that, according to the official media, it’s recently become harder for migrant workers’ children to get into Shanghai schools, despite the local authorities having proudly announced a decade ago that they would remove such obstacles. Beijing has also tightened its rules.

Some new employment opportunities have undoubtedly been created in smaller towns in more rural areas, as state media are keen to emphasise. Yet it remains a challenge to persuade young people to abandon the dream of life in the kind of big metropolis they see in their favourite TV dramas. For many older migrants, meanwhile, returning home after so many years away from the land is not always easy. The government has acknowledged “unbalanced and inadequate development,” particularly in many rural areas.

More investment in remoter areas is likely in the coming years, but modernising these regions takes time. And, as the Beijing intellectuals who signed the anti-eviction petition (and other experts) have asked, who will do the jobs being created in the big-city service industries and the consumer economy that the government continues to promote? Labour shortages have already emerged in less well-paid industries in Guangdong province — the “world’s factory” — in recent years, not least in Shenzhen, where urban villages providing relatively cheap housing have been torn down to make way for new development.

Meanwhile, new schemes to give migrants better conditions in big cities— such as housing subsidies in the western city of Chengdu — often only benefit university graduates from other cities. And some warn that the schemes will only fuel a boom in already prohibitive house prices.

Following the recent crackdown in Beijing, some companies appear to be making their own efforts: online shopping mall JD.com, for example, promised to provide temporary homes for any of its delivery staff affected by the demolitions.

But in the current climate, where control seems to be the most prized quality among urban officials, finding creative longer-term solutions may not be so easy. Despite official pledges to press ahead with reforms of the household registration system, the Australian-based Chinese sociologist Bingqin Li has noted that these have been “less progressive” than many hoped.

It’s a reminder of the difficulties involved in rebalancing China’s urban–rural divide. One of the drivers of China’s economic growth over the past three decades has been the fact that labour flowed to where it was needed — even though it was technically illegal for rural people to move to the cities in the early days of economic reform in the 1980s. Now that the government is again seeking to direct the movement of migrants, ensuring that jobs — and homes — are available in the places they move to may be one of the biggest challenges it faces in the coming years. •

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Those fine words are backed by C$15.9 billion of federal money. Evan Siddall, president and CEO of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, told the conference that contributions from provincial and local governments could bring the total investment to around C$40 billion over ten years, sufficient to repair 300,000 existing dwellings and build 100,000 new ones.

Ottawa is spending C$4.8 billion to increase the quality and supply of public and social housing provided by provincial governments and community organisations, and putting another C$11.1 billion into a National Housing Co-Investment Fund offering low-interest loans to build affordable housing for the private rental market.

To get finance from the fund, 30 per cent of dwellings in a project must be rented out for less than 80 per cent of median market rates for a minimum of twenty years. That’s double the duration required under the successful but short-lived Australian equivalent, the National Rental Affordability Scheme, or NRAS, which funded about 37,000 new homes renting at a 20 per cent discount to the market. The Canadian government is also leveraging its fund to achieve other objectives: projects must outperform existing national codes on energy efficiency and greenhouse gas emissions by 25 per cent or more and at least one in five dwellings must meet specified accessibility criteria.

On top of all that, Canada’s strategy sets a target of halving chronic homelessness within ten years through a C$2.2 billion program that Siddall said would take a housing-first approach, regarded by many advocates as the most effective long-term way to tackle the problem.

The relevance of the Canadian example was not lost on the Australian audience. Measured by housing prices and the pace of their rises, Toronto and Vancouver are up there with Sydney and Melbourne. Both countries are federations, with split responsibilities across three tiers of government complicating housing policy. Both struggle to find a coherent response to chronic homelessness.

Perhaps the reason that Siddall’s presentation had the Sydney audience buzzing was the extent to which the approach of the Canadian government appeared to reflect their own aspirations for policy in Australia. This goes beyond the language of human rights to encompass the benefits of secure, appropriate and affordable housing for health, education, employment and economic growth. Siddall, who helped develop the strategy and described his role in the Canadian system as equivalent to that of a deputy housing minister, cited research showing that housing has “a higher multiplier effect than personal or corporate tax cuts” with a return of $1.50 for every $1 invested. He described the strategy as “community renewal on a national scale” and said the Trudeau government conceived housing as “shelter, not bricks and mortar.”

The sincerity of Trudeau’s promises will only become clear over time. Australia, too, has had a prime minister who vowed to halve homelessness and then found the problem to be far more intractable than expected. Critics note that Trudeau’s new approach to homelessness won’t be launched until early 2019, about six months before Canada’s next federal election. Another key element of the program, a C$4 billion rent subsidy called the Canada Housing Benefit (which looks like it might be similar to Australia’s Commonwealth Rent Assistance) is not due to start until six months after that election, in April 2020. As Australian housing advocates know only too well, programs are only durable if they have bipartisan support solid enough to withstand changes of government and changing budgetary circumstances.

Still, Evan Siddall’s presentation on Canada’s strategy set the tone for many conversations during the rest of the conference. For the more optimistically inclined, there was a sense that measures announced by treasurer Scott Morrison in this year’s federal budget had also moved Australia closer to a coherent national policy.

The most significant step is the creation of the National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation. If it works, the NHFIC will attract new long-term institutional investment into affordable housing by acting as a bridge between community housing providers and superannuation funds. While community organisations can, and do, borrow from banks, each loan must be separately negotiated. Super funds won’t deal one-on-one with individual providers in this way, so the NHFIC and its associated bond aggregator aim to offer them a standardised, rated investment product. “The NHFIC is not a national housing policy,” said Carrie Hamilton from the Housing Action Network, “but it is a very important piece of the puzzle.”

Hamilton was introducing a keynote presentation by Piers Williamson, chief executive of the Housing Finance Corporation. This British forerunner of the NHFIC was set up in 1987, after Margaret Thatcher’s controversial “right-to-buy” program had depleted Britain’s supply of affordable rental dwellings by selling off council houses. It provides long-term loans to Britain’s 170 individual housing associations, which between them own 2.49 million homes and account for 10.5 per cent of all housing.

Williamson, who is advising the Australian government on setting up the NHFIC, described himself as a specialist in risk — “not in taking risks but avoiding them.” He is proud of the fact that no bank or institutional investor has lost money lending to a British housing association over the corporation’s thirty-year history. He also points out that the Housing Finance Corporation helps smooth economic cycles. When commercial banks were falling over in the global financial crisis, its lending grew. Under a government scheme introduced in 2013, the Corporation also guarantees loans to housing associations, reducing the cumulative cost of borrowing for affordable housing, he says, from 3.7 per cent to 2.5 per cent.

On the final day of the conference, when assistant treasurer Michael Sukkar announced that the Commonwealth would offer a similar guarantee on bonds issued by the NHFIC, delegates burst into spontaneous applause. Two other announcements also pleased the audience. The first was that the NHFIC will have an independent board when it begins operations on 1 July 2018. Williamson had earlier told the conference that independence has been crucial to the success of Britain’s housing finance corporation because “politicians always like to dabble and dabbling is not always good.” Sukkar’s third bit of news was that a $1 billion facility set up to finance infrastructure to expedite new housing supply will now be ongoing, rather than terminating after five years.

The NHFIC has the backing of both Labor and the Greens, which means it should survive any change of government, and in his conference speech Sukkar added some small but essential elements that move it closer to being a core piece in the bigger picture of a coherent national housing strategy. But the most important part of the puzzle is still absent — government money.

“Subsidised housing requires a subsidy,” Williamson told the conference. He said that “sitting at the bottom” of Britain’s affordable housing model was £45 billion (A$75 billion) in grant money. “Grants,” he said, “are one of the things missing over here.”

The crucial role of public investment in providing housing for low-income households is well established. Private developers will not build affordable housing because it does not make commercial sense for them to do so. It’s a clear case of market failure.

Two charts from reports by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, or AHURI, help illustrate the point. The first, from a report on the responsiveness of Australia’s housing supply, tracks new dwelling supply over a decade. The authors argue that this data shows that the vast majority of new houses and units are “concentrated in the mid-to-high price deciles” and that there is a “paucity of new supply at the bottom end of the housing market.”

In theory, though, an increase in higher-priced supply should still help reduce the cost of housing overall. As buyers or renters of more expensive homes move up the property ladder, they release their former cheaper dwellings onto the market — a process known as filtering. If filtering works effectively (and there are arguments about that), then what matters for affordability is not so much an increase in supply at the bottom of the market as an increase in supply overall. But what is happening to supply is also disputed, as seen in a current public debate between leading Australian housing researchers.

Ben Phillips and Cukkoo Joseph at ANU’s Centre for Social Research and Methods recently concluded that Australia had an oversupply of new dwellings between 2001 and 2017. If this is correct, then other factors must be stopping filtering from increasing affordability. If new properties are bought as second homes or by overseas investors, for example, then there is no previous property to filter down.

But the Grattan Institute challenges the ANU analysis of oversupply. “Phillips and Joseph ignore how rising prices and worsening affordability pushed people into larger households than they would have chosen,” wrote John Daley and Brendan Coates in response to the report. “And so their estimates underplay the number of dwellings needed to accommodate Australia’s growing population.” Daley and Coates give the example of young people staying longer in the family home than in the past and conclude that this is less likely to be driven by “a social wave of filial affection” than by the fact that “there is less housing to go round.”

Even if the Grattan Institute is right that “a sustained increase in supply over several years” would materially lower prices, it will be a slow process, because high rates of new construction only increase the stock of existing dwellings very gradually. This is why many delegates at the Sydney conference focused less on market settings and more on public investment in social and affordable housing.

Which brings us to the second chart, from an AHURI report on public housing that shows how government investment in the sector has tracked steadily downwards over a thirty-year period, with one brief, spectacular exception. The blip in the chart that resembles the sudden resuscitation of a stalled heartbeat is the dramatic effect of Kevin Rudd’s second stimulus package during the global financial crisis. In February 2009, Labor pumped $42 billion into the economy, including $6.6 billion to build 20,000 new units of social housing dwellings and 802 defence homes. At the time, surprised housing advocates called it a “quantum leap” for the sector. As soon as the stimulus ran out, though, construction of social housing fell off a cliff and the heartbeat of Australia’s social housing sector returned to its dangerously low levels.

On the same day as Justin Trudeau was launching Canada’s national housing strategy, the British government released its autumn budget, which included “£15.3 billion of new financial support for housing over the next five years, bringing total support for housing to at least £44 billion over this period.” Oona Goldsworthy, CEO of Bristol housing provider United Communities, who was at the Sydney conference, told me that “a lot of government effort” is going into housing in Britain, with prime minister Theresa May giving it equal priority, or greater, to health, education and growth.

Despite Michael Sukkar’s announcements, housing doesn’t seem to be getting the same level of attention here. Nor is there evidence of the cohesive approach that unites all levels of government as in Canada. This became obvious at a conference session that brought together senior state, territory and federal public servants. The focus was on housing policy innovation around the nation but the session ended in a degree of acrimony.

The final speaker was Paul McBride, manager of welfare and housing reform in the Commonwealth Department of Social Services. He was endeavouring to explain why the federal government wants to replace its existing deal with the states and territories — the National Affordable Housing Agreement, or NAHA — with a new National Housing and Homelessness Agreement, or NHHA. This was another 2017 budget initiative but it has stalled, not least because of resistance from state governments.

The Commonwealth says NAHA has failed because only one of the four performance benchmarks set up under the agreement has been met. Despite $9 billion in funding since 2009, “growth in the size of the social housing stock has stagnated and numbers on waiting lists have increased.” In return for future funding under the replacement NHHA, the Commonwealth wants the states and territories to put in place credible housing and homelessness strategies and provide data for transparent and consistent reporting. As an incentive, it is offering to index $115 million in annual funding for homelessness services provided under the current agreement and to make that funding permanent.

When McBride described this as “a significant concession from the Commonwealth,” Caryn Kakas, executive director of Housing NSW, shook her head in disbelief. She accused Canberra of holding the states hostage over housing funding. “If the Commonwealth is serious, it should be putting forward a national housing strategy, not just stitching together state programs,” she retorted. She pointed out that the Commonwealth can pull levers like tax reform that are beyond the reach of the states and territories. McBride’s response was interrupted by interjections from the floor. “There’s no strategy, absolutely none,” yelled one delegate. “Spend more money!” called out another.

McBride had earlier noted that treasurer Scott Morrison “wants a pathway to home ownership” and that all subsidies and state programs should point in that direction. And this is perhaps where the difference in views really resides. For most of those at the conference, the core issue is not assisting first homebuyers to take their initial step up the property ladder, but helping low-income households to put a secure roof over their heads.

Sydney University’s Nicole Gurran told the final conference session that Australia lacks a properly funded social housing system, which would require government and institutional investment to increase supply at the bottom of the market. “If we want stable supply, then we have to be serious about building, irrespective of the fluctuations of the real estate market,” she said. “And we have to make sure that we are delivering what we really need, and that’s affordable, new rental housing.”

Gurran noted that forgoing billions of dollars in revenue through negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount failed to deliver this outcome. Labor has promised to reform negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount if it wins the next election. Even if it only saved half of the $11.7 billion calculated to be lost on these concessions to property investors annually, that would still bring in enough funding to revive the heartbeat of Australia’s social and affordable housing sector, not just in a one-off stimulus package, but year on year. Wherever the money ultimately comes from, if we want a national housing strategy, public investment is still a missing piece of the puzzle. ●

The post In search of a national housing strategy appeared first on Inside Story.

But changes to negative gearing and the capital gains tax — the preserve of federal government policy — aren’t sufficient to make housing fairer and more sustainable. At least as important, according to analysis by the Grattan Institute, is reform of state taxes, and particularly the abolition of stamp duty and its replacement with broad-based property tax — something that is even more difficult to achieve politically.

Research released at the 2017 National Housing Conference in Sydney suggests that there is a way forward, though, given sufficient will. A new report on pathways to property tax reform published by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, or AHURI, argues that a gradual transition from stamp duty to a property tax is possible without severely disrupting the housing market or disadvantaging home owners.

Change in this area is difficult because state governments — particularly those with booming house prices — are addicted to stamp duty. State and territory property taxes raised around $40 billion in 2014–15, or more than 10 per cent of all taxes collected in Australia.

But University of Tasmania political scientist Richard Eccleston, who led the AHURI research, says a recurrent property tax could raise the same amount of money as stamp duty. “This is not about increasing taxes, it’s about using a new and more efficient tax,” he told the Sydney conference.

Economists and housing experts generally agree that there are good reasons for using property tax rather than stamp duty to raise revenue.

First, stamp duty is levied at the point of purchase, when buyers, particularly first homebuyers, can least afford it, whereas a broad-based property tax is spread over time. A property tax also brings in more revenue as house prices rise and so captures a share of windfall gains that would otherwise accrue solely to home owners when, for example, government builds a train line, school or hospital that improves the amenity of an area and boosts their property values. It also means that taxes fall with house values, and so home owners pay less if their notional equity is reduced.

Second, the big up-front cost of stamp duty is a deterrent to moving house, making people less likely to move from areas of low to high employment or to take up positions where their skills are more effectively used. Speaking on the same panel at the AHURI conference, Grattan Institute researcher Brendan Coates said the really big benefits of a shift from stamp duty to property tax were productivity gains, which could be worth up to $17 billion a year.

Third, by lowering the cost of moving, the shift to a property tax could encourage more efficient use of housing. Empty-nesters may be more willing to move to smaller dwellings if downsizing doesn’t cost them tens of thousands of dollars in stamp duty.

Finally, property taxes give state governments a more predictable, stable and reliable revenue stream than stamp duties. While New South Wales and Victoria may be rolling in cash right now, if the housing bubble pops and the real estate market slows, then the rivers of gold could quickly slow to a trickle.

The question is not whether shifting from stamp duty to property tax is a good policy idea, the question is how to do it. Asking existing home owners to start paying property tax would seem like double taxation, since they paid stamp duty up-front when they bought their homes. Yet exempting them would create an even bigger disincentive to moving. “Grandfathering is bad for mobility,” Coates told the conference, “because it locks people into their current homes.”

Both Coates and Eccleston recommend a twenty-year transition from stamp duty to property tax — just like the process that has been under way in the Australian Capital Territory since 2012. It’s true that the transition is simpler there because the ACT government is also effectively the local government and can incorporate property taxes into council rates more easily than other states and territories. But such practical obstacles are not insurmountable.

The new AHURI report recommends a four-step process. Eccleston says the immediate first steps are to develop consistent methods for valuing residential property across all states and territories and to establish a national register of property valuations and ownership. The second, short-term step is to simplify stamp duty into a single flat rate of 6 per cent applying only above a significant threshold. Eccleston says this would benefit those 60 per cent of buyers purchasing property at the lower end of the market and transfer costs to those buying more expensive houses. The third, medium-term step is to add a stamp duty surcharge for investors and top-end buyers or increase the rate of stamp duty they pay. According to the report, this would “meet housing policy goals by dampening demand for investment properties and increasing home ownership rates.”

Converting stamp duty into a “single progressive system” in this way would provide the foundation for the fourth and final substantive reform: replacing stamp duty altogether with a recurrent property tax. Stamp duties would gradually fall over the twenty years, and property taxes would gradually increase. Eccleston’s study estimates that the annual rate of property tax needed to fully replace stamp duty on a median-priced dwelling in New South Wales or Victoria would be less than $1300. In Tasmania, the figure would be less than $500.

The transition from stamp duty to property tax requires national leadership and national coordination. Eccleston says the obvious precedent — in terms of process rather than outcomes — is the implementation of National Competition Policy under the Howard government. The Commonwealth should take a similar leadership role in relation to property taxes, he says, because it would be the main beneficiary of the resulting increase in economic growth and output. And only the Commonwealth has the capacity to put a deferred payments scheme in place to enable asset-rich but income-poor retirees to put off paying property tax until they sell their home, or to have those taxes paid out of their estate.

Richard Eccleston acknowledges that moving to what is “essentially a wealth tax based on property” is a political challenge, but says it’s not as hard as the obvious alternative, removing capital gains tax exemption on the family home.

Grattan’s Brendan Coates adds two more big measures to the housing tax wish list. The first is to include the value of the family home in the pension assets test, but only above a certain threshold (say $500,000). Not only might this encourage some older Australians to downsize, it would also save the government money and even up the pension treatment of home owners and renters.

Coates also wants to flatten progressive state land taxes. In terms of fairness, this might sound counterintuitive, but the aim is to encourage a shift in the private rental sector from “mum and dad” landlords to institutional investors. Coates makes the point that investors who only own one rental property often don’t make very good landlords, partly because they are scared of getting a bad tenant and not being able to kick them out, and partly because they want to be able to sell the property any time to cash in on the value of their asset. As a result, they don’t like to offer tenants long tenure.

Institutional landlords, by contrast, invest at scale, spreading the risk of a bad tenant across many dwellings. They are also seeking long-term rental returns ahead of capital gains. Under current arrangements, the rate of state-based land taxes rises with the value of property held, quite steeply in some cases. This significantly reduces the yield for institutions like superannuation funds and creates a disincentive for them to invest in the private rental market.

Politically convenient changes “are often ineffective or harmful,” notes Eccleston, while “meaningful reforms are generally politically difficult.” The major beneficiaries of a transition from stamp duty to property tax would be younger Australians buying their first home. “Do we have leaders with the courage to make that argument?” he asks.

With his own battle wounds from attempting significant tax reform, former Liberal leader John Hewson has his doubts. “Politics is even more short-term, populist and opportunistic than in my time,” he told the same conference session. “It is hard to imagine a serious and sustained debate about any aspect of public policy.”

Changing the way housing is taxed wouldn’t necessarily have a huge impact on housing affordability, but it should make it easier for younger homebuyers to enter the market. It would also help to boost growth, deal with budget challenges and reduce inequality, and so make the entire system fairer and more sustainable. As Hewson told the conference, continuing to push such problems further down the road is “basically intergenerational theft.” ⦁

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At issue in Northcote was the fate of eighty-seven dwellings on the Walker Street estate, built in the 1960s and slated for redevelopment under Labor’s $185 million public-housing renewal program. The program promises to replace “older, rundown housing” on nine inner- and middle-ring estates with “new, modern, low maintenance homes.”

While the Northcote stoush has its own special characteristics, similar battles are being fought across Melbourne and in Sydney and other cities. They are symptomatic of how public housing is being reshaped in two main ways.

First, state governments are trying to replace or refurbish ageing public housing without investing large sums of public money or taking on substantial new debt. By giving private developers access to well-located land that is home to public-housing estates, governments can offset the cost of renewing social housing. Second, and simultaneously, state governments are increasingly transferring the management or ownership of public housing to community-housing associations, the other much smaller branch of the social housing sector.

These shifts come on top of a long period of neglect. According to data compiled by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the number of households in state-owned and state-run housing dropped from 331,100 to 312,200 in the decade to June 2016, a fall of 6 per cent despite overall growth in the population.

Given Australia’s ageing demographic and changing household composition, the tally of individuals in public housing probably fell even faster. In 2007, families with children (couples and sole parents) made up 27 per cent of households in public rental; ten years later their share had fallen below 20 per cent. The proportion of single-person households rose from 50 per cent to 54 per cent.

As public-housing assets age, maintenance becomes more expensive. In a report released in June 2017, the Victorian auditor-general found that 60 per cent of the state’s public-housing stock was more than thirty years old — up from 42 per cent just five years earlier. As a result, state governments struggle to maintain existing dwellings at an acceptable standard, let alone expand their portfolios.

In any case, the public-housing mix is no longer fit for purpose. Though many existing houses and flats have three or more bedrooms, designed to accommodate families, growing numbers of long-term tenants live as couples or singles. Children have grown up and moved out; couples have separated or a partner has died. As a result, says the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, more than 16 per cent of public housing is underused — that is, the property has at least two more bedrooms than the residents need. One- and two-bedroom accommodation is also by far the most sought-after option among people on waiting lists.

Add to those factors the age profile and levels of disability among current and potential public-housing tenants, and it’s clear that older-style “walk-up” flats like those at Walker Street urgently need to be replaced. Lifts will provide access to higher floors for people with limited mobility, better air circulation will create healthier environments, and energy-efficient design can reduce heating and cooling costs.

All these pressures help explain why state governments are looking to leverage private-sector investment and engage the not-for-profit sector in building, upgrading and maintaining public housing.

In theory, allowing the private sector to build commercial residential property on well-located public land is win–win, because it generates revenue to offset the cost of public-housing renewal. This enables government not only to replace stock that is run-down, inaccessible or unsuitable with new more appropriate dwellings, but also to increase the supply of dwellings overall.

In the case of Walker Street, the Victorian government says it included private housing to “help fund” the redevelopment, and insists that its renewal program will increase the total number of social housing properties by “at least 10 per cent.” Existing residents will have to move away during construction, but housing minister Martin Foley has pledged that any public tenant who wants to can return when the work is complete.

Yet the potential benefits were hotly disputed at the Northcote by-election, with the mayor of Darebin, the Greens’ Kim Le Cerf, warning that redeveloping the estate could permanently displace forty-seven families.

Foley and Le Cerf can’t both be right, so what is going on here?

The government’s claim that the number of public-housing dwellings will rise is technically correct. As the plans stand, the eighty-seven existing homes in Northcote will be replaced by ninety-five new social housing units. But the overall number of bedrooms appears to decrease by about 25 per cent (from 201 to 149) because smaller one- and two-bedroom apartments will replace mostly three-bedroom dwellings. So it’s possible that the new estate could end up with more public housing but fewer public tenants.

According to researchers Abdullahi Jama and Kate Shaw, this was what happened when the state government used a similar technique to redevelop an ageing estate in inner-city Carlton. They estimate that 146 public tenancies were lost as a result of renewal and conclude that “the social-mix approach to inner-city estate redevelopments in Australia is driven more by an imperative to capitalise on the sale of public land than it is to assist public tenants.”

But private-sector development has potential benefits. Along with ninety-five new units of public housing on the 1.1 hectare Walker Street site, another 125 dwellings will be built and sold on the open market. This expansion in medium-density housing means that existing infrastructure will be used more efficiently and more housing will be available close to public transport and jobs. All things being equal, it should improve overall affordability and reduce the constant pressure to develop on the metropolitan fringe.

Where the government is on more uncertain ground is when it argues that mixing private development and public housing helps transform “pockets of disadvantage” into “genuinely integrated communities.” Critics argue that this promise rarely translates into practice, with Jama and Shaw again citing the Carlton redevelopment as an example. Far from being integrated, “public” and “private” residents ended up living in separate blocks, entering through different foyers and parking in different areas. The surrounding open space was not fully shared either, with owner-occupiers enjoying a “private courtyard garden” that public tenants can’t use. This parallels the “poor doors” found in notionally integrated developments in New York and London.

Even if these problems were overcome, the evidence that social integration makes a material difference to the lives of public-housing tenants is mixed at best. According to the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, or AHURI, “a vast literature compiled over many years” has produced only “inconclusive” findings about the benefits for disadvantaged residents.

What’s more, selling public land to fund the renewal of housing estates is a one-off that can never be repeated. AHURI cautions that “forward-thinking governments” should be planning for forty years hence, when today’s “new” public housing needs replacing and there is no public land left to sell.

More broadly, are state governments driving a hard enough bargain when they redevelop estates? After all, Victoria’s plans to increase the stock of public housing by 10 per cent are hardly ambitious.

The Coalition government in New South Wales appears to be extracting greater value from its public-housing assets than its Labor counterparts in Victoria, at least if the promises made about the redevelopment of the Ivanhoe estate in Macquarie Park are anything to go by. Under its “innovative approach to social housing,” dubbed Communities Plus, the NSW government is hoping to transform “259 social housing properties on the 8.2 hectare site into a socially integrated neighbourhood of around 3000 properties including at least 950 social and 128 affordable rental apartments.” The state government seems to have accepted that the necessary price for getting the private sector to build more social housing in Sydney is much higher levels of density.

Oona Goldsworthy, CEO of the not-for-profit housing association United Communities, based in the English city of Bristol, has dealt with private developers in creating mixed residential communities. “The land owner is in the driver’s seat,” she told me recently. It can require developers to meet particular design standards or insist on a bigger share of public housing on a revamped estate.

“One developer wanted to put all our social housing at the back of the site,” says Goldsworthy. The development was on municipal land, and a progressive city government used the planning system to demand a different layout. It’s true that governments may end up having to accept a lower price on the sale of public land as a result of applying constraints to private-sector development, but she believes this is an acceptable trade-off for more high-quality social housing.

Goldsworthy is visiting Australia on a Churchill Fellowship studying the way other countries are planning to house millennials. Her initial impression is that the problem here “is even worse than in the UK” because so many factors work against an increased supply of affordable housing. “The tax system gives such a huge advantage to people buying investment properties,” she says. “And the split of responsibilities between federal, state and local government makes things extra complicated.”

Yet Goldsworthy, who is speaking at AHURI’s 2017 National Housing Conference this week, thinks not-for-profit housing associations could play a key role in the delivery of affordable housing in Australia, just as they do in Britain. There, around 10 per cent of all housing is owned or managed by housing associations, considerably more than the 7 per cent owned by local government. Less than 1 per cent of Australian housing is owned or managed by not-for-profits.

“Housing associations in the UK grew out of an ideological and political push that the state is not necessarily the best provider of housing and the view that it can be better handled by smaller organisations that are closer to the community,” says Goldsworthy. “Ironically, some community-housing providers are now much bigger than local councils.”

She says the community-housing sector in Britain “matured relatively quickly.” Housing associations were able to borrow proactively, capturing a relatively small amount of public subsidy and matching it with lending from other sources — something public authorities couldn’t do. This agility makes housing associations attractive for Australia too, and similar arguments are being used to justify putting public-housing assets under the control of community organisations.

In a modest way, Victoria is following that lead. Under its affordable housing strategy, Homes for Victorians, the state government plans to hand over the management of 4000 state-owned properties to housing associations, about 6 per cent of its existing stock. New South Wales is going a bit further, with 14,000 public-housing dwellings on nine entire estates to be transferred to community management as part of its social housing reform program. This will increase the share of the state’s social housing managed by community-housing providers from 19 to 32 per cent.

From the perspective of state governments, transfers make sense for four main reasons. Housing associations are generally closer to the ground and more in touch than public servants tucked away in CBD offices. Housing associations do the very thing governments are reluctant to do themselves — create more housing by borrowing against the assets and their rental return. The shift to the community sector pulls in additional subsidies from the federal government, since it enables social housing tenants to qualify for Commonwealth Rent Assistance. And as long as community-housing providers hold rents below 75 per cent of market value, they are exempt from paying GST on any inputs used in building, repairing or maintenance. (State governments do not enjoy the same exemption.)

It all adds up, says David Cant, who spent sixteen years at the helm of the Brisbane Housing Company, one of Australia’s most innovative community providers. Cant, who is also speaking at the AHURI conference, reckons that every dollar invested in public housing by the state government generates a return of just 85 cents, whereas the same dollar invested in a community-housing provider can generate at least $1.35 — and significantly more if local government can be persuaded to join the party with cash or in-kind contributions, such as free or discounted land.

Victoria’s plan is part of a trend. The renewal of Sydney’s Ivanhoe Estate is a joint venture between community provider Mission Australia Housing and private developers Frasers Property Australia and the Citta Property Group. The project promises not only to generate affordable housing but also to reduce residents’ utility costs by building in solar panels, green roofs, high-efficiency centralised hot water and other environmental and energy-saving features.

The shift from public housing to community housing can have big benefits. One example is the Brisbane Housing Company’s award-winning Caggara House, in the middle-ring Brisbane suburb of Mt Gravatt. The $15 million development created fifty-seven one-bedroom apartments designed for older tenants who were living alone in public housing that had become too large for their needs. Residents who previously felt isolated, or were overwhelmed by the upkeep of a three-bedroom home with a garden, express relief and pleasure at moving into a brand-new apartment located close to shops, public transport, a library and medical services.

The advantage for the Queensland government is that a $15 million investment in Caggara House freed up existing public housing worth $25 million. “What makes Caggara work is that it is liberating houses worth $500,000,” says David Cant. He thinks the capacity of community-housing associations for innovation is even more important than the hard numbers. “Small not-for-profits know their residents and know their geography,” he says. “We’ve overheard so many conversations between the kids and Mum about how she’s always cold in winter because she’s living in a draughty old Queenslander, and the lawn always needs mowing.”

Working face to face at a local level, with a single focus on affordable housing and a willingness to take risks, community associations can do things “quicker and smarter” than an overly cautious public service, says Cant.

A “gradual but steady” shift from “public” to “community” housing has been apparent for some time, says Cant. Over the past decade, the decline in state-provided public housing has been offset by a doubling in the number of households living in housing provided by not-for-profit community organisations, up from 35,700 in 2007–08 to 72,400 in 2015–16.

As a result, the total stock of social housing (public and community housing combined) has grown, although not quickly enough to match population growth or keep up with demand. As a proportion of all housing, the share of households in social housing has fallen from 5.1 per cent to 4.7 per cent over the past decade and almost 200,000 households are on waiting lists for social housing nationwide.

Can community-housing associations be scaled up rapidly to meet this pressing need? Recent federal moves should help. In this year’s budget, treasurer Scott Morrison announced two measures designed to enable not-for-profit associations to develop more housing for low-income households by borrowing long-term at low interest rates: the National Housing Finance and Investment Corporation and an affordable housing bond aggregator.

The Victorian government has created similar mechanisms: a $1 billion loan guarantee to help housing associations borrow at affordable rates, and a $100 million revolving credit facility to provide them with long-term, low-cost loans.

Despite governments’ emerging ideological and practical support for community housing, the kind of take-off seen in Britain will only be achieved with much higher levels of subsidy than what is currently on offer. In the meantime, thousands of Australians are being denied safe, secure, affordable housing.

At the end of last year, more than 34,000 households were on the waiting list for public housing in Victoria, and upwards of 10,000 of them were classified as priority cases in urgent need. According to the state’s auditor-general, applicants “who are homeless or experiencing family violence” face an average wait of almost nine months. Applicants “who are in insecure, unsafe or inappropriate housing, or who have a serious medical condition” can expect to wait sixteen months on average, and “low-income households that may benefit from public housing” face nearly two years in the queue. The expected wait for “general social housing applicants” in most suburbs of Sydney, is “ten-plus years.”

All this serves as a reminder that community-housing providers can’t work miracles with only relatively modest government help. “Community-housing providers can extend public money much further,” says Oona Goldsworthy, “but you still need the subsidy in some form, whether that is land, financial grants or tax concessions.” David Cant agrees. “If you want to house people on lower incomes then you have to find a bit of a subsidy,” he says. “If public money comes in, private capital will follow.” ⦁

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The last great high-water mark in public transport investment was in the years between the first and second world wars, when state governments, still in control of income taxes, could afford to electrify the suburban systems of Sydney and Melbourne, build J.J. Bradfield’s Sydney Harbour Bridge and underground railway, and maintain a network of capital-city trams. Since they surrendered their income tax powers to Canberra in 1942, they’ve been strapped for cash, and the federal government has made more and more of the decisions about where public investment goes. Where it’s gone has been into public housing and suburban sewage (at least to begin with) and education, health and interstate roads, but not into public transport.

Melbourne managed to keep its tram system — now the largest on the planet — but all the other cities ditched theirs along the way. What an irony it is that one of the main reasons for getting rid of Sydney’s trams was the road lobby’s complaint that traffic in the city’s main thoroughfare, George Street, was down to five miles an hour. Seventy years later, with traffic once again down to a crawl, the tramline is being rebuilt.

Elsewhere, governments are belatedly attempting to retrofit new rail routes and build new tramlines. Even the Gold Coast, where the Queensland government ripped up the Beenleigh-to-Southport-to-Coolangatta rail line in the early 1960s, acquired a new federally funded line in the 1990s, designed to cope with a predicted population of half a million. More recently, a tramline has been inserted into the Gold Coast highway, with an extension on the way.

But roads have always been the priority. State and federal governments invested billions in urban freeways from the 1960s to the 1990s, and then Transurban came along with offers to inject capital in exchange for long leases. The company didn’t just want ownership; it also wanted remunerative links to publicly owned freeways, with its share of the take maximised by strategically located tolling points.

Victorian premier Jeff Kennett’s thirty-three-year CityLink agreement with Transurban included a clause allowing the company to claim compensation if “new roads or public transport” had a “detrimental effect” on its financial performance. Victoria’s current government has belatedly promised a rail link to Tullamarine airport, its absence being the single biggest dent in Melbourne’s claim to be a global city. One simple accident on the “Tulla” on a Friday afternoon and thousands miss their flights, parents miss closing time at childcare centres and everyone’s temperature rises dangerously.

Tollways and freeways can certainly make longer urban trips much quicker at certain times of the day, but not at peak hour, when adding lanes might increase capacity but rarely diminishes congestion. Part of the problem is that you can’t quickly alter the public transport and road systems, and it is usually hard to increase capacity significantly.

Most of the worst traffic congestion in Australia is no longer in the inner-city areas. It’s on the freeways and tollways, where cars jostle with B-double trucks and tradies’ utes. In the past, traffic problems have been blamed on city-centred road systems, but tollways and freeways — including Melbourne’s ring road, Brisbane’s Gateway system (linking the Gold and Sunshine Coasts) and western Sydney’s M7 — increasingly bypass city centres completely. Even on accident-free days, travel times often double at peak hour. A quick check of Google traffic maps for the morning and evening peak shows plenty of twenty-five-kilometre trips taking an hour or more, especially when tollways intersect with publicly owned freeways, with many lanes of traffic being forced into just a couple of lanes.

Brisbane desperately needs another rail crossing under the river because the current two lines simply can’t cope with the three million people who live in the 200-kilometre city from Noosa to Tweed Heads. Over $3 billion was unaccountably spent on the Clem Jones Tunnel under the city’s Story Bridge without building in a rail link. Instead of the predicted 60,000 vehicles a day, it got 20,000 and went broke, and Transurban eventually picked it up on the cheap. Like the saga of the cross-city tunnel in Sydney, the project showed that the resources spent on an enormously expensive quick fix could have been much better allocated.

Simple bits of infrastructure can make a significant difference. The bus, pedestrian and cycle bridge over the Brisbane River, linking Woolloongabba with the University of Queensland, services 50,000 trips a day — a bargain at $55 million. A high proportion of Brisbane’s busway system, built over the past twenty-five years, runs on bus-only infrastructure, which offers much faster travel times than buses manage in Sydney or Melbourne (though bus-only lanes can also be helpful). The bus-only lanes on the Sydney Harbour Bridge carry more passengers at peak hour than private cars, most of which carry a driver but no passengers. Myriad research studies show that when you ask car drivers to estimate their travel time, and compare it to the same trip on public transport, they rarely calculate the amount of time it takes to find a park once they reach their destination.

Metro-wide planning blueprints should be an opportunity to deal with at least these problems. The latest of these, the Greater Sydney Commission’s forty-year plan (currently at the draft stage), divides Sydney into three “cities” — CBD/Eastern Harbour, Parramatta/Central River and Western Parkland. It promises (or at least hopes) that 70 per cent of people will live and work within thirty minutes of one of these cities by 2056. Because Sydney is built on a semi-circle – the other half is the Pacific Ocean – it has much less room to expand than Melbourne. Chief commissioner Lucy Turnbull’s hero corporations, she told us in her recent Bradfield Oration, are Lend Lease, Westfield and Macquarie Group. They have all made a lot of money, though why success in developing car-based shopping complexes is a guide to a better urban future is beyond me.

Like all such plans, the Sydney blueprint is predicated on certainties — not least that air travel will continue to dominate one of the world’s busiest routes, Sydney–Melbourne, with ten million passengers a year. A fast train, especially if it went via Canberra, would completely undercut that patronage base, but it would require new regional cities along the route, along with legislation to capture the rise in land values, and genuine coordination between the NSW, ACT and Victorian governments, an unlikely prospect. And the owners of the current Sydney and Melbourne airports would be very cross indeed.

Sydney has added a few new rail lines over the past twenty years, with the impetus for the airport line coming from a fear of transport chaos during the 2000 Olympics. One of the most difficult issues in rail planning is the trade-off between speed and the number of stations, so some supporters of the new route from the Sydney CBD to Parramatta, which is central to the Turnbull scheme, want just a couple of stops and a high-speed trip, while others, including key property developers and local councils, would like a dozen stations.

Melbourne still seems to be playing around at the edges in expanding its public transport offerings, with some modest rail additions just announced. Its new trams certainly provide better access for the full gamut of passengers, and getting rid of railway level crossings seems sensible (though road bridge overpasses are pricey). The hope in the 1990s that privatisation would improve rail services has proved illusory and the state government now provides massive subsidies to private operators. Many of the larger inner-city stations, most notably Footscray’s, have been rebuilt and some new suburbs, especially in the west, have been given better rail access via new stations on existing lines.

It’s easy to forget that transport has enormous equity implications. At any one time, at least a third of the population can’t drive because they are too young, too old or incapacitated in some way, or because they can’t afford a car or, heaven forbid, don’t want to own or drive one. A bunch of futurists tell us that electric cars, self-drive cars, and now Jetsons-style personal air transport will solve all our traffic problems. In reality, cities and congestion will always go hand in hand, and morning and evening peak hours are inevitable. Cities that don’t suffer massive congestion have either had a vast amount of public money spent on their road system compared to their population (Canberra) or experienced a relatively static population (Adelaide). The range of trips people take in cities — to go to school, to shop, to eat out, to spend time at the beach, to visit friends and relatives — won’t change too much, even with the rise of home delivery of shopping and meals. Remember when pundits were telling us we would all be working at home by now?

The federal government has finally recognised the necessity of more public transport investment, but right now most of the new housing estates on our urban fringes still follow the major road routes, and households still have to rely on their cars. Developers are also making hay with “transport-oriented” high-density apartments near public transport. But investors in inner-city apartments, who account for well over half the market, still insist on car spaces, and many of these developments are causing an exponential increase in traffic despite the fact that most residents live within a few minutes of a tram, bus or rail stop. This leaves us with a growing number of high-rise apartments abutting major roads and freeways. You can escape the noise with double glazing and air conditioning, but why on earth would anyone want to venture out onto a balcony overlooking constant traffic? Still, the developers love adding those balconies, a last gasp of defiance against climate change.

For too long we’ve let public transport play second fiddle to roads and cars. We’ve conned ourselves into thinking that a car-owning democracy offers choice and freedom of movement. But not at peak hour, not at holiday time and not when there has been an accident. Instead of relying on freeway-driven development in our outer suburbs, we should return to new suburbs being built around a growing rail and light rail system, as they were from the 1880s to the 1950s. And walking should again become a valued activity, without having to play second fiddle to motorists or even cyclists, neither displaying much respect for pedestrians ⦁

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Artworks and storyboards illustrate the walk around the rocky headland, telling about Gabul the carpet python and the region’s creation story, as well as the medicinal and other uses for the soap tree and other plants that line the walk.

Embedded in the footpath are key dates in the history of colonisation, including the 1898 legislation that authorised the removal of Aboriginal people to reserves and the separation of children from families. The timeline also documents landmarks in local resistance, including when the Bwgcolman people of Palm Island called the historic 1957 strike in protest at their unjust treatment, an event whose sixtieth anniversary was recently commemorated nearby.

Lisa Paull takes this walk a few mornings each week, revelling in the views, the sense of connection to place and people, and the physical activity. Many other people are likely to be out and about, too, walking and running with prams, dogs and friends. Paull often works out on the foreshore’s public gym gear, which is where we strike up a conversation one morning in May.

Chatting with strangers is one of the pleasures of her morning ritual, in fact, along with watching the striking red-tailed black cockatoos. As the fifty-six-year-old explains, the regular workout is becoming more critical as she gets older. She needs the physical resilience to help look after her frail mother-in-law, with whom she and her husband live, and her grandchildren. “I’m not looking to do anything except keep my core strength strong, keep balance, being able to walk, keep my heart working, blood pressure down, and diabetes away.”

Body and soul: Lisa Paull exercising on Townsville’s foreshore. Melissa Sweet

A year ago, Paull was using morphine patches to help manage the pain of a degenerative spine condition. But she has been able to give them away thanks to an outdoor exercise program that has made an “enormous difference” to her life. “I’m happier than I’ve ever been,” she says. “It’s just great for your mind and your body and your soul; it’s better than sitting in a chair and letting the world pass you by.”

She goes on using the equipment while we talk. I tell her I’m heading to Ipswich, a town just southwest of Brisbane that sounds like it’s going places, to speak to the mayor, Paul Pisasale, about the work he’s done over many years to encourage the community to get active. Paull said she has heard great things about that mayor. Just weeks later, Pisasale’s term in office would end in controversy, but at this time, before the storm broke, people were singing his praises.

And so, a few days later, the setting for my morning walk is a sprawling park not far from the Ipswich CBD, where Brian Fegan, a semi-retired teacher who has lived in Ipswich for thirty-five years, has brought his ninety-one-year-old father, who is recuperating from a recent stroke. With them is Sam Tanejo, an accountant who moved from Delhi to Brisbane and then to Ipswich in search of a better life for his family.

“He heard there were two types of people,” Fegan jokes. “Those who come from Ipswich, and those who wished they had.” The men’s friendship began in the park a few years back when they met over dog walking.

When I ask them about the mayor, the two men say he is well-known for supporting community initiatives and for his unrelenting spruiking of Ipswich. Pisasale, a local councillor since 1991, was first elected as an independent mayor in 2004, and went on to win 83 per cent of the vote in last year’s mayoral election.

“I think Paul Pisasale is the most popular mayor I’ve ever seen,” says Tanejo. “When I came to Australia, Ipswich had a stigma attached to it; but once you start living here, I would say it’s one of the best places around Brisbane to raise a family. I got more active after coming to Ipswich; seeing people jogging all the time, I got more active myself.”

I leave the men enjoying their restful spot and check out some nearby public gym equipment. I’m tempted to try it out, but I’m feeling a bit sore from the previous evening’s sampling of one of the many low-cost fitness programs provided by the Ipswich Hospital Foundation. Each week, about 500 people join classes like these around Ipswich, from boxing to aquafitness and Pilates, and pay a maximum of just $5 per class.

The foundation, mainly funded with revenue raised by managing car parks at the local hospital and shopping plaza, is focused on health promotion and keeping people out of hospital — a big ask in a region with rapid population growth and a socioeconomic profile associated with poorer population health. “The scale of the challenge, it’s huge. There’s a great deal of room to improve our personal health as a region,” says the foundation’s CEO, Phillip Bell. “We are not coming from an excellent place in terms of health and wellbeing.”

Bell, who is also a farmer and president of the local chamber of commerce, was, like many, enticed to the area by affordable housing. He describes a long list of developments under way or planned in the region, including a focus on innovation and social connectivity. In 2019, the city will host an autonomous vehicle trial.

“It’s a very easy city to become passionate about,” Bell says. “A lot of it comes down to what I call the Pisasale factor. Paul is a unique leader… He is the type of mayor who gets involved when there are gaps, when people are missing out. As a consequence, we have a really strong and vibrant not-for-profit sector, and I include us in that.”

Waiting outside the mayor’s office to hear more about his role as Ipswich’s chief health promoter, I found plenty to engage the eye. Glass cabinets display hundreds of espresso cups — the Mayor’s Demitasse Collection, listed in 2008 by Guinness World Records as the largest of its kind, which Pisasale has said is valued at more than $100,000.

Inside the mayoral office is a life-size cardboard cut-out of the man himself, who quickly makes it clear why he is often described as a larger-than-life figure. He presents me with a gift-wrapped scarf, decorated with a City of Ipswich motif, before launching into conversation that jumps quickly from one topic to the next, linked by his obvious love for Ipswich, his drive to promote it, and his frustration with the political prioritisation of marginal seats rather than areas of need.

A better place? The then mayor of Ipswich, Paul Pisasale. Melissa Sweet

A concern for health and wellbeing also features prominently. Pisasale describes some of his own experience with multiple sclerosis, and the importance of people with chronic diseases having hope and motivation to remain active. Every time his blood pressure is checked or he takes other health measures, he posts about it on Facebook.

Pisasale also stresses the importance of community engagement and social inclusion, though these are not terms he uses, talking instead about kindness, care and compassion, and describing the city’s parties to welcome refugees. “If the [federal] government was the government when my parents came over in the big boats from Sicily, I’d be the mayor of Manus Island,” he says.

To be a great city, he says, requires taking a collective responsibility to care for all. Pisasale laughs when I produce the book I’ve been reading in preparation for the interview. I read out the title, If Mayors Ruled the World, and ask him what difference that would make. “It would be a better place,” comes his quick response.

Given the failure of nation-states to tackle pressing problems such as climate change, the book argues, it’s up to cities to save the world. There are “not many climate change deniers among mayors,” observes the author, the late Benjamin R. Barber, formerly a senior research scholar at the Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society at the City University of New York.

Barber mounts a case for a global parliament of mayors or a world assembly of cities to formalise the networks developing between cities or mayors within and across countries. “Mayors can rule the world because cities represent a level of governance sufficiently local to demand pragmatism and efficiency in problem solving but sufficiently networked to be able to fashion cooperative solutions to the interdependent challenges they face,” he writes.

Past and present mayors, from Michael Bloomberg in New York to Ayodele Adewale in Lagos and Sheila Dikshit in Delhi, figure in Barber’s account. Leaders like these, Barber argues, tend to share an all-absorbing passion for their locale, as well as focusing on fixing problems rather than on ideology or partisan politics. Pisasale isn’t mentioned in the book, but these descriptors echo much of what people say about him.

The day after our meeting, Pisasale joins local business and community members on an RAAF air-to-air refuelling mission over the Pacific Ocean. It is an opportunity to talk up his support for the local Amberley RAAF base; the stunning video clip later posted to his Facebook page attracts more than 16,000 views. “We want to make Ipswich Australia’s most prosperous and liveable Smart City,” he posts, “through a strong focus on jobs, growth and liveability.”

Later that week, Pisasale is due to fly to Melbourne to meet celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, whose first Ministry of Food program in Australia opened in the Ipswich CBD in 2011. Speaking with the staff there, it seems the mayor is one of their most enthusiastic supporters, dropping in regularly to greet those taking cooking classes, sometimes serenading them with song. “He is quite a character; it’s just amazing the support that he gives us,” says a staff member.

But there’s a surprising coda to my visit to the mayor’s office. Four weeks later, in an emotional press conference at a local hospital, Pisasale announced his resignation. A few weeks after that, he was charged with extortion and other matters, and expelled from the Queensland branch of the Labor Party.

On 17 July, Queensland’s Crime and Corruption Commission was granted an extra two months to prepare a full brief of evidence, with a further court mention scheduled for September. A mayoral by-election is due on 19 August, and some residents are campaigning for the entire council to face an election. Only the passage of time will reveal the true legacy for Ipswich of “the people’s mayor,” as he has so often been called.

Benjamin Barber published his book in 2013, and its call for more effective governance grows ever more timely in the wake of Brexit, Donald Trump’s election, and increasingly unstable geopolitics. In the United States, hardly a week goes by without media reporting on coalitions of mayors or cities for climate change action. When the Climate Council recently launched a Cities Power Partnership to support such local action in Australia, one report was headlined, “In the Absence of National Leadership, Cities Are Driving Climate Policy.”

It’s a line that raises questions for the wider public health sector. The 2014 federal budget’s cuts to public health spending left a big vacuum. For those feeling desperate — or optimistic — this opens the opportunity for other leaders to step up.

We recently saw such an example when a coalition of health groups released a framework for a national strategy on climate, health and wellbeing. Fiona Armstrong, executive director of the Climate and Health Alliance, hopes it will provide policy-makers at all levels with guidance. “When governments refuse to lead,” she says, “it is important for civil society to step in.” The coalition made detailed recommendations for health and other sectors, including calling for federal, state and territory governments to establish a ministerial health and climate change forum to oversee coordinated national action.

Once, governments might have been expected to do this work of policy development, and in other countries they have: strategies addressing climate change and health have been developed by the European Union and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States, while Britain has implemented a policy for the National Health Service that includes both mitigation and adaptation strategies.

Public health advocates could learn much from the environment movement and its long history of activism and grassroots engagement, says Michael Thorn, chief executive of the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education – not to mention, I’d add, the long history of resistance by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, as evidenced by the 1957 strikers on Palm Island and a new generation of activists, like the Seed Mob, an Indigenous youth climate network.

Thorn describes a sense of frustration and anger among public health professionals. Many are looking to develop new alliances with communities, he says, including supporting the work of local councils who are challenging alcohol retailers and pokie operators. “The paucity of national leadership has caused us all to think about what can happen at a local level… we need to try and find those leaders and encourage them and support them,” he says.

The Heart Foundation has been doing just that for some years, points out Julie Anne Mitchell, director of cardiovascular programs for the foundation’s NSW Division. “Our first experience of really working well with local councils was back in 2007 when the state government had just banned smoking in pubs and clubs.” Since then, she says, the government has resisted taking action on smoking in outdoor public places.

The NSW Division began working with a few local councils that supported the measure, and over the next five years ninety-eight of the state’s 152 councils adopted some form of smoke-free outdoor areas policy. Most were in Sydney, but the move created a groundswell of support for statewide action, says Mitchell, and the NSW government was brought to the legislative table in 2012.

Testing public policy: the National Heart Foundation’s Julie Anne Mitchell.

Working with local councils also involves engaging environmental health officers to encourage food outlets to switch from saturated and trans-fat oils to healthier oils. Cessnock Council has been “the standout example of this strategy,” says Mitchell, reflecting local concern about the area’s high rates of heart disease. In 2012, 12 per cent of small food outlets in Cessnock were using healthier oils; after three years of the Healthier Oils Program, two-thirds were. Buoyed by that success, the foundation is widening the campaign; the huge Penrith Panthers Leagues Club in western Sydney is estimated to have removed a tonne of saturated fat from its menu each year as a result.

The goal, says Mitchell, is to persuade the state government to put its might behind the program, making it part of the job description for environmental health officers. “It is often the role of NGOs to test public policy because we run ahead of where the government’s appetite is set,” she says. “It’s only through testing these cases that we get enough of a groundswell that convinces politicians in a way that a report or a commissioned piece of research never will.”

The Heart Foundation is a member of the CycleSafe Network, a coalition that has worked with the Newcastle City Council, doing the hard slog in developing a plan for a 140 kilometre active transport network across the Newcastle and Lake Macquarie local government areas. A CycleSafe report says 63 per cent of people in the area are overweight or obese, 1 per cent currently cycle to work, and air pollution is often above recommended levels.

The aim is to make walking and cycling for short trips — less than two kilometres for walking and less than ten kilometres for cycling — a viable alternative to car travel, and accessible for children, the aged and people with reduced mobility. The network would not only boost health and the environment, but would also be a great opportunity for tourism and regional development, Mitchell says, pointing to the experience of Portland in Oregon. It would also provide a blueprint for other regional communities, she adds.

Despite strong local support, Mitchell says the state’s Coalition government looks unlikely to back the CycleSafe plan, despite the $1.75 billion sale of the Port of Newcastle. This is not a marginal seat; the local Labor MPs have solid margins.

Meanwhile, Mitchell and colleagues are advocating for forthcoming amendments to the NSW Planning Bill to incorporate a focus on health. Such a change would be a huge enabler for local councils, providing much-needed support in the practical ways they could embed physical activity and food policies locally. “If we could get health into planning, we should also have it in transport. It is a way of getting health across government.”

The push to implement health in all policies, known as HiAP, is gaining increasing traction, according to a manual for local government in Britain: “HiAP is based on the recognition that our greatest health challenges — for example, non-communicable diseases, health inequities and inequalities, climate change and spiralling health care costs — are highly complex and often linked through the social determinants of health. Just one government sector will not have all the tools, knowledge, capacity, let alone the budget to address this complexity.”

This isn’t rocket science. To flourish, we need healthy, sustainable environments; decent living conditions; inclusive and culturally safe societies that tackle poverty, racism, discrimination and trauma; and access to the basics — affordable housing, quality education, active transport, quality healthcare, healthy and affordable food, safe drinking water and high-quality internet.

Yet there are so many roadblocks, as the National Rural Health Conference in Cairns heard earlier this year. The chair of the Northern Queensland Primary Health Network, adjunct associate professor Trent Twomey, described the importance of dealing with the social and economic factors that determine health and ill-health. Using a series of maps, he showed the lack of alignment between the boundaries governing education and training, police, local government and health services in his own network’s region, including thirty-one local government areas with thirty-one mayors.

“It is extremely difficult for regional Queenslanders to have control over their destiny if the boundaries of all the different state and federal agencies don’t line up… The system of government, whether state or federal, is basically designed against us,” Twomey said. “Communities of interest” would be a much better way of determining the boundaries of governments and service providers, he argued. Only in that way would local communities be empowered “to take control of our destinies in a planning process.”

Given the obstacles to such massive institutional reform, though, might there be other ways to act local, and to subvert all the jurisdictional, sectoral and organisational silos and roadblocks?

One approach has been building steam in southwestern Victoria, where a community-based health movement is being forged in public meetings that bring together representatives from all walks, including local organisations and government. Participants are given tools, developed and continually updated by Deakin University researchers and community leaders working together, to map the complex factors contributing to weight gain in local children and to identify where change is possible. The process helps shift focus from individual behaviours towards topics such as urban planning.

These collaborative modelling processes have made a powerful contribution to new networks for action, says Janette Lowe, one of the leaders of the collaborative GenR8 Change movement, and director of the Southern Grampians Glenelg Primary Care Partnership, based in Hamilton.

Primary Care Partnerships are funded by the Victorian government to develop and support local cooperation between local governments, health services and community services organisations. They provide a platform for local innovation, says Lowe, and that’s important for driving wider policy. “Government is not in the innovation and early adoption space,” she says. “They’re in the space of when things become mainstream.”

Lowe recalls a meeting of about sixty people in Portland, a coastal industrial town, in 2014. The group modelled and mapped obesity prevention, producing many “aha moments” as people began to appreciate that “this is a whole of community problem and this is where I can influence it.” It was a very empowering process, she says. “It isn’t about someone coming to fix your problem, or coming to a workshop to get information about you. People go away very motivated and there is a real buzz.”

As well as the usual concerns — like junk food marketing and the costs of children’s sport — community members said the taste of drinking water in Portland was contributing to demand for sugary drinks. Wannon Water is working to address these concerns, and is also installing public drinking fountains across the region. Acting managing director Ian Bail and his colleagues are also investigating what more the organisation can do for public health, as well as how to apply the whole-system thinking from public health to their business.

“We would love to see our region flourish,” Bail says. “It is about that local connection. That encourages us to work with a range of other agencies, to say, how can we improve liveability of our towns in a collaborative way?

When similar group modelling workshops were held in Hamilton, to the north of Portland, community members subsequently reported that more than 180 different actions had resulted. Lowe says these included changes in the food provided in school canteens and day-care facilities, and one woman initiating a “ride to school bus” that collected local children to cycle to school each morning. “Some of the biggest change-makers are your passionate mums or people from the community who aren’t necessarily in an organisation,” says Lowe.

Along the way, Rohan Fitzgerald, CEO of Western District Health Service and formerly a local councillor, has emerged as a powerful voice for public health in a way rarely seen among health service executives. Meeting Deakin’s Steven Allender has, he says, “hooked” him on the need for a paradigm shift at his organisation. Sugary drinks haven’t been sold on its premises since 2015, a move that has been followed by some other public health services in Victoria and, more recently, New South Wales.

Fitzgerald is also behind a petition to federal parliament calling for a sugar tax on sugary drinks. “I don’t know of any other public health services that have petitioned the federal government to introduce a sugar tax,” he says.

The research team has deliberately maintained a low profile to ensure communities devise their own tools for change and take responsibility for the outcomes. Community volunteers were trained to collect data on the height, weight and behaviour of children, creating a level of engagement that meant far greater participation rates than usual. The received wisdom from national data is that 25 to 30 per cent of children are overweight or obese, but prevalence rates of 27 to 52 per cent were found among primary school students in the Southern Grampians in 2015 (varying according to age and gender), according to a GenR8 Change report back to community via YouTube. “So it’s way more of a problem than we thought,” says Allender.

Timely access to this local data has been important for engaging the local communities in devising solutions, says Janette Lowe, including working closely with the local newspaper, which, she says, has been “one of the great leaders in our community.” Great care is taken to ensure the data is not used in a way that causes stigma. The 2017 survey results are due soon, and Lowe is hopeful they will see improvements in health-related behaviours, such as children being more active, as a result of all the community’s work.

Meanwhile, the pair are turning their sights to the national stage. Allender is seeking philanthropic funding so the model used in southwestern Victoria can be shared more widely. “We have a waiting list of about one hundred communities around the country who want to get involved,” he says. Lowe is hoping to run a series of national workshops to mobilise communities more widely. “My big mantra at the moment is, I’m not going to wait for government,” she says. “It’s about passionate people coming together to make change.”

The distribution of health in any society is essentially a reflection of who holds power and how it is wielded. Can local mobilisation help to counter the powerful interests that undermine our health in a time of political and policy capture and inertia? Perhaps this is not an entirely new question, but it is being asked with a new urgency. •

The assistance of the Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund in providing funding for this article is gratefully acknowledged.

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The key themes are well-known. Australians are getting older: almost five million of us are now over sixty, and almost a million Australians are over eighty. We are becoming ethnically more diverse: more than six million Australians – more than one in four – were born overseas, and for the first time more of them come from Asia than from Europe.

Fewer of us own our homes (thank you, negative gearing!). Home ownership rates are now back to postwar levels, and housing densities in the big cities are rising as more people squeeze into existing homes. Fewer of us believe in God, and those who do worship in increasingly diverse forms: only 52 per cent identified themselves as Christians, 8 per cent belonged to other faiths – mainly Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism, in that order – while 30 per cent declared no religion and 10 per cent declined to answer.

Despite the NBN, and the way the internet has transformed the lives of most of us, the census found that almost 15 per cent of Australian homes still have no internet connection. While 25 per cent of households reported a combined household income of less than $800 a week, 15 per cent reported earning more than $3000 a week (and another 10 per cent provided incomplete information on incomes, or none at all).

While census questions about incomes are always subject to a high rate of non-compliance, those figures, and many other census details, map out a growing level of economic inequality in a country for which social equality has long been a trademark.

From the census data, the Bureau of Statistics has concluded that Australia has more people than it thought. More precisely, Victoria (Melbourne, that is) had 100,000 more people than previously thought, and is now estimated to have grown by 146,000 in 2016 alone. This means the city is adding more than 10,000 people a month, and Victoria – essentially Melbourne and the area within a 150 kilometre radius of it – is attracting almost 40 per cent of the nation’s population growth. The political and policy consequences are startling.

Politically, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory will each get an extra seat in parliament because of their rapid growth (long overdue for the ACT, whose two existing seats have huge enrolments). The new ACT seat will certainly go to Labor, and the Victorian one probably so. On the other hand, Adelaide will lose a seat, and most Adelaide seats are Labor.

Had it happened earlier, Malcolm Turnbull might now be struggling with a minority government. The census figures have just made his chances of re-election a bit harder.

Turnbull and his team must now accept their responsibility to play a constructive role in helping to fill Melbourne’s need for new infrastructure. As I have written before, this government’s neglect is stunning. In 2017–18, on its own figures, it will spend or lend $1.7 billion to build new infrastructure in Sydney, but will provide only $193 million for new infrastructure in Melbourne, which now has to house and service more than a third of Australia’s population growth. This blatant bias is bad policy, and bad politics.

The mainstream media did a very good job of covering the census data, but inevitably it focused first on the overall numbers. In many ways, the most revealing things the census tells us are in the finer detail, or will come from matching one set of data with another. That will take time.

One of the surprises, for instance, was that the overall rate of home ownership in 2016 was not too much lower than a decade earlier. Of those answering the question, 67.1 per cent said they owned their home, down from 69.8 per cent a decade earlier. But there were limitations in the data supplied, which could mean that the census understates the shift.

For years, compliance in answering census questions has been in decline. In 1996, only 2.3 per cent of households skipped the question on housing tenure. Last year, 7.7 per cent of households answering the census form skipped that question (and many others). Can we assume that they have similar tenure patterns to those who did answer the question? Or is it likely that a higher proportion of those who don’t answer are renters? If so, the published figures understate the decline in ownership.

Also obscuring the problem is the fact that home ownership rises with age – and Australia is an ageing society. I’m burying the scoop somewhat, but detailed figures given to Inside Story by the Australian Bureau of Statistics show dramatic declines in home ownership by age group since negative gearing took off in the early 1980s.

Ownership in retreat: home owners by age group

Since 1981, the rate of home ownership among twenty-five to thirty-four year olds has crashed from 61 per cent to 45 per cent. (Figures for past census years come from a submission by Sydney University’s respected housing expert Judith Yates to the parliamentary inquiry into home ownership led by Liberal MP John Alexander. The inquiry was cynically terminated by the Coalition before the independently minded Alexander could file a report, then reconstituted under the more compliant David Coleman, who duly reported that if there are any problems with housing affordability, state governments are to blame.)

Okay, we know that many of today’s young are big spenders on their phones, overseas holidays and weddings, and don’t prioritise home ownership as their parents did; but other young people do want to own their own homes, save as hard as they can, only to find the market out of their reach. Even among thirty-five to forty-four year olds, the rate of home ownership has fallen from 75 per cent in 1981 to 62 per cent in 2016.

To put it another way, those without their own home at the age of forty or so have risen from 25 per cent to 38 per cent of Australians that age.

It has happened because of a bipartisan policy, until recently, to reduce home ownership by allowing tax breaks for rental investors. As treasurers, Joe Hockey and Scott Morrison tried to get the Coalition to reduce or remove these tax breaks, without success – probably because so many Coalition MPs and senators are themselves taking advantage of this rort. Chris Bowen has been more successful in getting Labor to reverse its policy, which gives us a clear choice between the two parties: one of them now sides with the investors, the other with aspiring home owners.

The census found that in the past decade, the slump in home ownership has spread to higher age groups. This time, 28 per cent of households headed by forty-five- to fifty-four-year-olds were without a home they owned, as against 22 per cent a decade earlier. Future budgets will face serious costs if they have to subsidise the rental bills of millions of retirees, rather than the few hundred thousand receiving rental support now.

The bottom line from the census is that different Australias are changing at very different paces. Some changes are sweeping right across the nation; others are confined to the big cities, and especially to the inner areas of them. It’s worth burrowing down into the detail to discover what’s really going on where.

Let’s look at the data for three federal electorates. All are in Victoria, but in different areas, and the changes there reflect those happening in every state of Australia.

Melbourne is the only federal electorate held by the Greens, and it’s at the epicentre of the rapid remaking of Australia’s inner cities. In the established outer eastern suburbs lies Aston, which has seen, by contrast, the biggest swing to the Liberals anywhere in Victoria over the past thirty years, changing it from a marginal Labor seat to a safe Liberal one. And far away in the Western District is Wannon, once represented by Malcolm Fraser, which today seems as remote from social and economic change as any place in Australia.

The Census, as told by three electorates

The massive increase in Victoria’s population – in a decade, it’s swollen by 1.14 million or 22.3 per cent – has increased the average enrolment in its electorates by 15.5 per cent since the 2010 redistribution. A third of that has gone into just five electorates, all held by Labor or the Greens: four on the outer suburban fringe, and Melbourne. The census counted 136,018 people living in Aston, 133,772 people in Wannon, and 208,593 in Melbourne, which now has the biggest population of any of the 150 federal electorates.

Since the 2010 redistribution, Melbourne has added another 52,767 people, whereas Wannon has added just 8415 and Aston 6568. Inner Melbourne can absorb that number because many of them are students, and new jobs are constantly springing up for workers. The inner city is a dynamic region: if you live there, the world around you is changing constantly, and that influences your values. If you live in a settled outer suburb or country town with little population growth, the world around you isn’t changing much, and that too influences your values.

In the three statistical regions covering Wannon, meanwhile, the census found population growth of just 2600 over the past decade. By 2016, in round figures, it had 4500 fewer children and teenagers than a decade earlier, and 3200 fewer people of prime working age – but 10,300 more people at or nearing retirement age. The next census might well record more retirees than workers, because few jobs are being created there and many of the young are migrating. That was why the Andrews government had to swallow its principles and agree to a new subsidy for Alcoa’s Portland smelter, to keep one of the area’s biggest employers.

Victoria is seen as an economic success story, but if you dig into the figures, that success is concentrated in Melbourne, and particularly in inner Melbourne. The Bureau of Statistics estimates that in the past three years, 95.5 per cent of all growth in full-time jobs in the state has been in Melbourne. In net terms, only 4.5 per cent of new full-time jobs are in the regions. In the country, six in every seven new jobs created are part-time. That’s why the kids move out, and head to the city.

In recent days the Age has shone its investigative spotlight on the problems of a city (and to some extent, a nation) that seems to be relying on population growth and housing construction to drive its economy. While the series made too much of the Bureau’s unreliable measures of state output, and let the Turnbull government off lightly, it did a fine job of highlighting the gap between the city’s breakneck population growth and the modest investments in infrastructure, and the lack of jobs, services and infrastructure in the outer suburbs that still take a narrow majority of Melbourne’s population growth.

The census confirms that, essentially, immigration is driving Victoria’s economy. In the electorate of Melbourne, 50.3 per cent of those who gave their birthplace were born in Australia, while 49.7 per cent were born overseas, including 11.1 per cent in China alone, and a similar number in ASEAN countries such as Malaysia. That probably understates the reality, since one in ten census respondents didn’t answer the question.

Even twenty-five kilometres away in suburban Aston, centred on Knox at the foot of the Dandenongs, a third of residents were born overseas. Of them, though, one in four was from the white English-speaking world (what I call “the Anglo crew”), and the rest were from a wide range of countries, including an outsize share from Sri Lanka. In fact, one in forty of Aston’s residents comes from that island, part of a large community that started settling in Melbourne in the 1960s and is now 54,000 strong.

But in the far west of Victoria, hardly any Asian migration has reached Wannon. The census found only 8.7 per cent of its residents were born overseas, and most were from Britain, New Zealand and other Anglo countries. The biggest contingent among the non-English-speaking countries were the 597 residents who had migrated from the Netherlands, most of them at least fifty years ago.

Malcolm Fraser opened Australia to Vietnamese refugees, yet forty years later, only sixty-nine Vietnamese-born people live in his old electorate, compared with 5098 in the electorate of Melbourne. Wannon has just 261 residents born in China; the electorate of Melbourne has 20,739.

In Melbourne, 41 per cent of people said they spoke a language other than English at home; in Wannon, only 4 per cent did. In Melbourne, 13 per cent of residents were Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus and other minority faiths. In Wannon, only 1.4 per cent belong to non-Christian faiths. The difference is staggering.

Is it plausible to suggest that one reason for the polarisation of Australians’ attitudes to Muslims in general, and Muslim refugees in particular, is that people in some areas are used to them being in their neighbourhood, while people in other areas are not?

It is striking how what we are seeing now differs from the first wave of postwar migration in the 1940s and early 50s. That wave was led by the British, the Dutch and the Germans, who spread right across the country and put down roots wherever they settled. Even now, the 2016 census finds that in New South Wales, 34 per cent of the British-born live outside Sydney, as do 37 per cent of Germans and 44 per cent of the Dutch. Stunningly, so do 44 per cent of the Australian-born. In Victoria, the numbers are lower, but the pattern is similar.

But the second wave of migrants that followed, dominated by the Italians and Greeks, were more likely to form urban enclaves in the big cities. In Victoria, which attracted the largest share, only 10 per cent of Italian migrants and 3.4 per cent of Greeks now live outside Melbourne, much the same as a generation ago.

And the third wave of migration we are seeing now is almost completely city-centric. In Sydney on census night, the 224,685 Chinese migrants clearly outnumbered the 178,411 British – probably the first time in Australian history that British migrants have ever been outnumbered by another race in any capital city. But in the rest of New South Wales, with its 2.65 million people, the census found just 9578 Chinese migrants. Only 4.2 per cent of those in New South Wales live outside Sydney.

Sydney is also home to 96.3 per cent of the state’s Vietnamese-born population, 97.4 per cent of its Iraqi migrants, and 97.6 per cent of its Lebanese. That’s so different from the first wave of Lebanese migration a century or more ago, which spread out all over Australia, with some enterprising migrants buying horse and cart, fitting them out, and riding from station to station as the general stores of the outback.

Migrants to Victoria are similarly concentrated in Melbourne. The few square kilometres ruled by the Melbourne City Council house four and a half times as many Chinese-born residents as the 210,000 square kilometres of regional Victoria, which include cities like Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo. Melbourne is home to 97.2 per cent of Victoria’s Chinese migrants, 96.8 per cent of its Sri Lankans, 94.9 per cent of its booming Indian-born population, and 98.0 per cent of its Vietnamese.

Sydney now – and twenty-five years ago

Melbourne now – and twenty-five years ago

The one group of Asian migrants that has spread across Australia are the Filipinos. Barely half of them have settled in Sydney and Melbourne, and the rest have gone everywhere – maybe because they speak better English and can find work more readily, who knows? They are easily the biggest Asian community in Wannon, and you will find more Filipinos than Chinese across regional Australia.

Migrants usually flock to the cities. It’s natural that newcomers go where they have friends or family. But what we are seeing now is that natural tendency carried to extreme lengths. The difference between the racial makeup of electorates such as Melbourne and Wannon is like a difference between countries, rather than between parts of one region. Their human makeups have little in common. It’s not surprising that their political views also have little in common.

There are many other points of difference between these three electorates. Incomes, mortgages and rents are all highest in Melbourne, lowest in Wannon. The concentration of families is highest in Aston, whereas most households in Melbourne are either one-person flats or group houses. Almost half the residents of Melbourne have a university education; in Wannon, just one in seventeen people has been to university. And even in 2016, 23 per cent of occupied homes in Wannon have no internet connection.

The census also found that one in six homes in Wannon was unoccupied: more than anything, this reflects the decades of relative stagnation that has seen farms consolidate, villages die away and smaller towns shrink as the young migrate to bigger places. Footy grounds decay for lack of enough youngish men to field a team. A lot of western Victoria is going through that decline.

Even in Aston, 6.2 per cent of homes were unoccupied. In the city of Melbourne, a stunning 14.6 per cent of homes were declared empty by the census collectors; in neighbouring Port Phillip and Stonnington, the vacancy rate was almost as high. It adds to the case for a serious government-led stocktake of vacant housing, and the reasons for it. It’s a similar story in Sydney.

But the census did find one trend happening right across the nation, and at surprisingly similar rates: Australia is losing its religion. This is not so much because migration has brought growing numbers of Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists; their collective share of our people has grown from 2.6 per cent in 1991 to 8.2 per cent, but their numbers remain relatively small: the number of Muslims in Australia (604,240) is similar to the number of Presbyterians, and less than one-in-forty of the population.

The big increase has been in the number openly declaring that they have no religion. From 12.9 per cent a generation ago, that has soared to 30.1 per cent in the latest census, while another 9.6 per cent ignored the question. The Bureau of Statistics tells us that 75 per cent of all marriages in 2015 were carried out by civil celebrants; only brides and grooms born in the Middle East preferred to have a religious ceremony.

Even an ageing, conservative area like Wannon is experiencing that change. Apart from the lack of Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus, its census responses reflected the nation. The census found that, by state, the highest proportion of non-believers was in Tasmania, the nation’s oldest and most Anglo society, where 37.8 per cent said they had no religion, compared with just 25.1 per cent in New South Wales, which has by far the highest concentration of East Asian and Middle Eastern migrants.

Carrying out a census is an expression of national unity. But its results in many areas highlight our national divisions. •

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Western Sydney is Australia’s third-largest economy. With its population set to grow by one million people over the next twenty years, a City Deal for this region will be a big deal. The two other City Deals struck so far – in Townsville and Launceston – have been more modest in scope, which makes Western Sydney the first substantial test of the Coalition’s “smart cities” approach to urban development. When he announced the policy in April last year, prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said that smart cities would deliver all the things that Lindy Deitz wants for her squinters and more: “Jobs closer to homes, more affordable housing, better transport connections and healthy environments.”

Smart cities are also designed to drive “the innovation economy,” and City Deals are at their heart. Angus Taylor, Turnbull’s assistant cities and digital transformation minister, told the Melbourne conference that “we have to reshape the way our cities work” because they are becoming “a brake on productivity.” It’s not just the time lost to traffic jams and long commutes, it’s also inefficient land use and poor matching of jobs and skills. Deitz gives the example of major hospitals in Western Sydney struggling to find staff because key workers like nurses are priced out of nearby housing.

The very things that make cities economically productive – the benefits that flow from bringing people, ideas and capital closer together – also undermine that productivity by creating congestion and pushing up rents and property prices. Existing landowners make windfall gains but the poor and the young are forced either to pay excessively for housing or to move away from the places that offer the most jobs and the best career prospects. We are “actually asking young Australians to buy a high-paid job… by buying an expensive house or renting an expensive house,” says Taylor.

Improving Australia’s cities is “not a minor issue about productivity, but a central question of economic policy,” international urban development expert Duncan Maclellan told the conference. With current policies reinforcing inequality and frustrating sustainable development, it is also a matter of fairness and environmental impact. And the fact that Angus Taylor’s cities portfolio is located within the prime minister’s department suggests that Turnbull – unusually for a Liberal leader – recognises these realities.

In his famous “It’s time” policy speech during the 1972 election campaign, Labor’s Gough Whitlam told supporters in Blacktown that almost every major national problem related to cities. “A national government which cuts itself off from responsibility for the nation’s cities is cutting itself off from the nation's real life,” he said. “A national government which has nothing to say about cities has nothing relevant or enduring to say about the nation or the nation’s future.”

In office, Whitlam set up a Department of Urban and Regional Development and involved the Commonwealth in everything from inner-city renewal and heritage protection to public transport and sewerage projects. Since then, the engagement of national governments with cities has tended to rise under Labor and fall under the Coalition. During the Hawke–Keating years, Labor minister Brian Howe initiated the Building Better Cities program, which shares some characteristics – including collaboration between different levels of government – with City Deals. The Rudd and Gillard governments not only developed a national urban policy to improve “the productivity, sustainability and liveability of major urban centres,” but also set up the National Affordable Housing Agreement and the National Rental Affordability Scheme, created Infrastructure Australia, and tracked progress in annual State of Australian Cities reports.

By contrast, the Fraser, Howard and Abbott governments tended to “stick to their knitting,” treating cities, urban policy and public transport as the realm of state governments. Turnbull is bucking this trend. The idea is to bring together all three tiers of government – national, state and local – to forge agreement on urban development goals and the measures needed to achieve them. Angus Taylor says the deals will be transparent and the lines of responsibility will be clear: “No more finger pointing, no more saying, look, housing’s the state, or local or the federal government’s fault. We put the finger-pointing aside and we say, you know, we’re actually going to solve this problem. We’re going to publicise who’s accountable for what and we’re going to hold ourselves to account.”

Taylor’s bold words are an attempt to deal with the fact that no single level of government has clear carriage of urban issues in Australia. Tim Williams, CEO of the Committee for Sydney, describes cities as “orphans of public policy.” In Melbourne, Duncan Maclennan asked rhetorically, “Who deals with the issue that we had a 20 per cent rise in property prices in Sydney last year?” His answer: “No one.” Three layers of government, he says, “is precisely the problem.”

City Deals have their origins in the longstanding French contrat de ville system, but they have come to Australia via more recent developments in Britain. Both Maclennan and Williams have direct experience of the way the deals have operated there since 2012, Maclennan as “knowledge leader” on City Deals for Britain's Economic and Social Research Council from 2014 to 2017 and Williams as a former senior adviser in the UK Department of Communities and Local Government.

Although he was initially sceptical about a private-sector-led scheme supposedly based on innovative finance models, Maclellan believes that City Deals have been “fundamentally positive” and “changed the game.” The poster child is Manchester: its agreement, the biggest and most established in Britain, has produced a revolving infrastructure fund (with the city earning back some of the tax revenue arising from the boost to economic growth), a metropolitan investment strategy, a housing investment fund, and hubs to promote apprenticeships, business growth and low-carbon initiatives.

The Manchester deal only involved two levels of government – national and local. Perhaps more relevant to Australia is Britain’s second-largest City Deal, in Glasgow, which also involved the Scottish government. The deal activates more than £1 billion (A$1.7 billion) in infrastructure investment for urban renewal and transport projects, establishes a life sciences research centre and provides targeted assistance for young unemployed Glaswegians and other vulnerable residents.

One of the most important things to come out of both the Manchester and Glasgow deals is not new money or new construction projects but innovation in the way those cities are governed. The Greater Manchester Combined Authority brings together ten separate local authorities and the Glasgow and Clyde deal brings together eight. The idea is that an overarching body can more effectively address issues that cross council boundaries, including transport planning, urban regeneration and investment strategies.

The Western Sydney City deal is also aiming for this type of horizontal integration. In bringing together eight local governments (Camden, Campbelltown, Fairfield, Hawkesbury, Liverpool, Penrith, the Blue Mountains and Wollondilly), it seeks to overcome another perennial problem of urban planning in all of Australia’s capital cities except Brisbane – the lack of an overarching authority that can coordinate policies across a greater metropolitan area. “Sydney does not exist as an entity,” says Tim Williams. “It doesn’t act as an entity; it has things done to it.”

One of the advantages of City Deals, says Williams, is that they are shaped from the bottom up, based on what local governments determine they need rather than on what central governments want to give them. And since local governments must invest some of their own money up front, they also have skin in the game. Both these factors move City Deals away from the Australian norm of top-down federal grants that are so vulnerable to pork barrelling (although it didn’t pass notice at the Melbourne conference that Australia’s first three City Deals are all in electorally sensitive regions).

One of the potential pitfalls of City Deals is the amount of effort needed to set up and implement them. Necessarily bespoke by nature, they can’t simply be rolled out across the nation. Townsville’s deal includes investment in port and rail facilities, as well as a new NRL stadium and a cooperative research centre for the development of Northern Australia. The Launceston deal includes money to move the University of Tasmania campus into the heart of the city, to redevelop the historic Paterson Barracks and support local schools to extend classes to Years 11 and 12. (Many Tasmanian high schools only go to Year 10.) Both deals are integrated to some degree with defence projects.

In Western Sydney, the deal is likely to include public transport investments, local employment initiatives and a housing package. In return for its investment, the Commonwealth will expect significant planning and zoning reforms at state and local government level to reduce restrictions on residential development and speed up building approvals. This is in line with the federal government’s dubious argument that red tape and a lack of new construction are almost entirely to blame for Sydney’s runaway house prices.

In reality, two distinct issues to be dealt with: “housing affordability” and “affordable housing.” The first relates to the general rise in house prices, which puts pressure on new home-buyers and raises overall levels of mortgage debt, with associated risks to the economy and the financial system. The second relates to the provision of dwellings for low-income households that simply can’t afford to buy or rent in the current market. While an increase in supply may help with housing affordability, it will do little to generate more affordable housing stock.

Many participants at the Melbourne conference argued that City Deals will only improve housing options for low-income households if they involve previously taboo initiatives such as inclusionary zoning. Widely used in other countries, inclusionary zoning requires developers to set aside a proportion of new dwellings in any project for sales or rentals at below market rates.

David Waldren, head of planning, design and development for the construction company Grocon, told the conference that his firm is absolutely certain that inclusionary zoning will be part of the future (though he acknowledged that rival firms strongly oppose the idea). The “notion of a fair go” is still embedded in Australian society, he argues, and would find expression in a demand to provide affordable housing options close to city centres. City Deals were an opportunity to make inclusionary zoning a reality.

One way to introduce inclusionary zoning would be to make it a condition of developers’ bids for government land like the former defence site at Maribyrnong, in Melbourne’s west. With developers incorporating the cost into their modelling, governments may earn less from the sale, but the benefit will be an increased supply of well-located affordable housing. Inclusionary zoning could also be combined with an investment strategy for not-for-profit housing providers. Duncan Maclellan says the funds unlocked through City Deals can help buy off the ideological opposition of some local governments to new social and community housing.

Whether Western Sydney’s City Deal will make much difference to either housing affordability or affordable housing will depend on the nature of the final deal struck. Given that the most urgent and necessary housing reforms lie in the realm of tax policy, and are being dodged, City Deals may be the only available option right now. They aren’t perfect, but at least they have the potential to generate coherent, region-wide land use strategies that better align housing, transport and jobs. And if they result in increased coordination and cooperation between Australia’s three tiers of government, and across fragmented local councils, then the process of striking the deals may be just as important as their content. •

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An emergency begun in a cascade of flames, which dozens of firefighters worked relentlessly but vainly for four hours to contain, ended in a blackened shell. This sarcophagus, which people in the district will be living with for months, is now a container not only of numberless remains but also of all the prodigious dread, emotional and political, aroused by the inferno.

This monument is also shaping the disaster’s aftermath in ways still evolving. After such an event, raw grief and rage, fear and disbelief were always going to be abundant, mingling with more respectable and easily packaged reactions. Everything is inflected, too, by nearby Notting Hill and south Kensington’s conspicuous affluence, a proximity that magnifies the city’s social intimacy and its divisions alike.

How the fire started is not yet clear. But as to its catastrophic spread, the early details have the unmistakable stench of a major scandal, political and commercial, in the making. The exteriors of the twenty-four-storey building, which was built in 1974, had been given a refit in 2015–16, on which £8.6 million (A$14.4 million) was spent. But who benefited?

A tendering process operated by the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, which runs the building on behalf of its owner, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, resulted in a contractor and then a sprawl of subcontractors handling different parts of the work. One attached a type of cladding, with a plastic (rather than mineral) core, ruled dangerous or banned in the United States and Germany on grounds of its flammability, and implicated in Melbourne’s Lacrosse Building fire in 2014. No water sprinklers were installed, despite a 2013 coroners’ report saying that the 75 per cent of Britain’s 4000 tower blocks lacking sprinklers should have them retrofitted. Cost-cutting appeared a factor in both decisions.

When the makeover did get under way, it seemed uncoordinated and slapdash to worried residents. In one of many communications, the Grenfell Action Group issued this prescient warning in November 2016: “Unfortunately, [we] have reached the conclusion that only an incident that results in serious loss of life of residents will allow the external scrutiny to occur that will shine a light on the practices that characterise the malign governance of this non-functioning organisation.”

The chain of responsibility is stretching backwards: from the contractors, management and Conservative-run council to the record of the Conservative government over fire-safety measures. Gavin Barwell, housing minister in 2016–17 – newly appointed chief of staff to prime minister Theresa May after losing his seat in the general election, an episode in the political merry-go-round that might otherwise have been overlooked – reportedly took no action over sprinklers when given the opportunity. In 2014, his predecessor Brandon Lewis had declined to make them compulsory, saying, “It is the responsibility of the fire industry to market sprinkler systems effectively.”

More tales of negligence are relayed daily, bit by bit composing an indictment with many ingredients: policy dysfunction, technical incompetence, pinched investment, inadequate regulation. And criminal responsibility? The formality of an investigation was opened on Thursday. The police initially said that there was “nothing to suggest the fire was started deliberately,” but under questioning stressed that their inquiries would be “wide-ranging” and look at all aspects, including the tower’s refurbishment.

All this churns the emotions of people closely affected. A huge voluntary effort is supplying their immediate needs, but many still do not know the fate of their family members, friends, colleagues and neighbours. Insecurity, loss of all possessions, and a lack of information cloud their future. Answers, accountability and access to loved ones are their righteous claims.

Most authorities have been found in some way deficient, the elected ones more so (London’s mayor Sadiq Khan partially excepted). The Metropolitan Police and esteemed London Fire Brigade deliver regular updates on casualties and the missing. Council leaders are notably absent from the scene, though they have secured emergency hotel accommodation for the most needy and promised to rehouse all affected. Central government, aside from the announcement of a public inquiry and a preliminary aid package of £5 million (A$8.3 million), has shown little urgency, less coherence and, in the eyes of a wounded local populace, zero empathy. If the disaster itself reflects a broken social contract in a core area of public responsibility, its febrile aftermath exposes – or confirms – a deep want of trust between citizens and their leaders.

“Not good enough” was May’s verdict on her own government’s performance. The words came on Saturday, soon after she met a band of Grenfell residents, her failure to do so over the previous three days having provoked savage criticism. But it was Queen Elizabeth who articulated the sense of a vacuum of moral leadership, thus in effect filling it. Referring to “a succession of terrible tragedies” – the fire having followed three terrorist attacks – she said that “it is difficult to escape a very sombre national mood… Put to the test, the United Kingdom has been resolute in the face of adversity. United in our sadness, we are equally determined, without fear or favour, to support all those rebuilding lives so horribly affected by injury and loss.”

Decoded, this is less likely to mean “buck up, Theresa” than “game’s up.” Either way, the head of state’s expression of concern about her realm is indeed a quietly thunderous message to the governing class to, well, shape up. In constitutional terms, it also neatly reverses Tony Blair’s crown-saving act following Princess Diana’s death in 1997, by putting the monarch’s own authority at the service of a drifting executive.

But who is there to grasp the sceptre, and can that even be done? Ghoulish symptoms are coalescing in these worst of times in the country’s recent history: Brexit’s unknowns, post-election deadlock, directionless governance, those terror incidents, and multiple economic and social pressures. Against this broader context, Grenfell’s disaster reeks of systemic failures that demand a comprehensive strategic response. If only Britain were remotely capable of such a thing.

Can any consolation, even encouragement, be found in Britain’s modern history? This tragedy, after all, also belongs to a melancholy sequence of major disasters that together cost hundreds of lives. But the ensuing inquiries and reports, where safety and other recommendations have made their way into reality, may have guarded many more.

The lowest point was the 1980s and 90s, coincident with the previous long period of Conservative rule. The events included fires in a soccer stadium and on the London underground, an oil platform explosion, a stadium crush, a passenger ferry sinking and a leisure boat accident. Different in type and location they may have been, but “Hillsborough,” “Piper Alpha,” “the Marchioness,” “the King’s Cross fire” and the rest also came to be attributed not just to contingent failings but to institutional flaws in Britain’s public life: underinvestment, poor regulation, managerial indifference, silo effects, and official neglect or corruption.

That nothing equivalent hit people in their homes seems fortuitous, especially given the houses-in-the-sky boom of the statist-welfarist 1960s and 70s, which transformed urban landscapes. A turning point in attitudes was the gas explosion at the Ronan Point tower block in east London in 1968, only two months after it opened, which led to its partial collapse and caused four deaths. Grenfell’s construction six years later, however, shows that planners still saw new high-rise building as a ready answer to urban Britain’s changing housing needs. Indeed, many designers and surveyors of those decades would defend the era’s safety standards even as they acknowledge other flaws.

Margaret Thatcher launched the next housing revolution in the marketising 1980s by giving tenants the “right to buy” their rented property. Alongside squeezed local budgets and changing priorities in urban planning, that meant depletion or decay for much of the public sector’s stock, redeemed in part by the semi-dissident ecology of regional housing associations and philanthropic trusts.

But the Conservative era of 1979–97 was indelibly marked by that chain of tragedies, with the name of the ferry that went down off Zeebrugge in 1987 (the Herald of Free Enterprise) supplying a potent signifier. The switch to New Labour began a decade of modernising public works, which coincided with the onset of digitalisation. Under Tony Blair, the word “disaster” acquired association more with the waste of vast sums on abortive IT projects, on the extravagant nullity of the Millennium Dome, and later on the Iraq war. The skyscrapers transforming London’s vistas were now increasingly financial rather than residential.

Labour also supported local councils in upgrading their housing stock, in many cases refitting to take account of improvements in materials, design, technology and security features. When an ominous fire at Lakanal House in Camberwell, south London took six lives in 2009, the site was greatly improved. But the fallout of the financial crisis in 2007–09 cramped resources and strategic thinking, especially as far as housing is concerned.

There is no doubt that a reset is overdue. “Fires have a way of making the inexcusable unignorable,” says the architecture critic Rowan Moore, author of a brilliant new book about London, Slow Burn City: London in the Twenty-First Century, citing the city’s great fire of 1666 and Chicago’s in 1871. He concludes a fine philippic with a prediction that invokes Ronan Point: “The greater and more lethal monstrosity of Grenfell Tower will change the British attitude to housing forever.”

Greg Bankoff and colleagues expand the historical point in Flammable Cities: Urban Conflagration and the Making of the Modern World. If fire is at times “a catalyst for the introduction of stricter building regulations, social reform, and more effective governance,” as Dirk Schubert writes there on Hamburg’s 1842 blaze, London might now and again become a laboratory for more egalitarian progress.

North Kensington’s skeletal tomb – as if no one had ever lived inside – stands in judgement. It vindicates past warnings and present emotions, and the hunger for justice they now inspire. The hulking ruin itself may become the guarantee that a purgative light will continue to shine on the tragedy, or the atrocity, that happened here. •

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After surging for five years, the growth in house prices is slowing in Melbourne and Sydney, the two epicentres of the boom. New lending volumes are down following a clampdown on interest-only loans. And there are signs that oversupply could hit apartment prices in parts of Brisbane and Melbourne.

Talk of a “bubble” threatening to pop misses an important point, though. Yes, house prices have risen rapidly – by more than 40 per cent nationally and 70 per cent in Sydney over the past five years. But there are good reasons why housing is so expensive today.

Australia’s population has surged by about 350,000 a year over the past decade, up from the 220,000 a year during the previous ten years. Record low interest rates have made it possible to service much larger mortgages. And most of the increase in house prices reflects restrictions on the effective supply of residential land – both limits on rezoning for urban infill and limits on developing land on the urban fringe. Dwelling construction has simply not kept pace. Several years of housing construction – probably at even faster rates than currently – will be needed to erode the large backlog that accumulated between 2006 and 2014, estimated at about 200,000 dwellings.

Investors are also part of the story. Emboldened by recent price rises and armed with cheap credit, they have chased further house price gains. Investors now account for 40 per cent of all new mortgage credit. Negatively geared property remains a popular investment strategy. And with gross rental yields below 3 per cent in Melbourne and Sydney, such investments only make sense if investors are banking on future capital gains or a large rise in rents.

Of course, no one can predict with certainty what will happen to houses prices from here. But history provides some pointers. Past Australian housing booms have tended to end with prices falling modestly, or flat-lining for an extended period, rather than crashing down. Sharper falls are certainly possible – as the US and European experience during the global financial crisis shows – but they are unlikely in Australia while our regulators keep a tight rein on bank lending practices, unless we are hit by an economic downturn unrelated to housing.

But what might happen to the banks, and the economy, if house prices do start to fall or if households struggle to make good on their debts?

Since the subprime mortgage crisis hit the United States, commentators have tended to focus on the risks that property market booms and busts pose to the banking sector. Higher levels of debt increase the risks of borrower default and thus the risks of banks getting into trouble, with all the economic chaos that would create. And household debt in Australia is now a record 190 per cent of household after-tax income, up from about 170 per cent between 2007 and 2015. In 2002, 20 per cent of households had debts of more than twice their income; today it’s 30 per cent.

But the risks of Australian banking instability are low because relatively few households have high loans-to-total-assets ratios and our banks are highly profitable and well capitalised by international standards. As Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe noted in a recent speech, it’s the riskiest borrower who gets into trouble first in a downturn. And most of those taking on larger debts in Australia appear to be from wealthier households well placed to service those debts.

But there is always a risk that banks will drop their lending standards as they compete for business. One-third of borrowers have either no accrued buffer or a buffer of less than one month’s repayments. This is not historically high – indeed, more households have a buffer on their loan today than at any time since the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey began in 2002. But those with minimal buffers tend to have newer mortgages, or to be lower-income or lower-wealth households.

That’s why Australia’s banking regulator, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, or APRA, is limiting banks’ new interest-only lending to 30 per cent of total new residential mortgage lending. This followed its move in late 2014 to limit growth in each bank’s total lending to property investors to no more than 10 per cent each year. And APRA may soon require banks to hold more capital against their loans, in line with recommendations from the 2014 Financial System Inquiry to make our banks’ capital ratios “unquestionably strong.”

We should be more concerned about the risk that much higher debts could prompt a rapid fall in household spending in the event of a downturn. Household consumption accounts for well over half of GDP. Recent Reserve Bank of Australia research shows that households with higher debts are more likely to reduce spending if their incomes fall. A rise in unemployment, perhaps prompted by a slowdown in China or a stuttering US recovery, would force many people to save more – and consume less.

Even a relatively small rise in the interest rates paid by households would crimp their spending. Our research at the Grattan Institute shows that if interest rates rise by just two percentage points, mortgage payments on a new home will take up more of a household’s income than at any time in the past two decades. While the RBA would only lift interest rates cautiously, another disruption to international financial markets like the 2008 shock could sharply increase banks’ funding costs, raising mortgage rates.

Falling house prices may also result in reduced consumption if home owners feel poorer. But estimates of the size of this effect vary widely. One recent RBA paper estimated that each dollar of housing wealth lost reduced household consumption by about a quarter of one cent, implying a 0.1 per cent fall in GDP for each 10 per cent fall in house prices. Another paper suggested that such a “wealth effect” could be ten times as large.

So how should policy-makers respond to these risks? First, the RBA needs to be especially careful when it feels the need to raise interest rates. Higher debt levels mean household spending is likely to fall more when interest rates rise than it did in the past. Perhaps the RBA should make smaller shifts in the cash rate – such as ten basis points, or a tenth of a per cent – to cushion the impact of future rate rises.

Second, Australia’s financial regulators – APRA and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission – need to be ready to clamp down on banks making risky loans if there are signs that lending practices are deteriorating. But that doesn’t mean lending should be restricted simply in order to bring down house prices.

Third, the federal government needs to get its fiscal house in order. Australia urgently needs a better budget position so we have more room to manoeuvre in difficult times. The Australian economy is particularly exposed: with interest rates at historical lows, there are limits to what the RBA can do to stimulate growth, so fiscal stimulus will be an important part of the response to any future economic shock. •

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The shift in rhetoric isn’t surprising. Despite all the talk of options on the table, the government is yet to show that it’s serious about addressing housing affordability. Few of the proposals it has flagged in recent weeks would make much difference, and some would make the problem worse.

To capitalise on the government’s indecision, the opposition announced its own housing strategy last week. While most of Labor’s ideas are sensible, not many will make housing much more affordable, with the exception of previously announced changes to negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount.

State and federal governments have raised expectations among voters anxious to see action on housing. Governments now need something concrete to point to. There are options that would make a big difference, but none is politically easy. If governments want to be seen to be serious about housing affordability, they’re going to have to make tough choices and avoid the temptation to do the easy (and stupid) things.

The first step to making housing more affordable is to face up to the size of the problem. Australian house prices have more than doubled in real terms since the mid 1990s, far outstripping growth in household incomes. And while low interest rates make it relatively easy to service a loan today, slow wages growth means that the burden of a mortgage is eroded more slowly than in the past. Home ownership rates are falling, especially among the young and the poor. Without change, many young Australians could be locked out of the housing market.

Governments have long promised to improve housing affordability, yet all the while house prices have continued to rise. The politics are hard. More Australians own a house than are seeking to buy a house, and making housing more affordable means house prices will be lower than would otherwise be the case. And many people who live in the established middle suburbs don’t like the idea of more density in their neighbourhoods. If governments really want to make a difference, they need to explain why improving housing affordability matters – and why doing nothing will only make the problem worse.

While making the hard decisions, governments should also set realistic expectations. Although government policy can help, housing is unlikely to become much more affordable overnight. It took neglectful governments two decades to create Australia’s housing affordability crisis, and it will take just as long to improve matters. There are limits to what even a brave government can do.

A lack of policy ideas isn’t the problem. There are plenty, but most of them simply won’t have much effect. Some will make housing affordability worse, drag on economic growth, or subtract from government budgets that are already in trouble. And a few will make a difference, but all of them are politically difficult.

The policies that sound good, but won’t help much in practice, live in the top left of our diagram.

Treasurer Scott Morrison has shown great interest in “shared equity” schemes, which sound like a way for first home buyers to clear the deposit hurdle without significant costs to taxpayers. Such schemes come in many shapes and sizes, but in this case the government would likely stump up some of the capital to purchase a home, and later, when the property is sold, it would get its money back, together with a share of any property price growth. Such schemes already exist in Western Australia and South Australia, where government lenders have issued thousands of loans for people to purchase their own home.

There is some evidence that these schemes increase home ownership rates. Yet they are unlikely to make much of a difference to housing affordability, at least not without big public subsidies. Only one-in-five loans approved by the WA lender in 2015–16 were genuine shared-equity loans. Most were low-deposit loans to borrowers, some of whom may have borrowed from a commercial bank.

Treasurer Morrison is also keen on a “bond aggregator” for the social housing sector. The government would borrow on behalf of community housing providers, and on-lend to the providers – giving them access to cheaper and longer-term finance. While this may help to boost the supply of social housing, a substantial increase in the stock is unlikely unless there are additional large public subsidies to cover the costs of providing housing at below-market rents.

Restricting foreign investment in housing may have some impact on house prices, but again only at the margin. Treasury research suggests that foreign investment has not been a major contributor to recent growth in house prices. Of course, the government should ensure that foreign investment rules are being followed; recent reports suggest that foreign investment rules are still being broken, despite a recent crackdown.

Increasing taxes on foreign investment in housing, as several state governments have already done, and federal Labor has now proposed, may be a sensible way to raise revenue, but it is unlikely to hit house prices unless the tax hikes are very big.

Taxing vacant dwellings, a policy recently announced by the federal opposition and the Victorian Labor government, sounds attractive, but will be difficult to administer. Accountants are likely to be able to fit most vacant homes within one of the exemptions for those temporarily overseas, holiday homes and those who need a city unit for work purposes. A similar tax introduced in Vancouver this year is yet to show that it has overcome these challenges.

While those ideas won’t do much to make housing more affordable, they won’t do much harm either. Several other ideas, shown in the bottom left of our diagram, are less benign: they involve big risks either to the budget or to the economy.

The Turnbull government is reportedly still considering allowing people to use their superannuation to buy their first house. Politicians are understandably attracted to any policy that appears to help first home buyers build a deposit. Unlike the various first home buyers’ grants, which cost billions each year, letting first home buyers cash out their super would not hurt the budget bottom line – at least in the short run. But as we wrote in 2015, such a change would push up house prices, leave many people with less to retire on, and cost taxpayers in the long run. Alternatives that allow first home buyers to withdraw only voluntary super contributions are less foolish, but are unlikely to make much difference to housing affordability.

Another proposal to give first homebuyers extra tax incentives to save for a home has similar problems – it would move taxpayer money into the pockets of vendors without addressing affordability. In fact we’ve been here before: the former Rudd government’s First Home Saver Accounts provided similar financial incentives to help first homebuyers build a deposit. Treasury expected A$6.5 billion to be held in First Home Saver Accounts by 2012. Instead only A$500 million had been saved by 2014, when Joe Hockey abolished the scheme, citing a lack of take up.

The government is reportedly considering providing incentives to encourage seniors to downsize their homes, thereby freeing up larger homes for younger Australians. This idea, too, should be rejected. Research shows that downsizing is primarily motivated by lifestyle preferences and relationship changes. These considerations dwarf the financial trade-offs between having more cash to spend, but a lower age pension. According to surveys, no more than 15 per cent of downsizers are motivated by financial gain. Stamp duty costs (which are analogous to the threat of losing pension entitlements) were a barrier for only about 5 per cent of those thinking about downsizing. If financial considerations aren’t the big barrier then many of the incentives would go to households that would have downsized anyway. As the Productivity Commission found, these incentives have a material budget cost, and distort the housing market by adding even more to the long-term tax and welfare incentives to own a home.

The government should also resist the temptation to push people to the regions. Since Federation, state and federal governments have tried to lure people, trade and business away from capital cities. It has invariably been an expensive policy failure. Despite government policies of decentralisation, the trend to city-centred growth has accelerated in the past decade. Half of all net jobs growth in Melbourne and Sydney is now within a two-kilometre radius of the city centres, reflecting the rapid growth of jobs in service industries, where physical proximity really matters. In the unlikely event that government policy actually succeeded in encouraging more people to live in regional areas, it could reduce house prices in the major cities, but it would also slow growth in incomes.

The government should also tread carefully when it comes to curbing immigration, as proposed by former prime minister Tony Abbott. Slowing immigration would have a big impact on house prices. Australia’s resident population is increasing by about 350,000 a year, and over half of this is due to immigration. But curbing migration could also slow growth in incomes. Recent Productivity Commission modelling concluded that continuing Australia’s approach of taking younger, skilled migrants could result in GDP per person being up to 7 per cent higher in 2060 than if there were zero net migration.

So governments need to focus on the policies in the top right of our diagram: policies that will make a material difference to affordability without substantially dragging on the economy or the budget. Everything in this category is politically difficult.

Given the allocation of federal responsibilities, the Commonwealth can primarily intervene to reduce demand. States have more ability to boost supply, through land-use planning and zoning laws, and by releasing greenfield land. They can also make renting more attractive by reforming state land taxes and residential tenancy laws. Both levels of government can improve access by making better decisions about which transport infrastructure to build, and then introducing congestion charges.

The most obvious way the Commonwealth government can materially reduce housing demand is by reducing the capital gains tax discount and abolishing negative gearing. The effect on property prices would be modest – they would be roughly 2 per cent lower than otherwise – but would-be home owners would benefit. Economic benefits would flow too. The current tax arrangements distort investment decisions and make housing markets more volatile. Reform would boost the budget bottom line by around $5 billion a year. Contrary to urban myth, rents wouldn’t change much, nor would housing markets collapse. If phased in, the reforms would be easier to sell politically and would dissuade investors from rushing to sell property before the changes come into force. An alternative flagged by the government – limiting the number of properties a person could negatively gear – would be much less effective because few people negatively gear multiple properties.

The government should also include the value of the family home above some threshold – such as $500,000 – in the age pension assets test. This would encourage a few more senior Australians to downsize to more appropriate housing. More importantly, it would make pension arrangements fairer, and contribute up to $7 billion a year to the budget.

Making owner-occupied housing liable for capital gains tax could also reduce demand and improve the budget bottom line. But such a change might have unintended consequences. It would discourage people from moving house, since home sales would trigger liability to pay capital gains tax. Young purchasers would be tempted to choose oversized housing to reduce the number of home moves they make over a lifetime. It would be difficult to resist calls to allow deduction of interest payments (given taxation of the gains), which would wipe out most of the benefit to the budget.

Affordability would improve much more if the states did the heavy policy lifting over a number of years to increase supply.

The middle rings of Australia’s large capital cities generally have good infrastructure, and good access to city centres, where most of the new jobs are being created. These cities are sparsely populated relative to other large cities in the developed world outside the United States. Grattan Institute research shows that people want more townhouses and semi-detached dwellings in established suburbs.

Current rules make it reasonably easy to build apartments in the CBD and to develop new housing estates on the fringes of the major cities – so that is what we’re getting. But the rules make it very difficult to subdivide and create extra residences in the middle rings of the capital cities, up to twenty kilometres out of the CBD. Population density in the middle rings has hardly changed in the past thirty years, yet urban infill could supply a lot of the new housing needed.

State and local governments need to change planning laws and practice to make it easier to subdivide in middle-ring suburbs. They also need to increase density along transport corridors, which would both boost housing supply and use existing transport infrastructure better.

Increasing supply will only restore housing affordability slowly. With migration increasing substantially from about 2006, Australia’s population grew by around 350,000 per year, rather than the 220,000 per year that was typical in the previous decade. Dwelling construction did not match demand, particularly in New South Wales. It increased by about 30 per cent in the past four years, but it is still only keeping pace with current population growth. Several years of construction – probably at even faster rates than currently – will be needed to erode the large backlog that accumulated between 2006 and 2014, estimated to be a shortage of about 200,000 dwellings.

This is primarily a state government problem. While the federal government can release some of the limited stock of Commonwealth land, it does not directly control planning rules. It could provide incentives to state and local governments to increase the supply of housing in good locations, but its budget will struggle to provide incentives sufficiently large to overcome the reluctance of a state government that is not motivated to take on the political difficulties anyway.

State governments should also abolish stamp duties and replace them with a general property tax, as the ACT government is doing. Stamp duties on the transfer of property are among the most inefficient of taxes: they discourage people from moving to better jobs, or to housing that better suits their needs. Their abolition would encourage people to move as their circumstances change, making more efficient use of the housing stock. This would mainly improve economic growth rather than housing affordability, but it’s a big prize: a national shift from stamp duties to a broad-based property tax could add up to $9 billion a year to gross domestic product.

Reform of progressive state land taxes, which levy a higher rate of land tax if a person owns more investment property, could improve conditions for renters, because institutional investors would be more likely to offer long-term leases to those renters who seek greater certainty.

Such tax reforms might be encouraged if the federal government provided incentive payments to the states, which would reflect how Commonwealth revenues will ultimately benefit from the increased economic growth. A recent COAG agreement to encourage states to enact economic reforms is a step in the right direction, but more needs to be done.

Governments also need to improve transport networks by using existing transport infrastructure more efficiently and building more effective transport projects. This will make fringe suburbs a more attractive alternative to established suburbs closer to CBDs, limiting price increases in inner suburbs.

First, the federal government should work with states on the possibility of introducing congestion charging to ensure existing roads are used more efficiently. A congestion charge needs to discourage only a small proportion of people from driving to enable a big increase in traffic speed.

Second, the way governments decide on transport infrastructure investment needs to improve. Governments have tended to favour projects in swing states and marginal seats, rather than projects with the highest benefit–cost ratios. They should only commit money to a transport infrastructure project if Infrastructure Australia or another independent body has assessed it as high priority, and the business case has been tabled in parliament.

Housing affordability has vexed Australian governments for two decades, as politicians have tried to appease aspiring first home buyers without upsetting existing home owners. They have dodged the hard choices that would actually make a difference, preferring policies that are cosmetic but politically painless.

Continuing inaction will further reduce home ownership, increase inequality, dampen economic growth, and increase the risks of an economic downturn. The public has figured out that there is a real problem. Unless governments improve the reality rather than appearances, public trust in political institutions will continue to fall. Pretending there are easy answers will only make things worse. •

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“Housing affordability” is a catch-all banner for a grab-bag of public concerns linked to rising house prices. Some people resent spending more of their pay packet on housing. Some fear that younger Australians will be locked out of the housing market. Economists are worried that many people can’t find housing with good access to jobs. Patterns of home ownership are increasing inequality between and among generations. Others fret about the risks that higher house prices pose to the economy.

It’s worth teasing these issues apart to understand what should really keep policy-makers awake at night.

Most literally, housing affordability is about how much a person spends on housing relative to everything else. Overall, spending on housing has increased from about 16 per cent of all spending in 1980 to more than 20 per cent today. And this means households have less to spend on other goods and services, from healthcare to entertainment.

Australian house prices have more than doubled since the mid 1990s in real terms, far outstripping growth in incomes. Although attention is focused on the rapidly rising prices in Sydney and Melbourne (a typical house in a capital city currently sells for around six-to-seven times annual incomes, up from around two-to-three thirty years ago), prices have also risen strongly in the regions.

Of course, house prices were always going to rise as incomes increased and finance became cheaper and more readily available. These changes have helped people to access more and better housing. Since the late 1980s, the average floor space of newly constructed houses has risen by around 45 per cent. The number of spare bedrooms has also risen rapidly.

But most of the increase in the value of housing reflects increases in the price of land. These higher land prices mainly reflect restrictions on the effective supply of residential land – both limits on rezoning for urban infill and limits on developing land at the urban fringe – at a time when demand for land is growing strongly.

Of course, most Australians don’t buy a home outright: instead, they borrow to purchase a home. Housing affordability is falling mainly because it takes longer to pay back the principal on a mortgage. That takes longer because house prices have risen much faster than incomes. And nominal incomes are not rising as fast to overtake the nominal amount originally paid for a home.

While it is harder to pay down the principal, paying the interest on a new mortgage on the average-priced home is no more difficult today than in 2003: the rise in prices has been counteracted by the fall in interest rates. As for rents, they have more or less kept pace with wages over the past twenty years. Because mortgage and rent costs haven’t risen much relative to incomes, households are under relatively little financial stress. As a recent Reserve Bank of Australia article showed, more homeowners are further ahead on their mortgage today than in 2006, and fewer households are reporting financial stress events such as being unable to pay a bill.

Inevitably, averages conceal problems for some groups. In particular, it is getting harder for low-income households to pay the rent, particularly if they live in large cities. About 47 per cent of low-income households in capital cities now spend more than 30 per cent of their pre-tax income on rent, up from 36 per cent in 2007.

Higher house prices have also made it harder for buyers to save a deposit, which historically has been 20 per cent of the purchase price. In the early 1990s it took around six years to save a 20 per cent deposit for an average dwelling; it now takes around ten years.

Higher house prices and debts may not currently mean higher mortgage payments, given lower interest rates. But they do increase the risks. If interest rates rise by just 2 percentage points, mortgage payments on a new home will cost more of a household’s income than at any time in the past two decades. With interest rates across the globe at historic lows, the risk of an interest rate rise is real. And because wages aren’t rising fast, households are burdened by big interest payments for much longer.

These risks may explain the second big concern about housing affordability: the worry that “my child can’t afford to buy a house.” While buying a first home might seem “affordable” if we only look at mortgage payments relative to income today, it now involves a lot more risk.

Home ownership rates are falling quickly for those under fifty-five. Falling home ownership among twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds might be explained away because people are forming long-term partnerships and having children later in life. But this explanation doesn’t wash for thirty-five- to forty-four-year-olds. Home ownership among this group has fallen from about 75 per cent in 1991 to about 60 per cent today. The fall has been particularly steep among low-income households.

There are plenty of reasons to care about home ownership. Owning a home can provide a sense of community belonging, a sense of prosperity, the motivation for additional savings, and the basis for investing in a business. Under current policy settings, it provides higher after-tax returns on savings, and effectively higher income in retirement. Of course, home ownership also has its costs: for example, home owners may be more reluctant to take on a better job that would involve the emotional and financial costs of moving.

Given current rental markets and policies, renting is relatively unattractive: it is generally much less secure; many tenants are restrained from making their house into their home; and tenants miss out on the tax and welfare benefits of home ownership. Renters are forced to move much more often than home owners, and are less satisfied with their housing.

So it’s not surprising that younger generations still want to own their own home. There is little evidence that falling home ownership is due to lack of desire; rather it seems to be due to lack of opportunity, and the heightened risks.

Housing in the right places is also becoming less affordable. Australia’s large cities are increasingly divided between the middle and inner ring with good access to jobs, and an outer ring whose residents can’t get to many jobs. This divide is becoming more important because much of the net growth in jobs is occurring in the large capital CBDs. Relatively few people commute from outer suburbs to the centre – the travel time is just too long. And whereas new housing on the city fringe forty years ago still had reasonable access to the centre, new housing on Sydney and Melbourne’s outer fringes is now typically much further out. As a result, the price differential between inner and outer city is increasing. And so it’s getting harder to buy a home that has good access to the places where a lot of the jobs growth is happening.

Concerns about housing affordability also reflect worries about increasing wealth divides between generations, and among generations. The wealth of older households increased rapidly over the past decade: the average household aged between thirty-five and fifty-five in 2004 increased its wealth by $50,000 a year over the decade to 2014. Wealth was boosted significantly by the rapid run-up in the price of houses and other assets. A younger generation is unlikely to get this kind of free kick.

The increasing divide between generations can easily transmit into an increasing divide within generations. If home ownership relies more on the “bank of mum and dad,” then getting a home depends more on the success of one’s parents than on one’s own endeavours. Rising house prices are also likely to boost future inheritances, which tend to transmit wealth to children who are already well off.

Finally, concerns about housing affordability may reflect concerns about economic stability. House prices are rising faster than incomes. And households are borrowing more, particularly to invest in housing. As a result, household debt in Australia is now a record 190 per cent of household after-tax income, up from about 170 per cent between 2007 and 2015. More households are exposed: in 2002, 20 per cent of households had a debt of more than twice their income; today it’s 30 per cent.

Higher levels of debt increase the risks of borrower default and thus the risks of banks getting into trouble, with all the economic chaos that would create. But overall, the risks of Australian banking instability are low given relatively few households with high leverage of loans to total assets, and robust bank capitalisation.

Much more concerning is the risk of a rapid fall in household spending. A fall in house prices, or a relatively small rise in the interest rates paid by households, would force many households to save more – and to consume less. This would probably slow economic growth, potentially increasing unemployment and further reducing house prices.

Thus, “housing affordability” includes a wide variety of concerns: less money to spend on goods and services other than housing; falling home ownership rates; worsening access to jobs; increasing wealth inequality between and among generations; and increasing risks of a housing-led economic downturn.

Responding to these concerns requires careful analysis of the underlying drivers and of the potential impact of policy changes. Not all policy changes will make a difference to the problems that really need solving. We will look at potential policy reforms in a subsequent article. But even then, policy-makers need to be honest about how there are limits to what governments can do to get the barbecue started again. •

Monday: Assessing the solutions

The post Why should we care about housing affordability? appeared first on Inside Story.

But some things are eerily familiar to the east-coast-dweller’s eye, and none more so than the politics of the Roe 8 freight link. The parallels between that imbroglio and Victoria’s infamous East West Link saga, for instance, are too many to count. An enormously controversial inner-city toll road provoking rolling protests, “direct action” and court challenges; contracts signed with an election only months away, despite declarations by the opposition that they won’t go ahead with the project; sweaty state Labor leaders telling the press pack they will rip up said contracts if they win office (which, when they made those pledges, looked entirely likely); tussles with the feds over redirecting Commonwealth dollars promised to the projects… the more one looks, the uncannier things get. Sydney’s WestConnex is not far below on the déjà vu spectrum, but Roe 8 and East West are so incredibly alike it’s worth asking what exactly is going on here.

Well, what indeed? Why are these inner-city road projects crashing into elections again and again, and becoming the subject of messy politicking and brinkmanship? One common denominator is the Abbott government. Eager to go down in history as “the infrastructure prime minister,” Abbott pumped billions into a score of inner-city road projects within months of winning government. At the same time, he made a point of shunning public transport projects, even those deemed a higher priority by Infrastructure Australia, the independent umpire.

This change in Commonwealth priorities saw a bunch of projects leap the funding queue, despite many having not been fully planned or costed. With the states desperately reliant on Canberra to get any project rolling, all they could do was try to make up the time and get sods turned by the next election. According to this account, what we saw in Victoria and are seeing now in Western Australia is really an aftershock of Abbott’s brief but consequential time in the Lodge.

It’s a temptingly simple explanation, but it assumes some pretty debatable points, including the idea that power has become so centralised in Canberra, and especially the prime minister’s office, that whoever sits in the PM’s chair essentially dictates what happens at every level of government. Put a roads man in the chair and we get a massive realignment of policy and resources to favour roads; switch to an avid rail fan and we get a recalibration with some money shifting back to public transport. The PM says jump and the entire Australian political system asks how high.

In reality, these controversial schemes are the product of the enormous mess of bureaucracy and lobby groups, political imperatives and economic limitations that get between any leader and the rolling-out of a policy. It takes a lot of momentum and collaboration to turn a leader’s idea into reality, and often a lot changes in the process. Indeed, navigating a policy or a project through this maze of interests and institutions, players and processes can be so torturous and require such political dexterity that they often simply never make it through to the other side.

This seems to be the fate of more and more policy initiatives these days, whether it’s greyhounds in New South Wales, abortion law reform in Queensland, or pokies, negative gearing or carbon pricing in Canberra. Mobilising opposition to a project has never been easier, thanks to social media, and the fragmentation of the two-party system in recent decades has multiplied the number of fronts on which a project can be attacked. It has probably never been harder to pitch a project and get it through to the ribbon-cutting.

If that is indeed the underlying problem with all these infrastructure fiascos, then we’ve been thinking all wrong about infrastructure reform for the past ten years. Since Kevin Rudd took over the leadership of the Labor Party in the lead-up to the 2007 election, the big push has been to depoliticise infrastructure, to get it away from politicians and into the hands of independent experts. Not only has that push failed utterly – politicians have bypassed the new processes and authorities set up to make infrastructure non-political – but the thinking behind it is profoundly mistaken about the nature of infrastructure.

Infrastructure is inherently political. It involves the allocation of public resources (even when private capital features heavily) and appropriates space in the name of the common good. And once projects are announced, they necessarily have to run a political gauntlet to make it to completion. A thumbs-up from the brains trust at Infrastructure Australia, or one of the state-level authorities, will never change the fact that projects require political momentum to get up. Good politics – careful building of support, cobbling together coalitions, bringing together stakeholders and so on – is the foundation for good infrastructure. Until we accept that, expect to see more East West Links and Roe 8s on the horizon. •

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It was a clear, sunny day; the cool air tasted of possibility and fear. As the two teams entered the arena and breached their exhortatory banners, the crowd let out a huge sigh of anticipation.

We were called to attention by the national anthem, then the distinctive Australian Rules siren blared. The umpire stepped in for the opening bounce, with 60,000 pairs of eyes following his every move.

All around me anxious-looking men held their breath, teenagers refrained from texting, and small groups of transfixed women stared in wonder. In an instant they would be crossing over into that state that every sports tragic desires: freedom from all other worldly concerns. The ball rose in the air, tumbling above the ruck; the roar of the crowd was deafening.

Three-and-a-half quarters later, Swans fans were leaving early in disappointment. The youthful Giants had run down their more experienced opponents. By the siren they were ahead by thirty-six points. It was a massive upset.

And I didn’t feel a thing. I was an atheist at church; a non-believer among the faithful. I had attended out of curiosity, simply because my friend had asked me. Neither team – nor the sport itself – was of any interest to me. The train home was filled with the agonised and the ecstatic; I was trying to calculate if I’d be back in time for dinner.

Yet just a few weeks earlier I had been sitting in almost identical seats in the same stadium, sweating a thousand pinpricks of blood while watching a different set of teams playing a different sport.

The Wallabies had played New Zealand in the first test of the 2016 Bledisloe Cup. We scored eight hard-won points, but the All Blacks scored forty-two – and with an arrogance and ease that was awe-inspiring and demoralising in equal parts. I won’t go into the sordid details; they are still too painful to recount. But it was like watching a team of clumsy twelve-year-olds playing a team of gods.

Though he was a New Zealander, my father never played Rugby Union. In his poverty-stricken childhood he was moved around Christchurch by my rent-dodging grandmother so many times that he barely had time to learn to read, let alone join a rugby club.

But every year in late summer, race memory would kick in, and Dad would take me and my brother around to our local shops to sign up for winter sport. And every year, just outside Price’s Pharmacy, a row of men would be sitting at card tables. We’d walk past the man at the soccer table, then the League man, and then we’d stop at the Rugby table and put down our names.

I was five when this ritual began. From the very beginning I loved everything about the game, and I went on playing for my local club for the next twenty years. And just as much, I loved watching the Wallabies play – particularly when they competed with the All Blacks for the Bledisloe Cup. But I dreaded the phone call from the New Zealand side of my family after they had beaten us – which they usually did.

Like most Australians, I found my sporting allegiance in childhood and it has never left me. As I got older I began to understand the inviolable nature of this commitment. I remember once trying to engage with a work colleague about an upcoming Bledisloe Test Match.

“Not interested,” she said.

“But they’re your national team,” I countered, appealing to her patriotism.

“I’ve already got a team. They’re called the Cats.”

“Who are the bloody Cats?” I spluttered.

The Melbourne-born writer and journalist James Button can clearly remember when he became a one-eyed Australian Rules football fan. At the age of seven or eight, as he was being driven to school by his father, John Button, who would later serve in Bob Hawke’s Labor government, he leaned over from the back seat and casually asked, “Dad, who do you barrack for?”

Upon Button Senior’s one-word answer hung the nature of the youngster’s winter Saturdays for the next four decades and beyond. Without fully understanding the consequences – and just like my erstwhile colleague – James Button had become a supporter of the Cats, also known as the Geelong Football Club. In an instant, father had passed down to son something that would become both a burden and a joy.

“You can change jobs, cities, teeth, your house, your spouse, your life. You can even change your sex,” Button writes. “But you can’t change your team.”

Coming not long after my brush with Australian Rules at Olympic Park, Comeback: The Fall and Rise of Geelong had the potential to be the most tedious book I’ve ever had to read. No sensible person willingly chews through over 300 pages motivated by another person’s fandom without sharing the obsession. It is a testament to Button’s skills as a journalist and storyteller that this book was read with interest and delight by someone who has never been to Geelong, doesn’t intend ever going to Geelong, and has watched exactly one game of AFL in his life.

How did Button accomplish this?

To begin with, Geelong’s story is almost mythical in shape. It’s a tale that matches Joseph Campbell’s famous “hero’s journey,” the storyline so beloved of Hollywood.

Once upon a time, the narrative might go, there was a country town that felt it was scorned and disparaged by its near neighbour, the great metropolis of Melbourne. “We might be lowly provincials,” the people of the town reasoned, “but at least we engage in the Great Game with balletic skill and grace.” As they sang in their club song: “We play the game as it should be played.”

But in the 1950s the town fell into a deep despair. For a couple of years the only thing Geelong could win was the wooden spoon. The condescending sneers of the big clubs from Melbourne cut, and cut deep. The word “soft” was heard in the land.

But wait, a shining prince came out of the West. Polly Farmer, the great Aboriginal player, the best hand-passer the game has ever seen, the sport’s first real professional, helped Geelong to a grand final place in 1963 – and they won.

Having tasted success, the good people of Geelong craved more of it. They beseeched their gods, “Let the premiership come again.” But it never came. And it never came some more. Decades passed. The year 1963 came to be seen as a cruel anomaly.

Then a new hero arrived, a country boy from Myrtleford. With the great Gary Ablett in the pocket, Geelong thought another premiership was in the bag. But it was not to be. To get so close and yet no closer tormented the good people of Geelong. The pain of not winning led to a revolution in thought and deed.

In 2000, outsiders were brought in – a new CEO and a new board. Old habits died, and died hard. A new coach – Mark “Bomba” Thompson – laid out a seven-year plan to win the flag.

Geelong found new, young players – many of them locals or country boys, the traditional source of club champions. Slowly, sometimes stutteringly, Geelong rose again. By 2007 the young team was older and wiser and battle-hardened. In the grand final that year it crushed Port Adelaide by a record margin of 119 points. Forty-four years of failure came to a glorious end.

When the Cats brought home the cup – what the Jungian Campbell would have called “the return with the elixir” – Geelong went completely nuts; it was a Festival of Bacchanalia by Corio Bay. The streets were filled with honking cars and drunken supporters – but no one was arrested; the town’s tattoo parlours went into overdrive inking commemorations; nine months later came a mini baby boom.

It was a paroxysm of catharsis that Sophocles would have recognised. According to Button, one woman watched the first half of the game at home on TV, and when it became clear Geelong was going to win “she took her portable radio to the cemetery and listened to the second half sitting beside her mother’s grave.”

The residents of Oberammergau may have their Passion Play, but the citizens of Geelong have their footy club. From 2007 to 2011, Geelong made it into four grand finals and won three.

Apart from the story itself, Button has at his disposal a cast of characters so uniquely weird that at times the book reads like a novel about a strange cult.

The intense former North Melbourne champion Malcolm Blight was Geelong’s coach in the early 1990s. He took them to three grand finals in six years but never won a flag. Blight’s attempts to motivate his players could be bizarre.

He would get them to sit in a circle with blankets over their heads, while “Big Chief Malcolm” laid down the law to his “Indians.” He would make them form an honour guard to clap their opponents onto the field. And if that didn’t work, Blight would take his team into a pitch-black room and yell at them while chucking chairs around. The only thing he didn’t try, it seems, was a haka at three-quarter time.

A decade later, when Geelong was on its way to greatness, a player named Max Rooke – a gentle, beloved eccentric who took ballroom dancing lessons but was as hard as a sack of hammers on the field – created a team bonding ritual.

In a secret ceremony Rooke asked the other players to write down on a piece of paper their greatest ambition – “I want to be a premiership player” – then the bits of paper were gathered up, set on fire, and the ashes were stored in an old flask made of cloth and animal hide that Rooke had bought for $20 at a shop that sold African arts and crafts. “Then they dripped wax around the edges of the lid to seal it shut,” reports Button.

The flask – known as The Spirit – was awarded each week by the players to their teammate who showed the most Geelong spirit. It would then stand above the honoured player’s locker at the next game. Is this normal behaviour for young professional football players? Probably not, but they won the premiership that year.

And who has ever pierced the unknowable heart of that flawed hero of Geelong, Gary Ablett senior? Once, when the team was about to run on to Geelong’s home ground at Kardinia Park, someone thought to ask, “Where’s Gary?” According to Button:

He was found on a chest in the boot room eating a pie. At other times he was found in the same place, weeping. There in the boot room were the two Abletts: daffy genius and tormented soul.

Underlying the story of Geelong is the more fundamental story that bubbles beneath the surface of all big-time men’s team sport: the barely contained male hysteria that occurs when you make war, minus the weapons.

Relying on a lifetime of personal observations, and over 200 interviews, Button has managed to get at this story from a variety of angles. He gets inside the locker rooms, and sits among the crowds in the stand; he gives us glimpses of the powerbrokers in their boardroom, and goes out on the pitch with players.

It’s a fascinating portrait of a football club as a human institution: rancorous, magnificent and often absurd. Despite a brief – and no doubt embarrassing – flirtation with Richmond when he was five, Button has been a Cats man all his life. And the Cats are lucky to have him as their unauthorised historian.

When I finished Comeback, I thought, “Maybe I’ll give up my insouciant neutrality and start supporting Geelong, if only to annoy my Swans-loving friends.” But I will never, ever understand why so much raw athletic power and so much life-giving passion is expended on an Aussie Rules team when it could be harnessed to achieve something important: like beating the bloody All Blacks. •

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Some are vaguely aware that the area has been the site of European activity since that day in January 1788 when white men from a distant land came ashore from their strange sailing ships and – in their strange uniforms – claimed possession of the land in the name of a faraway king. An educated few would know that for thousands of years before these invaders raised their flag the area had been home to the Cadigal people, members of the Eora clan.

Even fewer remember from their history lessons that while these newcomers were busy establishing the infant colony, a new constitution was being forged in the United States, France was facing a revolution, and King George, back in the mother country, would go insane. Such, in part, was the antipodean political context at the time of “first” settlement in Australia.

In Sydney Town, the immediate job for government was to establish a peaceful colonial township while keeping the convicts under control. The Rocks area on the western side of Sydney Cove was an obvious place to gain a foothold for the invasion that commenced in January 1788, and to lay the first bricks in what was a nation-building enterprise.

A little under 200 years later, in 1973, The Rocks was far from peaceful. The events there, early on a cold morning late in October, would become famous in the annals of the Australian urban conservation movement.

An old building in Playfair Street was the focus of the action. Despite a green ban by the Builders Labourers Federation, or BLF, on demolitions in the wider Rocks area, non-union labour had commenced pulling down the building. A passive occupation of the site was seen as a way of furthering the conservation cause and ensuring that the green ban held. But under instructions from the state government and premier Askin, a large force of police arrived shortly after dawn to ensure that the non-union workforce could continue the demolition.

The police found the site occupied and barricaded by a very resolute group of locals and the two BLF leaders, Jack Mundey and Joe Owens. The police arrested fifty-eight of the activists, Mundey and Owens included. As Mundey recalls:

That morning’s occupation was just one of the large number of separate actions that, together, saved The Rocks. The combined power of citizens and unionists stopped insensitive development and, more importantly, gave citizens a say in the making of decisions.

Why was Mundey arrested? A strictly legal answer might be because he defied a police order to move on, to cease his trespass. A more realistic response might be that the premier wanted his head.

Why did residents defy the police? Because they were facing summary eviction from their homes, the destruction of a tight-knit community, the wrecking of a familiar and much-loved landscape, and bureaucracy’s failure to properly consult and negotiate.

Why did the whole Rocks saga become front-page news – eventually entering the history books as a brown sequel to the earlier and greener Battle for Kelly’s Bush? Because it involved the mass refusal by an army of determined unionists to apply their labour to an unpopular development proposal, and because it was a catalyst, a unifying event, an extraordinary and unprecedented moment for public sentiment to emerge as a driving force for reform of outdated planning laws and the introduction of heritage conservation as a proper responsibility of government.

The story begins with an outbreak of bubonic plague in 1900. This threat gave the state government a convenient excuse to compulsorily acquire most of the area in order to achieve two pressing objectives. The first was to bring this sector of the harbour waterfront into public ownership so that progressive modernisation of wharfage could take place. The second was to secure control of a site that would be a strategic element in the construction of a bridge across the harbour to the north shore.

From that date forward, residents became tenants of the state. Little private ownership remained, and private investment virtually ceased. In the 1930s a government committee recommended that this “slum” be cleared to make way for flats, offices and commerce. In the event, nothing of the kind happened, but the massive construction program for the Sydney Harbour Bridge (1928 to 1932) took a partial toll. The building of the Cahill Expressway across Circular Quay in the 1950s also had its impact on the community, both socially and environmentally.

By and large, though, this traditional inner-city working-class community – many of whose members traced their lineage back to colonial days – was able to stand its ground. Then, in 1960, the state government under Labor premier Robert Heffron invited selected developer teams to submit fresh proposals for reshaping the area east of the expressway, right down to the harbour’s edge. Once again, big changes were looming.

In January 1964, the construction firm of James Wallace Pty Ltd was named the successful tenderer on the basis of a scheme prepared by leading Sydney architects Edwards Madigan & Torzillo. From the harbourside at Dawes Point as far south as the Cahill Expressway, the old Rocks would be replaced by high-rise office towers, retail and commercial space, and some thirteen residential apartment blocks linked by a continuous traffic-free podium element at ground level.

After a conservative state government was elected in May 1965, the scheme was shelved. But the building boom in Sydney was moving into top gear and a year later the prospect of wholesale redevelopment again appeared when Liberal premier Askin sought the advice of John Overall, the head of Canberra’s National Capital Development Commission. On the ground, little had changed. The Askin government saw a large, rundown yet extremely valuable area of public land occupying a prime harbourside position on the edge of the CBD.

The trigger: Artist’s aerial view of 1967 scheme for The Rocks. Courtesy Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority

Yes, it was occupied, but only by a handful of low-income state tenants, slum-dwellers, hippies, down-and-outers and families on the welfare housing list paying ridiculously low rents. The government’s position was clear: in the name of progress they would have to go. Under Overall, the project’s ambit was extended south. As with the abandoned Wallace scheme, the government’s ultimate objective was to enable the huge real-estate potential of the area to be unlocked and exploited to the full.

Overall presented his Observations on Redevelopment of the Western Side of Sydney Cove Rocks Area to Grosvenor Street to the NSW parliament in June 1967. At his recommendation, the study area had been extended to include “the contiguous Crown-occupied land in West Rocks and Dawes Point. Observatory Hill, Argyle Place… [and] other holdings extending from Dawes Point to the Quay.” As Overall wrote in his 1993 memoir, his assignment was:

a concentrated exercise… proposing the development of the whole area around a design theme. Its aim was to retain the historic parts… opening up of Sydney’s majestic waterfront by developing a great harbour-front square that would provide the city with a memorial for its birthplace.

The National Trust resolved to support the scheme and its proposal to preserve “about seven buildings.” The government adopted Overall’s scheme and embraced with enthusiasm his recommendation that a special redevelopment authority be established to implement it. As later events proved, that single recommendation triggered the chain of events that led to blood in the streets, lockouts of building sites, police arrests, massive street demonstrations and, eventually, the famous BLF green ban of 1971–73.

John Overall was an architect, ex-military commander, and very capable public servant – attributes he brought to his Rocks assignment in full measure. In particular, his architectural training and his ready access to the considerable design resources of the National Capital Development Commission coloured his approach to urban design.

This background was a major influence on the beaux arts formality – some might call it sterility – of his recommended scheme, with its grand plaza overlooking Circular Quay, its axial building relationships, and its serried rank of towers stepping down to the harbour’s edge. In hindsight it could reasonably be seen as the offspring of the dry, sterile urban design achievements of his commission in central Canberra. Its general spirit was vaguely reminiscent of the postwar plans for the blitzed St Paul’s precinct in London prepared by Sir William (later Lord) Holford, one of those eminent UK-trained designers whose advice was regularly sought by the federal government in Canberra during the three decades following the end of the second world war.

Overall’s military background also gave him the no-nonsense management skills to get things done. He was comfortable in the company of government ministers and captains of industry. Socially, he was suave and likeable, with a twinkle in the eye, always impeccably dressed. These attributes endeared him to his political masters, and he remained comfortably in Canberra’s top job for fourteen years.

Overall’s recommendation that the state government create a dedicated agency to undertake the redevelopment of The Rocks was hardly a surprise, given that his own National Capital Development Commission had proven to be the perfect model for a major city building project. Largely autonomous in its relationships with other federal agencies, and enjoying a mandate to get the job done as expeditiously as possible, the commission had a dream run as both a design agency and a construction authority. Almost overnight, the empty paddocks of the capital territory were filled with houses, roads, parklands, schools, neighbourhood centres and civic facilities of all kinds. The commission attracted skilled professionals in architecture, landscape design and civil engineering, and it enjoyed the certainty of continuous federal funding.

The state government’s decision to create a special authority was shortly followed by the impetuous passing in January of the Sydney Cove Redevelopment Act 1968. Public debate on the bill was not on the agenda and press coverage was minimal. Two years later, in January 1970, the Sydney Cove Redevelopment Authority, or SCRA, was established. The authority’s first executive director and deputy chair was Owen Magee, another ex-military man whose field rank as a recently retired brigadier was prominently and proudly noted on the back cover of his 2005 memoir. Obviously a no-nonsense operator, there could be no better man for the job.

Under Magee, the SCRA quickly appointed a consortium of consultants led by Melbourne architects Bates Smart & McCutcheon, with a brief to review the Overall scheme and present a detailed set of proposals to the government within a year. In December 1970 they delivered, and their scheme was promptly adopted. The SCRA was in business.

In retrospect, it must be seen as an extraordinary miscarriage of the democratic process that, in preparing all three schemes for this unique area, not even lip service was paid to the concept of citizen participation. In the case of the Overall scheme, coming at a time when participation was entering the lexicon of contemporary planning, neither Overall nor his client saw any need to consult with the large resident community in the area or with the people of Sydney generally.

Here was a mature community with a long memory and longstanding associations with an area it had come to love. In the case of the SCRA scheme and its Melbourne-based architects, the tight schedule set by the government virtually ruled out any serious consultation. For this high-powered consortium, the prospect of community participation would have been dismissed as an expensive and time-consuming diversion. Weren’t the majority of residents low-income public housing tenants, indeed slum-dwellers? What right did they have to influence or interfere with a multimillion-dollar urban renewal project designed to clean up, once and for all, this crumbling and ramshackle quarter that was disfiguring the site of the nation’s birthplace?

Owen Magee provides a highly personal account of this prestigious state project in his memoir, How the Rocks Was Won. His choice of title says something about his (and the authority’s) philosophical position on the controversy that unfolded as he took the reins back in 1970. For this ex-military field officer and his newly created SCRA, the aim was to “win” the battle and eventually end the union’s “rule by violence,” as described in his second chapter. He makes it clear in his preface that his purpose in writing the book was to ensure that “the true story of how The Rocks was revitalised” was “set straight” in order to counter “the myths, first fabricated by the BLF and their supporters and repeated so often since that their truth is now seldom challenged.”

Magee’s take on the matter of consultation was clear. For him, consultation meant talking, negotiating and bargaining with the relevant bureaucracies, and the thought of entering into civilised discussions with the residents or interested community-based organisations would have been remote from his military mind.

Quite reasonably, he saw “the establishment of close contact at working level with the organisations controlling Sydney’s essential services and development” as being vital to the authority’s planning program. Some twenty-four “public and private” organisations were brought into the process, including agencies responsible for roads, planning, water, public works and public housing. His list diplomatically included the Sydney City Council and the National Trust, although the former had no real power in the area and the latter was considered to have no teeth. But talking to the people at grassroots level was not his style. His book is vague as to his views on citizen participation as a concept, and the topic does not appear in his index.

In later dealings, it’s clear that there was no love lost between Magee (and presumably the authority) and the Rocks Resident Action Group, professional institutes (including the Royal Australian Planning Institute and the Royal Australian Institute of Architects) and the BLF. Magee’s colourful language in his chapter on the “Riots in the Rocks” makes it abundantly clear that for him at least, the unionists were “thugs,” “a mob” of “screaming rioters” and “conspirators,” “drunkards,” and members of a “power-mad” union intent on “rule by violence.” BLF leaders Bob Pringle and Jack Mundey were “henchmen,” promoting the “power of the proletariat” and their “ruthless” desire for “worker control.” The NSW parliament had given the SCRA unprecedented powers at a time when town planning legislation was primitive, when there was no statutory protection for heritage, and when a right-wing conservative government was in no mood to have its plans derailed by resident activists, left-wing unionists, or their misguided allies in the design professions.

There may also have been a disinclination to deal with – or even a directive to avoid – those local design professionals. For reasons unknown, Magee’s book ignores the two professional bodies, despite the evidence that the planning and architects’ institutes had significant concerns about the 1970 scheme and both institutes made formal submissions to the authority setting out those concerns. Both bodies also achieved something that eluded the authority at the time: the development of a mutually respectful working relationship with Jack Mundey and other BLF leaders as well as with the residents’ action group. In the case of the planning institute, a policy statement released in June 1972 called for the state government to amend the SCRA Act “to provide for better consultation, public participation, and occasions for the exhibition and seeking of public comment on the policies and proposals of the Authority.”

If participation and consultation with the non-government sector was a low priority for the SCRA, its highly selective approach to heritage was at least explicit. Magee quotes from the minutes of the authority’s inaugural meeting on 20 January 1970, when its chair, William Pettingell, announced that the task facing the new organisation was one “which would not only preserve the historical significance of the area [but] would also see that it ran a useful business enterprise for the government and the people of the state.” Magee later states that one of the key requirements outlined to the incoming consultant team was that historic buildings worthy of preservation should be incorporated in the new development. “Worthiness” was not defined and, not surprisingly, very few buildings were found to be worthy.

In hindsight it can reasonably be claimed that much of the ensuing furore over the heritage issue was the result of disputes about the interpretation of that mandate. On the one hand was the planning institute’s view that the project site should be designated as a single coherent and unified conservation zone, with only selective redevelopment of certain properties within a heritage context. On the other was the view – first advocated by John Overall and later adopted by the authority – that apart from a small number of distinctive “historic buildings” the bulk of the site was ripe for demolition and redevelopment to satisfy the pressing commercial imperatives laid down by the government.

On the heritage issue, the National Trust’s position was evolving, if not ambivalent. At the invitation of the authority in 1970, the Trust submitted a survey and report, adopted by the National Trust Council in September that year, listing twenty-three buildings or groups of buildings “with first, second and third priorities for preservation, and a statement of townscape principles.” According to a file note from the Trust’s acting director, John Morris, many of the buildings that the organisation had recommended for preservation were included in the authority’s scheme, published in February 1971. The Trust duly expressed its support for the authority’s position, although only five buildings in the entire Rocks area had been formally entered onto the Trust’s register.

Subsequently, the Trust moved to correct this anomaly by directing its Historic Buildings Committee to review the listings, “taking into account what the committee believed to be essential to the character of The Rocks. That is, groups of buildings and the spaces they contain, together with the very important framed vistas which these spaces permit.” Significantly, the committee decided to recommend the inclusion of a number of twentieth-century buildings that had been overlooked until then. In April 1974 the Trust considered a schedule of new and revised listings, thereby preparing for its later classification of the entire Rocks precinct as an urban conservation area.

The SCRA scheme was founded on the expectation that it would be a model – a demonstration – of what could be achieved when the crème de la crème of the country’s design consultants, project managers, land economists, traffic engineers and real estate brains were brought together to determine a profitable future for this very valuable piece of publicly owned property.

Magee and architect Walter Bunning visited overseas precedents such as La Défense in Paris and the Barbican scheme in London during a whirlwind study tour after Magee’s appointment as executive director. The resulting design was a cluster of brutalist tower blocks stepping down the ridge to the harbour’s edge and ranging in height from thirty to fifty storeys, accommodating offices, retail uses, luxury hotels and apartments. A labyrinthine system of underground car parks made sure that motorists would not be inconvenienced. The heritage lobby was placated by the retention (or relocation) of a handful of historic buildings, mainly in the northern sector.

Clear, demolish and rebuild: the 1970 scheme for The Rocks, as adopted by NSW government. Courtesy Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority

The government summarily adopted the scheme after a token public exhibition, and its implementation was promptly authorised in December 1970. The authority probably saw the holiday period as an auspicious time to release such a potentially controversial scheme. In February the plans were officially launched, and briefly put on public display.

Over the next few months the SCRA considered the vexing matter of ensuring that rental tenancies were terminated so that demolition for the first stage of the redevelopment could begin. The authority also commenced its program of renovation and conservation of a handful of historic buildings that were now part of its portfolio. Rumours of impending evictions and loss of tenant rights, such as they were, led swiftly to the formation of The Rocks Resident Action Group. Their leader was Nita McRae, third-generation Rocks resident and mother. In November 1971 the group approached BLF secretary Jack Mundey and president Bob Pringle seeking union help. A green ban was placed, and the battle for The Rocks was about to get under way.

At the time, according to Mundey, “everyone should be interested when Sydney’s history and beauty is going to be torn down, and when people in the way of this so-called progress are regarded as minor inconveniences.” The “people” in this case were the residents facing eviction. Other people (not mentioned by Mundey) were the officials in charge of the redevelopment, and the financiers, developers and builders whose interests were of a more material nature. These “others” included anyone on the right who saw the BLF’s decisive intervention as a threat to the state’s economy, led by a group of communist extremists intent on defying the rule of law and on undermining the integrity of the Master Builders Association as the influential peak body within the NSW building industry.

From the outset, the campaign to save The Rocks had to be a fundamentally different battle from that which was still raging at Kelly’s Bush. In the latter case, it was the future of rare harbourside bushland that was at stake. In The Rocks, the welfare and housing needs of hundreds of low-income public housing tenants were among the primary drivers. Loss of heritage and history was another. As for the wider public – and a growing cohort of concerned professionals, civic leaders, “ordinary folk” – there was a palpable feeling of outrage at the cavalier way a state government could comfortably accept these architecturally audacious schemes without any attempt to assess public opinion.

Almost half a century on, the contemporary observer familiar with the human scale and undeniable charm of this mid-Victorian townscape could be excused for failing to understand what was being proposed at the time. The archives say it all. Many historic properties from Grosvenor Street north towards the harbour were to be razed and replaced by massive tower blocks, concrete plazas, podiums. Modern architecture was to be given free rein in this special place – all in the name of slum clearance and “urban renewal.”

Unlike Kelly’s Bush, where the locals were dealing with a private developer, the opponents of the scheme for The Rocks were facing a powerful statutory authority with a mandate to clear, demolish and rebuild. There was no local council directly involved, because the role of a local authority (the Sydney City Council) had been usurped by the state government through the Sydney Cove Redevelopment Act. In The Rocks, there were no green issues as such; but there was what many came to see as the most important question of all for the birthplace of European Australia: was it not vital that this historic precinct be protected and conserved for posterity as an indispensable part of what later came to be known as the National Estate?

In simple terms, the BLF’s green ban led by Mundey and Pringle proved to be the kiss of death for the official SCRA scheme that had been so enthusiastically adopted by the Askin government. The ban provided a breathing space for residents and supporters from outside to consider their options. It encouraged the area’s community to work with a group of interested professionals in the preparation of a people’s plan for their historic turf, a project that came to nought in bricks-and-mortar terms but would indirectly influence the review of the SCRA scheme, which eventually, and perhaps reluctantly, was commissioned in 1974.

The revised SCRA scheme signalled a significant volte-face for the authority. From that time on there would be no going back to wall-to-wall high-rise office towers, luxury housing for the fortunate few, and tokenistic nods in the direction of the heritage lobby. Indeed, Magee’s book includes a detailed schedule of domestic, commercial and civic heritage restoration projects that were successfully undertaken between 1970 and 1985 – an impressive list by any standards. From 1974 onward – at least until well into the 1980s – the work of the authority took it into new fields in which consultation with residents would take place as a matter of course on controversial matters. Conservation became a priority rather than a soft option. The resident population would be increased, with a reduction in office and commercial accommodation, and there would be an explicit commitment to low-to-medium building heights in the historic core area. North of the Cahill Expressway, high-rise was out.

In more recent years, the authority’s conservation effort has included some meticulous archaeological work that has added greatly to the fund of knowledge about the routines and lifestyles of the intrepid lads and lassies who found safe haven on this rocky hillside during the boisterous colonial era and the decades after. And the area’s role as a setting for public art has seen the installation of a larger-than-life, three-dimensional portrait of Jack Mundey in Globe Street, one of the oldest laneways in the old Rocks.

In 1995 the SCRA quietly dropped the word “redevelopment” from its official title – tacit recognition that heritage conservation was not only culturally important, but also officially legitimate, as well as commercially attractive. As locals and tourists flocked to visit and spend, the cash began to flow. A further change came in 1999 when the newly constituted Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority took over responsibility for the area. A couple of years later, this custodial role for state-owned harbour properties was augmented by an unexpected initiative of the federal government, when it established the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust, a new federal agency whose task was the preservation and rehabilitation of eight Commonwealth-owned properties around the harbour.

The entry of the federal government into the Sydney Harbour management scene was the culmination of a vigorous five-year-long grassroots campaign involving activists from harbourside communities, strongly supported by the National Trust. In December 1997, the Trust’s president, Barry O’Keefe, wrote to members urging their involvement and inviting them in turn to write to their local federal member of parliament, including Tony Abbott, the Member for Warringah. The following year, a press release from the Trust’s executive director welcomed prime minister John Howard’s “entry into the debate” about the future of the Commonwealth lands. The Trust’s priorities were clear: recognition of the “immense conservation values” of the remaining harbourside bushland, identification and recognition of the many items of built heritage, retention of public ownership of the lands in perpetuity, and the allocation of adequate funds to ensure effective conservation and management.

Nearly half a century later, The Rocks is the destination of millions of locals and visitors who come to the area to enjoy its ambience, thriving night life, handsome Georgian townscapes, cobbled alleyways, churches, open spaces, and many reminders of an earlier Sydney. But this is not to say that the entire Rocks–Millers Point precinct is in good condition. Poor maintenance and neglect by successive state governments raise questions on the future of certain parts of this heritage area, while the process of selling heritage houses to the private sector has already commenced.

It is probably this wilful “death by a thousand cuts” policy of neglect that triggered Miranda Devine’s trenchantly scornful description of Millers Point on 26 March 2014. She claimed in her Daily Telegraph column that “Millers Point, from the northern end of Lower Fort Street through Argyle Place to Merriman Street in the west and down to the southern end of High Street, is a decaying monument… a rundown hovel [sic].” To the uninitiated, this might seem to be reasonable enough. But when she goes on to describe this neglected place as “a decaying monument to the stand over tactics of the wharfies and the defunct, deregistered and disgraced BLF… a reminder of this city’s bad old days of greed, thuggery – and graft for those in the know” she might be accused of overstepping the mark. If decay and neglect are evident today, it is not because of the BLF; it is the result of three decades of poor maintenance by a negligent state government. Curiously, Devine’s unproven accusations of “greed,” “thuggery” and “graft” during the period of the BLF’s intervention can be compared to her silence on the rampant corruption with which the Askin government was associated at the time of the green bans.

To close the circle, the chair of the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority opened Jack Mundey Place in The Rocks on 1 May 2009. Within a stone’s throw of the setting for the bulldozer charges, bashings, sit-ins, lockouts and arrests of the early 1970s, Mike Collins named a small piece of the city after the man who began the conservation process during that turbulent period:

All movements need leadership, and this one found a dynamic and charismatic leader in Jack Mundey. He was the right leader at the right time… the movement that he led here at The Rocks was the genesis of Green Bans, and part of rethinking of planning and heritage in New South Wales… there is therefore a direct lineage between the protests that Jack led here and the birth of regulated heritage preservation around Australia… Jack Mundey Place celebrates this important moment in our history [emphasis added].

Coincidentally, the naming of Jack Mundey Place occurred at the same time as the release of a Revised Heritage Policy by the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority. This document is evidence enough of the steady reversal of government policy for this area during the period separating the SCRA–Magee era and the Sydney Harbour Foreshore Authority under Mike Collins. The revised policy is realistic in its acknowledgement that change must be accommodated if The Rocks is to continue “as a real place rather than as an artificial tourist destination… it is insufficient to expect that recognition of heritage values alone will conserve the place.” It follows that management of the area must involve adaptation – “provided that the uses and physical changes which result are compatible with the heritage significance of individual places and their settings.”

Given the irrefutable evidence of such a profound shift between the philosophical positions in 1971 and today, it could reasonably be concluded that the efforts of Mundey, the BLF and the heritage lobby of the 1970s have been well and truly vindicated. •

This is an edited extract from Jim Colman’s new book, The House That Jack Built: Jack Mundey, Green Bans Hero, published by NewSouth.

The post The battle for The Rocks appeared first on Inside Story.

Happily, I have been accustomed to rough it in many parts of the world. I glory in a good dinner, but can eat bread and cheese with an appetite; and so one morning I felt no very great repugnance at the fact of having to make a meagre breakfast, which was forced upon me by the unsatisfactory state of my finances. The day before, I had migrated from a certain hotel where I paid ten shillings a day (very cheap, too, according to London scale) to a small apartment in the suburbs, for which I paid five shillings a week. (In London it would be double.) I had sallied down town with the intention of making a cheap breakfast, and had a shilling in my pocket devoted to that purpose. Although I had been some months in Melbourne, and was aware that the necessities of life were very cheap here, I really had no thought that a breakfast could be got for sixpence. The idea seemed ridiculous, as sixpence appeared to me, up to that time, to be the lowest coin in circulation. I avoided the main thoroughfares, and at last entered a small restaurant in one of the bye streets. “Breakfast, sir,” said the Irish waitress, “chops, steaks, sausages, fried fish, dry hash”—. “Stop,” I cried, aghast at this list of luxuries, “I will have a cup of tea and some bread and butter.” “What else, sir? there’s nice steak this morning.” “How much is a steak?” I asked, bent on economy. “Sixpence, sir.” “And the tea, and bread and butter?” “All sixpence.”

“Bring me a steak, then,” I said; concluding that I had fully mortgaged my shilling. I was then supplied with a small steak, a roll, and cup of tea, which breakfast I humbly ate with a good appetite. When I had finished I rose, and putting my hand in my pocket, “How much?” I asked, grandly, and preparing to fling down my shilling as if I had hundreds at the back of it. “Sixpence for breakfast, thank you, sir;” and I left amazed at the fact of having discovered the cheapest meal in the world. The dinner was even a greater surprise to me. That I could obtain soup, meat, and pastry (no matter of what quality) for the ridiculously small sum of sixpence was a revelation of inestimable value.

“In essentials they are all much alike.“ Sketch from Illustrated Australian News, 21 December 1881

After the first day I gathered courage, and have since made a tour through most of the cheap restaurants. In essentials they are all much alike. The dishes appear to be stereotyped, and the cooking is much the same in all. There are generally, and especially in the summer, more flies in the dishes than refined prejudices might fancy. The sausages in all are bags of mystery, and the enormous consumption of these is a convincing proof that faith is strong in the colonies. The stews, which are mostly served at supper time, are not equal to the pot au feu of the French peasant, although the ingredients are as miscellaneous. Stewed lamb is a dish often on the supper bill of fare. I wondered for a long time how this was, as lamb is seldom to be had for dinner, till at last I discovered that the multiplicity of dishes consisted chiefly in the names. “Stewed lamb,” with a little curry stirred on the plate, became “curried mutton;” or, with the addition of a few slices of carrot, was “haricot mutton;” or, again, with a few boiled potatoes mashed in, was “Irish stew.” Thus, a smart cook will supply a dozen dishes from one base. Rabbit pie and fish are considered extra luxuries, and are generally announced by placards in the windows. What strikes an Englishman as very strange is the fact of eggs being so dear here. These, boiled or poached, are charged 9d. Fowl or chicken is absent from the menu of the ordinary sixpenny restaurant; but at some they are to be had for one shilling. It seems to me that one of the best speculations untouched would be a large poultry farm in the neighbourhood of Melbourne.

Sixpenny restaurants vary a good deal in style. There are some in the principal thoroughfares which shine with plate-glass, white linen, and pretty waiter girls. But all this extra display, and the cost of the handbills, which are so freely circulated, causes perceptible diminution in the quantity or quality of the viands. The places where one really feeds best are the smaller restaurants, kept by married couples, who do the cooking themselves. At many of these places the proprietors often work very hard, and are not by any means making rapid fortunes. These are chiefly patronized by working men, who take their dinners there. At one o’clock you will see a tremendous rush, every seat at the little tables being occupied. If one has catholic ideas on the subject of dirty hands, it is amusing to sit down with the crowd and watch the different modes of eating. The waiters are for some twenty minutes under a pressure of orders enough to tire out the intellect of most men. The habitués seem to strive to get done first, and he who sits nearest the door may order his “corned beef and cabbage” a dozen times, on each occasion it being captured en route as “my order.” The great appetites of apprentice boys are something fearful to behold, the soup, steak-pudding, and piles of cabbage and potatoes being assimilated by the consumption of half a loaf of bread. After watching the performance of half a dozen of these embryo “sons of toil,” you feel certain that the proprietor of the restaurant must be bankrupt on the morrow. A few quiet individuals generally dine after the one o’clock rush is over, and the same number may be seen at supper at seven o’clock, when they will have a chat together. At the restaurant I frequented there was a strange mixture. A negro gentleman from Jamaica, a noted politician in the Yankee sense of the word, who should have emigrated to the Southern States and got into office, instead of wasting his time here, where he is not believed in. A Frenchman, from the Mauritius. Several sons of the sod of various degrees of station and intellect, but mostly banded together under Holy Church in hatred of the Sassenach. A Birmingham mechanic, the best dressed man of the lot, bright, shrewd, and a liberal and freetrader of the John Bright pattern. A stray Chinaman, who is the only epicure, as he grumbles always at the quality of his “loast beef” or “cheak and lonions.” A hawker, Hibernian, who orates on every subject. A young man of considerable self-assurance, who was an officer in the Southern army during the American war, and is fond of “blowing thereon.” A blind beggar, often drunk, who sits near the door. A strange mixture this, truly, but really more interesting than the guests at many a first-class table d’hôte. The blind beggar is a character, not over cleanly certainly, but the presence of this Lazarus at the gate does not affect our appetites. The room is a long one, and he is afar off. Barring his real or simulated blindness, he reminds me of the beggar in Tom Burke of Ours. He seems the sort of man to sing a seditious song and humbug a jury. On one occasion he distinguished himself greatly amongst his compatriots by offering to raise a subscription to buy Signor Ricciotti Garibaldi a rope to send to his father… Now and then a poor vagrant creeps quietly in, and, taking the lowest seat, enjoys a good meal. All through the day miserable-looking dogs, who, according to the Pythagorean doctrine, are transformed vagrants, steal in, and, gliding underneath the tables, pick up scraps and bones. The kind-hearted proprietor often feeds them, and if the dogs fare as well at every restaurant in Melbourne, it is no wonder we see so many ownerless curs.

Restaurant waiters are not a class. They are refugees from all classes. One or two establishments employ young girls, who certainly are efficient in enticing you to order beer, when a bar-room is an adjunct of the place; but men waiters are the rule. They are of all trades and professions – new chums and old hands. Now and then you meet with a smart youth, who knows his business. Generally he has graduated at some good hotel, and drink or misfortune has condemned him to this. The cooks at these places, too, are mostly men who have begun with making damper. I know one man, however, thoroughly educated, who has passed years of his life in Parisian society, and is heir to £5,000 a year, who is now a cook in a restaurant. Some taverns set up as rivals to the restaurants, by giving “hot lunches, with pint of ale, from twelve to two daily, for sixpence.” The lunch is chiefly a plate of corned beef and potatoes, and instead of a pint of small beer you can compromise for a glass of the best. You get, altogether, about half the amount of food you would at a sixpenny dinner. Still these lunches are very cheap, and are much affected by young clerks, who may be hard up or economical, and who often steal in the back way to these places. Others, too proud, will spend sixpence in beer at an hotel bar, nibbling as much of the “free lunch”… as their shame will allow them. It would be far better for them if they would put their dignity on one side, and take a dinner in a sixpenny restaurant, which, up to this time, I consider to be the most wonderful example of Victorian progress and prosperity which I have met with. •

The Vagabond Papers is edited by Michael Cannon with contributions by Robert G. Flippen and Willa McDonald.

• Michael Cannon and Robert Flippen discussed the book with Thornton McCamish at the State Library of Victoria on 15 September 2016. View the YouTube recording here.

The post The sixpenny restaurant, a most wonderful example of Victorian progress and prosperity appeared first on Inside Story.

In their reasoning, friends and enemies of the suburb agreed almost as much as they disagreed. Both accepted the physical determinism that underlay the “logic of avoidance,” the esentially negative character of the suburban impulse. Suburbanites, they assumed, would, in fact, be healthier, more virtuous (according to middle-class standards), more family-minded and closer to nature. They disagreed, not because they thought that the suburbs made no difference to the lives of the suburbanites, but because they thought they made the wrong sort of difference. What suburbanites regarded as virtues, the suburbs’ enemies saw as vices. The suburbs were simply too spacious, too clean, too safe, too conventionally virtuous, too sanctimonious.

Libertarians rebelled against the evangelical morality that prized domestic privacy. Socialists opposed the suburbs’ effect on class segregation. Aesthetes, influenced by European realism or decadence, questioned the romantic idealisation of nature. Even the fears of bad air and overcrowding slowly dissolved as doctors embraced more complex theories of bacterial transmission. A way of life that was once prized gradually came to be seen first as contemptible, then as dangerous, and finally as downright irresponsible.

But before it became contemptible, the suburb was seen as simply ridiculous. William Thackeray, the satirist of London snobbery, sent up the saints of suburban Clapham in his comic novel The Newcomes (1855). In Our Mutual Friend (1865), Charles Dickens mocked “Mr and Mrs Veneering” as “bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new quarter of London.” A decade later, Marcus Clarke took a swipe at Melbourne’s new rich in a sketch of Mr and Mrs Wapshot, residents of “Nasturtium Villas,” a seaside suburb. The faults of these suburbanites were those of the new rich everywhere: they had too much money, too little taste and no sense of humour.

Only towards the end of the nineteenth century did the suburbanite emerge as an explicit topic of social commentary. Mr Pooter of “The Laurels,” Brickfield Terrace, Holloway, the comic hero of George and Weedon Grossmith’s The Diary of a Nobody (1888), is a lower middle-class cousin of the Veneerings and Wapshots. What endears him to us is his simple-hearted domesticity, his cheerful embrace of the suburban idea. “After my work in the City I like to be at home… ‘Home, Sweet Home,’ that’s my motto,” his diary begins. Content with a mundane round of horticulture, home improvements and his circle of like-minded friends, he is the prototype of a figure who appears, sometimes in more tragic guise, in the writings of Edwardian novelists, like H.G. Wells.

The most famous satirist of the Australian suburb, Barry Humphries, is a descendant of the Grossmiths. During the 1950s Humphries read The Diary of a Nobody and decided to write a sketch about a “decent, humdrum old man of the suburbs.” As his model, he took Mr Whittle, an inoffensive old man he often passed on his way to the station from his parents’ home in suburban Melbourne. “Mr Whittle,” Humphries recalls, “came to represent not merely my parents’ generation, but Respectability itself. He represented punctuality, industry, courtesy, thrift, temperance, niceness. I despised him.” He became the model for the most affecting of Humphries’s gallery of Australian suburban types, Sandy Stone. While his most famous character, Edna Everage, evolved from mousy housewife to spangled superstar, and from satire to burlesque, Sandy remained what he always was – a face for the deep pathos that Humphries detected beneath the complacent surface of suburban life.

Security, sedentary occupation and respectability were the hallmarks of “the suburbans,” as C.F.G. Masterman called them in his perceptive book, The Condition of England (1909). “It is no despicable life which has thus silently developed in suburban London,” he wrote. “Family affection is there, cheerfulness, an almost unlimited patience.” But there was something about its self-limiting, self-centred and spiritually enervated atmosphere that left him dissatisfied. Like Wells, Masterman pondered the possibility that the suburbs – still a small segment of London society – might eventually become everyone’s way of life. “Is this to be the type of all civilisations, when the whole Western world is to become comfortable and tranquil and progress finds its grave in a universal suburb?”

For all its prophetic insight, there is more than a whiff of condescension in the Edwardian critique of the suburbs. Masterman and Wells were refugees from suburban London and, in deriding its limitations, they were proclaiming their own emancipation. Condescension could easily harden into alienation. In 1910 the Australian socialist playwright Louis Esson declared:

The suburban home must be destroyed. It stands for all that is dull, and cowardly and depressing in modern life. It endeavours to eliminate the element of danger in human affairs. But without danger there can be no joy, no ecstasy, no spiritual adventures. The suburban home is a blasphemy. It denies life. Young men it would save from wine, and young women from love. But love and wine are eternal verities. They are moral. The suburban home is deplorably immoral.

A self-conscious Bohemian whose marriage was on the rocks, Esson saw the suburban home as a symbol of the Puritan values that, by now, had taken a strong hold on the public life of Melbourne. In rejecting suburbia, he inverted the value system of its creators but endorsed the equation between morality and urban form that underlay it.

In the early twentieth century, the attack on the suburb gradually broadened to include its economic, environmental, hygienic and social features. The evils of suburbia, these new critics suggested, were manifest in an insidious disease they called “sprawl.”

Few words in the history of urban planning have been so potent. “Sprawl” – literally “an awkward or clumsy spreading of the limbs” – originally denoted the unsightly, unplanned ribbon development on the edge of cities and towns, but it gradually became a synonym for almost any low-density or peripheral development at all. Its adoption as a self-conscious planning slogan appears to date from 1883, when the socialist and aesthete William Morris addressed an audience in Oxford on “Art under Plutocracy.” Art, Morris insisted, was something that should shape the material lives of the many, including their homes and towns, as well as the palaces of the few. “Need I speak to you of the wretched suburbs that sprawl around our fairest and most ancient cities?” he asked, by way of example. He was thinking of the (to him) ugly redbrick villas being erected on the circumference of Oxford.

Among Morris’s disciples (he may even have been present at the Oxford lecture) was his fellow socialist Raymond Unwin. By 1909, when Unwin published his influential book Town Planning in Practice (1909) and the House of Commons debated the first British Town Planning Bill, the disease – what Unwin called “that irregular fringe of half-developed suburb and half-spoiled country which forms such a hideous and depressing girdle around modern growing towns” – was well recognised, even if the word had not yet become standardised.

The noun “sprawl,” along with a standard lexicon of adjectives (“depressing,” “haphazard,” “dreary,” “ugly,” “shapeless,” “straggling,” “prosaic,” “unlovely,” “mushroom”), soon entered the vocabulary of Australian planners and architects. When the architect Kingsley Henderson observed in 1921 that “the suburbs had simply ‘sprawled’ outwards,” the quotation marks signalled the word’s arrival as a self-conscious planning slogan.

“Sprawl” was an anthropomorphic concept – it conjured up the image of a lazy, untidy, inconsiderate invader of other people’s space; a couch potato monopolising the national living room. Making the concept human invested it with human faults requiring censure and discipline. The usage gained currency at about the same time as the word “suburbia,” which was also often invested with humanoid qualities. “Suburbia lifts itself on the hills or snuggles in the hollows, plants itself in close communion of fellowship, or suspiciously scatters itself over a wide expanse of sand,” a Perth writer noted in 1914.

Observers of the Australian suburb echoed contemporary English critics, like Wells and Masterman. By the time the Englishman got to Australia, he peered down from an even mightier height. “Each little bungalow was set in its own hand-breadth of ground, surrounded by a little wooden palisade fence,” Richard Somers, hero of D.H. Lawrence’s novel Kangaroo (1923) observed. “And there went the long street, like a child’s drawing, the little square bungalows dot-dot-dot, close together and apart, like modern democracy, each one fenced round with a square rail fence.” Long before Pete Seeger’s famous song “Little Boxes,” the intellectuals, of both the left and the right, had written the suburb in a diminutive, minor key.

In 1928, the Australian historian Keith Hancock returned from Oxford to confront, as though for the first time, the Australian suburb. “Behind the garden fences, and within the little bungalows of a working class suburb, there are cleanliness, fresh air, some of the comforts and all of the decencies of life,” he admitted. “But for the Socialist” (he was writing for the British socialist journal the New Statesman) “it will not be enough.” The Australian suburb, he decided, offered “comfort without taste.” It had democratised “the standards of a plutocracy.” Even its residents, he believed, were vaguely conscious of the “dullness and monotony of Antipodean suburbia.”

Hancock thought he knew the remedy. The trouble with Australian cities, he decided, was “the abuse of space,” a bad habit they had inherited from their English counterparts. “It is time to declare a revolt against England… We shall find better teachers in Stockholm, or Hamburg or Vienna.” Australia’s cities would become more civilised as they became better planned, more compact – in short, more European.

Fears of suburban sprawl fluctuated in response to cycles of enthusiasm for urban planning. The 1940s was one of the great dreamtimes in Australian history, when wartime austerity launched visions of a new social order, made tangible in ideal cities and suburbs. In 1948, Sir Patrick Abercrombie toured Australia, preaching the lessons of his 1944 London Plan. “Decentralisation,” “satellite cities,” “green belts” and “model suburbs” quickly became part of Australian public discourse.

Among postwar planners, “sprawl” was redefined as an economic disease, though without losing its moral connotations. The unplanned suburb was not just a blot on the countryside but also a symptom of economic waste and inefficiency. “With its ever-increasing sprawl Melbourne has grown too big for its economy,” the Melbourne Argus warned in 1952. “To save our city and ourselves from bankruptcy we must call a halt to the sprawl before it can run us into bigger bills.” The attack on sprawl was coupled with reports of failing urban services, tallies of unmade roads, sewers and tramways, and appeals for an urban growth boundary. Sprawl was to the body politic what obesity was to the human body. “Melbourne,” wrote architect Robin Boyd, “has become too fat, languid, its strength outgrown.”

New shapeless suburbs sprawl heavily on the surrounding country. They grow without grace, without charm, far beyond the reach of the metropolitan transport system, beyond the last call of the milkman, beyond the gas, the sewerage, the shops, the theatres, the hotels. The city is putting on weight without muscle.

The antidote to sprawl, according to Abercrombie and Boyd, was not densification, but good planning and better suburban services. The metropolitan planning schemes adopted by Sydney and Melbourne in the 1940s and 1950s followed their lead, proposing green belts, activity centres and firmer metropolitan boundaries, but seldom directly challenging the low-density suburban way of life. “There are no definite boundaries where an observer can say: ‘Here the city ends and the country begins,’” Victoria’s Town and Country Planning Board noted in 1950.

By the 1950s, “suburbia” was becoming a metonymy for a new range of complaints. As well as architectural dullness and “oppressive conventions,” it was supposed to produce “effeminacy,” “loneliness” and political apathy, according to various critics of the time. “Nine out of ten of the little women in suburbia are content to leave political decisions to the mastermind of the house,” a political writer lamented in 1952. Women were also the chief victims of a mysterious disease imported from the United States, called “suburban neurosis.”

Defenders of suburbia had to defy an undertow of intellectual condescension. Australia’s most popular women’s magazine, the Australian Women’s Weekly, deplored the “scorn” of students and other “sham sophisticates” towards suburbia. “Of course it’s largely suburbia, but why should one be afraid of that name?” asked historian Charles Bean, in defence of his home, Canberra. “Twenty-three years as Australia’s war historian taught me how much that is magnificent can come from our decent suburbs with their little homes and gardens.” Even suburbia’s defenders, it seemed, could not escape the diminutives, “little” and “decent,” that seemed to haunt its name.

By the 1960s, Australian critics of suburbia were often taking their cue from the United States rather than Britain. As a disciple of Patrick Geddes and admirer of the English Garden City, American historian Lewis Mumford aspired to a new, more organic relationship between city and country, technology and nature. In his 1938 book, The Culture of Cities, he recognised the romantic suburb as expressing a “rational purpose” – the attempt to create “a biological environment on an urban basis.” If it was to be criticised, it was not for what it did, but for  what it failed to do. By the time he came to write his most influential book, The City in History (1961), however, Mumford’s opposition had hardened. The democratisation of the suburban idea had fatally compromised its original promise. Residents of the postwar suburbs enjoyed neither society nor solitude. The dormitory suburbs were not just “child-centred,” but also expressed “a childish view of the world.”

The suburb, Mumford declared in one of his more colourful passages, was “an asylum for the preservation of illusion.” In his mind, it was always to be contrasted with the city, the real world, where the great issues of civilisation are being played out, and where the rich share civic responsibility with the poor. The worst effect of the logic of avoidance, in Mumford’s scale of values, was the avoidance of responsibility.

Since the emergence of the first modern suburbs in the 1830s, the ideological foundations of the suburban idea have gradually crumbled. The sentimental idea of Home as a haven in a heartless world survived the decline of evangelical Christianity, and even its secularised version, Respectability. By the 1970s, however, the family was itself undergoing radical changes, especially the massive entry of married women into the paid workforce. The sanitarian’s belief in the healthiness of a semi-rural environment proved more tenacious than the anti-contagionist theories of disease on which it was based, yet by the 1970s the automobile suburb was generating new pathologies of its own and environmentalists were beginning to condemn the suburbanites’ profligate use of land and water as vigorously as their forefathers had condemned the squalor of the slum. Modernist architects and planners had rebelled against the nostalgic and romantic impulses that had inspired so much of the physical character of the suburbs. And, most significantly of all, the application of the techniques of mass production, and the postwar building boom so universalised the suburban form that its character as an exclusive middle-class retreat was finished forever.

It was not really until the 1960s that social scientists began to question the determinist logic that underlay what one of them now dubbed “the suburban myth.” Both the traditional critics and the defenders of the suburb had succumbed to the same flawed logic. Because the suburb was intended to foster domesticity, health, beauty and class solidarity, they assumed that it did so, and differed only on whether these were the highest values. It was only when the suburbs became more extensive and diverse that people began to recognise that you could find just as much domestic misery, ill-health, ugliness and class conflict in the suburbs as in the city. Conventional accounts mistakenly equated the suburbs, as a built form, with the ways of life of the middle class who monopolised them. But working-class suburbs, as the American sociologist Herbert Gans argued, could exhibit ways of life and outlook as diverse as the people who lived in them.

A rash of Australian studies added to the doubts. Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness (1960) deplored the “uglification” of the countryside as tree-haters and featurist architects shaped the new suburbs. Patrick Tennison’s The Marriage Wilderness: A Study of Women in Suburbia (1972) depicted the loneliness and depression prevalent among suburban housewives. Political scientists probed the complex interrelations between location, class and politics on Melbourne’s suburban fringe and the “circumambient apathy” that seemed to envelop it. Hugh Stretton’s Ideas for Australian Cities (1970) offered the most penetrating discussion of the trade-offs between urban density and the suburban way of life. Yes, he agreed, “plenty of dreary lives are indeed lived in suburbs. But most of them might well be worse in other surroundings.”

Paradoxically, it was the realisation of the suburban dream that finally proved its undoing. Only when almost everyone was a suburbanite did it become clear that similar places could mean different things to those who lived in them. Social critics were quicker to spot the determinist flaws in the idea of the slum than they were to recognise the similar skewed logic in the idea of the suburb. Rather than surrender their disapproval, they sometimes preferred to detach “suburbia” – a metonymy for a loathed way of life – from the geographical entity, the suburb.

Anti-suburbanites have been as slavish in their imitation of international fashions as the suburbanites were before them. The uncritical adoption by Australian commentators of the pejorative term “McMansion” illustrates this tendency. In fact, the material and social character of suburbanisation in the two societies are very different. In the United States, the middle classes have deserted the inner city for the suburbs, largely in order to avoid the costs and risks of sharing the inner city with poorer black and Hispanic neighbours. Some of the most criticised aspects of American suburbia, such as gated communities, fiscal selfishness, religious and political conservatism – and now sub-prime loans – are shaped by forces that are either absent, or much less powerful, in Australia. Here, by contrast, the upper middle classes have been deserting the suburbs in droves, forsaking the haciendas and swimming pools of Commodore Country for the terrace houses and restaurants of Cappuccino Country.

The most serious strike against the suburb is now environmental: its profligate consumption of land, energy and water. “We are full of regret for our gluttonous consumption of space and now we are questioning the ideology on which our lifestyle is based,” journalist Tony Collins observed in 1993. “As a nation we are in therapy, slowly coming to terms with the consequences of our over-indulgence.” Collins was preaching a new austerity on behalf of the Hawke government’s Better Cities Program and its policy of urban consolidation. Over the century since it was first coined, the concept of “sprawl” had metamorphosed from an aesthetic, to an economic, and finally to an ecological concept, while never losing its strong negative charge.

The suburban idea was losing its moral legitimacy. The new anti-suburbanism in Australia echoed the arguments of North American critics, inveighing against gated communities (even though there were few in Australia), nostalgic cookie-cutter architecture, and the false comforts of home ownership. After two decades of moralising, the critics have succeeded, not in killing the suburban ideal, but in cutting it down to size. Among the intellectuals they have not had it all their own way, although doubts about the value of urban consolidation do not necessarily translate into a full-blooded defence of the suburban idea.

After two centuries on the rise, the tide has turned against the suburban idea. The physical form has survived the ideologies that gave it birth. The suburbs continue to grow, although more slowly than before. The forces that sustain them are economic and pragmatic and they now have to swim against the tide of public opinion rather than with it.

The most desirable ways of living in Sydney and Melbourne are increasingly dense, urban and cosmopolitan rather than sparse, monocultural and suburban. The suburban fringe has become the refuge of the new poor rather than the new rich. It residents must endure not only the disadvantages of inferior public transport and services, but also the disdain of the inner-city intelligentsia. Real estate promoters still invoke the familiar rhetoric of rus in urbe, or attempt to graft it onto the language of urban sophistication. (“Latte by the Lake” was the slogan of one recent suburban development on Melbourne’s western edge.)

But the suburban idea is more like a marketing stratagem than the powerful ideology it once was. Its day is not yet over, but its heyday has passed. •

This is an edited extract from City Dreamers: The Urban Imagination in Australia, published this month by NewSouth.

The post The war on sprawl appeared first on Inside Story.

I had just got off the plane from a stint as an aid worker in cyclone-ravaged Fiji and was still unsure what country I was in. But if my mind was still in the Pacific Islands, my feet pushed forward into the streets of West Heidelberg, twelve kilometres from the centre of Melbourne, as if the act of walking would slowly coax my body and brain back together. As I emerged from one mental universe, I found myself in another, an Australia I distantly recognised.

Against a bright blue sky, a model suburb from the 1950s began to emerge, with pale brick houses, sizeable yards and streets lined with immense red gums. Only the small size of the houses and the narrowness of the streets betrayed that they had originally been designed as a scale model for housing athletes rather than as longer-term homes. The buildings themselves had been constructed with bricks from the Housing Commission’s factory in Holmesglen and, in the prim official language of the day, were intended to “present a pleasing contemporary pattern of form and colour.”

If the Olympic village offers a glimpse back in time, its construction – and the conduct of the “Friendly Games” themselves – mirrored the tense international political balancing act of the turbulent year 1956. In the official film of the Olympics, The Melbourne Rendezvous, the opening sequence and narration set a disquieting tone. Images of an enormous steel smelter, set to the doomsday chorus of a mass male choir, accompanied a narrative of industrial alienation in the deepening cold war. A resonant American voice intoned:

Modern man has made his entire world into a monstrous flaming arsenal. To protect himself against the inhuman forces of his own invention, he hides behind a thousand masks and disguises, rudely turning his back on the profound but simple miracle of his own being. He has put his faith in gigantic, complex machines and he cannot live without them. Ignoring his own pure strength, he stares spellbound and frightened at a world he can no longer understand. Is there an opportunity for men to act as men, free and unencumbered by science and their own inventions?

Luckily there is… the Olympic Games.

As the film panned over serried rows of pristine suburban homes, and as the narrator wondered, with obvious incredulity, why a small provincial backwater like Melbourne was the host city, a more frightening and uncertain world was beginning to emerge. In 1956, the first nuclear tests on Australian soil were conducted at Maralinga; the Soviet army invaded Hungary to suppress the anti-Soviet Hungarian Uprising; and British, Israeli and French forces had occupied the Suez Canal. This led to Olympic boycotts by Egypt, Iraq and Lebanon over the Suez Crisis, and Holland, Spain and Switzerland over the Soviet invasion of Budapest. “Red” China (in the language of the day) refused to attend, owing to the presence of official representation from Taiwan.

In the United States, it was the year Elvis Presley released his first album, Elvis Presley Rock ’n’ Roll,featuring “Blue Suede Shoes,” while Rosa Parks refused to leave her seat in the “whites only” section of an Alabama bus, as part of the wider desegregation and Civil Rights movement. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela faced his first trial for treason against the apartheid regime, while anticolonial movements in Algeria and Vietnam reached their bloody apogee in, respectively, the Battle of Algiers and the defeat of French forces at Dien Bien Phu.

In this global context, the construction of the Olympic village, and the equally constructed epithet that styled the event itself as the “Friendly Games,” suggested that Australia was slowly emerging from Dominion status while navigating the growing tensions of the cold war, radical social change and the end of European empire.

Was the order and conformity, the “pleasing contemporary pattern,” of the West Heidelberg streets an urban planner’s response to a “world he can no longer understand”? The official Olympic film suggests as much. An image of the great Olympian Shirley Strickland as she trimmed a rose bush in her neat, modern suburban home, then turned to the sky as a passenger jet roared past carrying incoming competitors, ended with the narration, “For some reason, Australian women prefer sport to back-fence gossiping.” It was as if the tide of change could be held at bay by javelin throwing, long-distance running and casual sexism.

Gaining confidence now and warmed by the sun, I walk under the Olympic rings that mark the entrance to the village and through the narrow, curling suburban streets dotted on either side by meek bungalows with pitched roofs and cream and yellow bricks. Vast gums line some streets and dominate the intersections, while neat lawns, privet hedges and tall plane trees are a model of Australian suburbia in the late afternoon sun. Some of the houses reflect a modest contentment with life – small but pleasant brick buildings that, in the wealthier surrounding suburbs, are rapidly being demolished to make way for towering McMansions. In West Heidelberg, too, some of the yellow fibro constructions, built as temporary athletes’ accommodation, are noticeably beginning to age and occasionally give way to newer, bigger townhouses.

As I walk, I am struck by the street names. They are a triumphant string of second world war victories where Australian forces were present in the Pacific and the Western Desert of Egypt and Libya. Many of those names are obscure now, but in 1956 they would have been part of recent collective memory. Here, the great battles of Midway, Tarakan, Tobruk, Kokoda, El Alamein, Bardia (in the Libyan desert), Morotai (in Indonesia) and Goodenough Island (off Papua New Guinea) cartographically intersect.

Only Australia’s colonial rule in Papua New Guinea was given greater prominence by local urban planners. The Papuan names of Moresby, Lae, Morobe, Malahang, Ramu and Wewak all feature proudly in the West Heidelberg streetscape. As European empire retreated around the globe, the old order lived on in the cream brick and colonial symmetry of an Olympic village that, with evident uncertainty about the new world, proclaimed an internationalism cloaked in military might and direct rule. In the 1950s, official Australia still saw itself, in Rudyard Kipling’s formulation, as part of the Empire’s “dominion over palm” (if not over pine).

But while West Heidelberg had once been large in the eyes of the world, there were visible signs that not all was right. A sign in a nearby phone box reads “RIP Trudy,” while a fake heritage plaque on a small fibro house, rather than announcing the former presence of a forgotten dignitary, informs passers-by that “Shit Happens.” In the next street, an enormous ute with a row of shooting lamps above the cabin is identified by the numberplate “Agro 0.” On some of the two-storey blocks of flats, a community regeneration program has put up large, locally made signs with words intended to inspire – “Hope” swishes across a wall in lively red and yellow spray paint, “Wish” and “Chance” express a more equivocal sentiment. The last two words are bright but illegible and suggest a disintegration of former optimism.

The Mall, celebrated as Australia’s first drive-in shopping centre, runs alongside the village and is equally suggestive of an antiquated modernism. Here, social planning policies of the era sought a concentration of the poor – ostensibly with the humane rationale of giving people a place to live but with the long-term consequence of producing intergenerational “locational disadvantage.” But if West Heidelberg is one of the most disadvantaged areas in the country, it is also one of the most rapidly changing. Along the Mall, traditional shops like Joe’s Meats and St Vinnies are being supplemented and replaced by those run by Somali migrants, reinvigorating local social life. Maidan Café, Maneeq Fashion Shop, Lebra Perfumes and Fathia Boutique have sprung up alongside the bottle shop, the TAB and various social services, taking advantage of cheap rents and prime positions, and transforming local life. The smell of coffee and freshly ground zaatar mingles with the occasional greasy waft from the fish-and-chip shop.

In an era of unparalleled destruction of Melbourne’s Victorian past, the 1956 Olympic village was an image of cleanliness, order and 1950s modernity that emphasised both national singularity and Empire loyalty. These decaying sentiments are woven into the urban fabric and provide an underlying stratum to subsequent layers of poverty, migration and gradual gentrification.

In its Olympic heyday, West Heidelberg was buzzing. The Victorian Housing Commission had constructed the village in record time for the arrival of 4700 athletes. The involvement of the Housing Commission was crucial, as it enabled the state government of John Cain Snr to respond to critics who argued that the games were a waste of the money that could have been spent on addressing Melbourne’s housing shortage. In a moment of desperation as the games approached, the organising committee hit upon the novel idea of an Olympic village, based on the garden city model of postwar suburban expansion, in place of the segregated barrack-like dormitories that had characterised athletes’ accommodation at previous games. Answering its detractors, the government announced that the Olympic village would become social housing once the games were over.

The village layout meant that teams could be accommodated together in houses, or groups of houses, fostering a spirit of “Olympism.” The practicalities of this sentiment were explained to Geoffrey Ballard, who became the deputy commandant of the Olympic village after responding to an advertisement describing the position’s attractions. “The hours are atrocious and the pay impossible,” he was told. The village commandant, Philip Miskin, a former Japanese POW, described Ballard’s role: “We are to be hosts to the young men and women of about seventy nations without distinction of colour, race, politics or creed… We must make no distinctions between any of them,” a sentiment Miskin took seriously given the horror of his wartime experiences.

While retaining the theme of military victories and colonial possessions in the Pacific, some streets were renamed to avoid reminding participants of wartime confrontations their home countries had lost. Care was taken that teams from countries with current political tensions were kept apart and separate dining facilities were provided so that athletes would eat together according to their “dietetic groups,” with a separate kitchen for the Israeli team and Halal meat “for the Mohammedans.” In response to a South African request to be located in a “white area” so as not to interact with black athletes, an affronted Miskin replied, “It was not you we were thinking of, but other people.”

If politics and food separated the athletes within the Olympic village, it was the first time both male and female athletes were housed within the same facility, although in separate quarters. A high wire mesh surrounded the women’s quarters as “female guests are entitled to complete privacy and protection from embarrassment,” although a legend quickly grew about the antics of a “Greek pole-vaulter” for whom high walls presented no great obstacle to romance. Thoughtfully, the village organisers provided an official chaperone for female athletes in the form of Miss Allison Ramsay, a former international hockey player, whose no doubt irritating presence was officially described as “a far reaching gesture of much merit and… appreciated by the teams concerned.”

Male athletes were looked after by the “housewives” – mainly married women who did the cleaning. Geoffrey Ballard described this arrangement as “a successful move as the boys had mothers and not lovers to care for them.” While some “national habits” were “unpleasant to take,” on the whole the “housewives generally loved their boys” and Philip Miskin’s secretary, Miss Baker, took a shining to some of them. “Marigold had a ‘thing’ about Nigerians,” Miskin later remarked.

At the time, the athletes’ accommodation was noted for its luxuries. All houses had unlimited hot water and there were two beds per room with “thick inner-spring mattresses and collage-weave bedspreads.” Each room had a heater and the women’s quarters were equipped with “washing machines, electric steam irons and sewing machines.” The male competitors, apparently requiring less, were provided with electric razors. Each day, across the village, 20,000 meals were prepared and 6000 beds were made. Food procurement was a vast logistical undertaking: athletes consumed ten tonnes of butter, 45,000 eggs, seventy tonnes of vegetables, twenty tonnes of fish and one hundred tonnes of meat. Eight hundred scouts and sixteen “bilingualists” were recruited to provide ongoing assistance to competitors.

If running the Olympic village was a massive operation, it was also one that had to be flexible enough to accommodate the random and the unexpected. Dame Pattie Menzies, the wife of the prime minister, appeared one day and was spotted playing quoits, while the Duke of Edinburgh, who had the demanding official function of opening the games with a public address that lasted a full ten seconds, was inclined to “shoot off on his own” and had to be closely watched.

All of this was too much for local satirist Barry Humphries, whose incarnation as (the then) Mrs Edna Everage arose partly as a reflection of suburban Australia’s attempt to grapple with the outside world. Mrs Everage, before reaching international stardom, was an “Olympic housewife” who had to come to terms with some of her foreign guests’ strange habits. Her observations were broadcast on the very first day of Australian television, established in readiness for the 1956 Olympics.

I meet Brother Harry Prout, a member of the Catholic Marist Brothers – and Banyule (the local council) Citizen of the Year – in his house in Liberty Parade. “I’m a tea man myself,” Harry confides as, clutching a warm milky brew, we settle down in his living room with its olive-coloured fibro walls and grey polyester sofas. On the coffee table there is a cross made of twigs woven together with red knitting wool. The house is at once public and private – a home that also attests to Harry’s two decades living among the church community he started and has maintained from his living room. The only personal object is a picture of Harry as a young boy in a framed photo over the fireplace; he looks remarkably like the older Harry on the sofa in front of me, holding a mug of tea.

“You can say that after eighteen years we’ve failed,” he declares flatly. He arrived in West Heidelberg believing that his work would be to “build capacity through collaborative leadership” and to help people in poverty develop skills and talents, often overlooked by institutions, that could break intergenerational cycles of disadvantage. “I’m frequently asked if we’ve had any success,” he says, “but it’s not really like that.” The search in the community for “natural leaders” who could take on local organising had not succeeded. “We’re given two ears and one mouth for a reason,” Harry says. “It’s about listening to people and learning to live together well in an area of identified need.”

He has clearly more than achieved this. As state officials from Centrelink, teachers, the local police and church leaders have come and gone, Harry has remained in the Olympic village in the same old athletes’ housing as everyone else. Here he has listened, helped locals to negotiate the social welfare system, and coached people in their interactions with the authorities and, periodically, the courts. For Harry, living in West Heidelberg is about being a constant in the lives of people who have had few, if any, figures to rely on – lives characterised by the intergenerational costs of family break-ups, substance abuse and instability. I don’t detect a hint of regret or despondency in his tone.

“You might get to the end if you’re lucky,” he says, “or you might not. It’s not just an economic thing – it’s about being there and appreciating the gifts they have, it’s about being with people and not trying to change them.”

I ask Harry what these gifts are. He thinks for a second before answering. “For the middle class, ownership is the most important thing, and for the upper class it’s connections – but people here are tribal. They stick together and fight together and there is always someone to turn to.” He goes on to say that “there’s so much damage and brokenness” and recounts how, in a men’s group meeting he once held, ten out of twelve attendees said they had been sexually abused as children by members of their own family. “The essential building blocks of personal development are missing and what they’ve experienced is abandonment. They have no answer to the question who belongs to me?” The members of the community, he says, “feel imprisoned and have no choices. They don’t have any money and the homes they have are given to them. They are controlled and powerless and consequently are often restless.”

Harry tells me that the absence of stable institutions or family relationships has meant an almost excessive openness, with few boundaries set about what may or may not be appropriate in different contexts. There is limited concept of personal property or ownership. Shoplifting is an issue, and then there is the early sexualisation of young people. The main view, he says, is that “if it works, use it.” He has observed that adult emotional needs are frequently met by children, as the adults themselves are often without other adult friends. In some cases, children haven’t gone to school because parents would have felt too lonely at home without them. If there is a shortage of money, the currency has become gossip and “stuff,” which Harry does not see as just accumulated clutter. “There’s sometimes little more than a path between the kitchen, bedroom and the TV because of all the stuff.” This is a psychological reaction to the absence of stability and security. According to Harry, there is a fundamental level of brokenness and “the whole household structure needs reordering.”

But for all this absence of rules, conventions and moral compasses, he tells me, there is a strongly developed sense of “justice and a fair go.” This is more than hypothetical. The local court has moved to the centre of Melbourne’s CBD and social services have become increasingly centralised, leading to culture clashes between the relatively educated administrators, lawyers and housing bureaucrats applying the rules from afar and the social norms, based on survival, that underpin the lived reality of extreme poverty. Strongly held local concepts of justice and fairness are, in part, the reaction to what Harry describes as the “institutional violence” of the state.

These comments are echoed by Jeff Percy, manager of Olympic Adult Education Inc., a private vocational training and community centre. “It’s like a country town here,” he says, and briskly summarises the area’s problems: in the housing estate there are the old, the lonely, and those with drug and alcohol issues. Thirty-three per cent of the local population are people living with disabilities “and they all hate each other.” Their problems and needs are different, and to make matters worse, communal spaces designed to foster a collaborative spirit among athletes half a century ago only antagonise people whose lives and needs are now so different.

He tells me that his role is more than education: it is “living and learning,” and is fundamentally about building connections. Offering literacy and vocational classes is one way of doing this, but turning around postcode discrimination is another. The “3081 Angels” (West Heidelberg’s postcode is 3081) is a local support group that takes pride in the area’s rough image and provides child and maternal support, cups of tea to young mothers, and the important function of “just being there.” There are meetings of knitting clubs, the Women of West Heidelberg, and the Combined Pensioners Association. A social enterprise program runs community gardens where locals learn gardening skills while also learning about collaboration and the expectations of work.

I ask Jeff about the standard of housing. I had read disturbing stories about hot summers and freezing winters, ancient sewer pipes bursting and tardy response times from the housing department. “They’re gulag blocks,” he responds immediately. But the area is slowly changing. Among Olympic Adult Education’s board members are local residents who are members of the middle class – social workers, teachers, a university lecturer. An indication of change is the arrival in West Heidelberg of the “Transition Movement” – loose affiliations of young professionals who are attracted by communitarian ideals of living locally, tending common gardens and attempting to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. West Heidelberg, I learn, has recently seen the highest rise in house prices in Melbourne. “We need to be there for the unwell but support the well,” Jeff says, and starts telling me about his longer-term plans to obtain funding for a $5 million new community centre.

As I leave the building, he points to gleaming beds of flowers all around the carpark. “There’s a Vietnamese lady who lives next door who planted all these. I’m not sure what her name is but I think of her as Mrs Wong.” Standing in the sun, I suggest that Mrs Nguyen might be more appropriate, and he laughs before shaking my hand and correcting my Vietnamese pronunciation. Nearby, a white Mercedes van with no numberplates is piled high with possessions in front of a house whose sign, next to a faded Australian flag, reads “Dead End.”

The adjacent Mall is a lively place – even the bins are painted in rainbow colours with the words “Be you, stay cool, we are 3081WH.” Somali men sit outside smoking, drinking coffee and chatting as the top end of the street buzzes with social activity.

It is here, in the street that has become known informally as Somaliberg, that I have coffee with Dr Hussein Haraco, president of the Somali Australia Council of Victoria. “We don’t really know how many Somalis live here,” he says. “They often don’t register in the census and many are afraid to identify themselves as Somali or Muslim.” Despite this, Hussein estimates that there are about 13,000 Somalis in Victoria, about a third of them living in West Heidelberg, making the Mall a major centre of Somali émigré life.

Hussein is an elegant man with distinguished grey hair, a neatly clipped goatee and professorial rimless glasses, who completed a doctorate in economics in New Delhi before coming to Australia in the early 1990s. While he has been in the area for nearly two decades, in many ways he is the face of the new West Heidelberg. His conversation centres around commerce and urban development; he is on the community advisory board for the Olympia Project – a major urban regeneration program that plans to build more than 800 new homes to replace ageing Olympic-era housing stock. The influence of the local Somali vote means that he has been courted by politicians on both sides at state and federal level.

“My one regret,” he says to me, “is that I did not buy more while there was an opportunity.” Hussein opened one of the first Somali shops on the Mall – a pizza shop with a billiard table. The shop, like most of the others in the Mall, had been empty for many years and the Mall itself had become a centre of local drinking and drug use. The shop’s owners offered a cheap rent that they rarely increased because they were happy that, after nearly a decade, someone was finally doing business from the premises. The Somali community started coming to the pizza shop and the billiard table was a big attraction in the evenings.

Gradually, owing to cheap rents, other shops opened. Hussein rented a second pizza shop and now Somalis are running seven clothes shops, two groceries and five restaurants. A virtuous cycle of economic activity began to spring up. A local hairdresser opened and, Hussein tells me, people would come to the Mall for a haircut, then buy their groceries and stay for lunch. Investment in landscaping and a children’s play area began to attract families back to a shopping strip made more secure by the presence of people, commerce and activity.

But far from being satisfied with the change in which he has been so influential, Hussein sees this as only the first phase of development. The shops, he says, are “too old-fashioned.” Young people prefer the nearby Northland shopping centre and it is time to modernise. For this, he is highly conscious of the area’s Olympic heritage – it is a selling point, something that makes the area unique. He shows me a large poster on the wall of the cafe, depicting the suburb and the Mall in their 1950s heyday when everything was new and bustling. The Olympic rings and flags of many nations fly over Liberty Parade and headlines from contemporary newspapers excitedly proclaim “Melbourne’s first ‘drive-in’ shopping centre.”

It is time, Hussein says, to move to the second stage of business – a return, perhaps, to the glory days. “We have to be ready for change, whether it is remaining commercially viable or the needs of our children as they interact with Australian life, whatever it is – diabetes, mixed marriages.” As I leave, he sees a friendly but very drunk young Somali man who is being greeted by a couple of Caucasian revellers who are clearly high. They move on as Hussein approaches, and forty minutes later, when I return to the Mall to drive home, I see Hussein and the young man still standing, deep in conversation.

The stability brought by the Somali community is frequently noted as one of the major changes to the Mall. “I feel safe leaving work in the evenings – there are always some elderly Somali men around chatting,” says Blanche Wong, the manager of the local co-working space, rented for a “peppercorn lease” from Australia Post. It is a brilliant-white space – attractively clean and open – with meeting rooms, computers and work spaces. A number of startups have settled here, including an accountant, a web developer, and media and publishing services, who have been attracted to what Blanche, a recent accountancy graduate, describes as a “business incubator.” When I tell her I’m writing about the area, she counters that her friend has been recently nominated for a RITA Award. Looking it up on her computer, we find that it is “the highest award of distinction in romance fiction.”

“The Games? No, I wasn’t a bit interested,” says Aileen Erikson, aged ninety, who was among the first occupants of the Olympic village after the athletes had left, along with her husband Jim, a milk delivery man. Her sitting room is sprinkled with a dappled light that comes in through the trees in the front garden.

In 1956, with a young child, Aileen and Jim were offered their pick of the houses in West Heidelberg for a £50 deposit and subsequent payment by instalments. She selected this house, “which was all empty when I saw it,” because she took a shine to the cream-coloured bricks. Her street was largely Italian at the time, and her neighbours were a policeman and “a cook married to a French woman.” “It was a bit more classy then,” she says, “but I wouldn’t go back to those days. I wouldn’t be able to do what I’m interested in. Our main role was to get married, have children, and make a home – women had to keep quiet.”

For a while, the environment deteriorated as a result of alcohol, violence and drugs. One time, Aileen “hid behind the door, scared out of my wits” owing to an altercation outside. But there are “many layers of living that have come into this place,” she tells me. Polishing up the Olympic village was important, and now migrants are “coming in with a bit more money, more culture, a bit more refined.” Two of her sons have moved to the more affluent suburbs of Box Hill and Springvale and tend to “look down on the area.” A third son converted to Buddhism and returned to live at home, where he practises silent meditation. “So I’m living with a Buddhist now,” she tells me, “but I’m more interested in experiencing life.”

Pausing one day to reminisce in front of the house of a friend who had died, Aileen met the new occupant, Suad, a young Muslim woman in a headscarf who is studying to be a teacher. The two discussed their experiences and pasts, and the role of women in their societies; and then, “caught up in all these cultures,” Aileen, the ninety-year-old “original,” and Suad, the young Somali teacher, ran off to the bus stop and went together to explore the nearby leafy suburb of Rosanna. “I thought I was her age,” Aileen says, gleaming as she recounts her adventure.

She shows me around the house and the backyard – a spacious block with a prominent Hills Hoist. “There weren’t any fences here when we arrived – it was all open and the children used to run everywhere.” Aileen hops lightly onto the back step and points over the fence at the big blue sky behind the house. “All that space,” she says, “used to be houses – all of this is being knocked down.”

Nearby, some of the athletes’ training facilities have been maintained, and the sporting tradition lives on through the local soccer club, Heidelberg United. John Lioupas has been with the club since he was a boy, and I meet him in Brunswick in the offices of the Greek Australian Welfare Society. Heidelberg United originated as a Greek social club and is still known in the Greek press by its original name, Heidelberg Alexander, a team whose glory days in the 1980s saw it crowned as national champion and host of the first soccer match broadcast by SBS. As Australian soccer began to professionalise, sporting authorities sought to widen the game’s appeal beyond its ethnic base and old teams with names like Alexander, Hellas and Croatia had to change. “It was ethnic cleansing,” John tells me angrily.

In Greek families, the club was a major social centre. “At the start of each week, Greek families’ money would be put on the table and allotted for different purposes – rent or mortgage, groceries, bills and, always, a bit left over for Alexander.” The club lost funding and was disbarred from competition for a period, but was kept alive by its dedicated supporters. “I’ve never been to an A-League game,” says John, despite his evident love of the game and role as a pioneer with United in developing women’s soccer. “They’re all owned in Dubai but my club is here. You can’t put up something that has no heritage – if you lose sight of that, you lose sight of where you want to be.”

In 2015, Heidelberg United reached the quarterfinal of the Football Federation Australia Cup against uber-club Melbourne City, part of the Manchester City franchise. Despite losing 5–0 to City’s hired stars, Heidelberg FC won a moral victory. In a moment of symbolism that would not have been lost on soccer’s authorities, the club contracted Kostas Katsouranis, a former captain of the Greek national team and winner of the European Championship in 2004, to play for one game. Despite the score, the presence of Katsouranis and a crowd that dwarfed most A-League matches meant that “we won the game before it started.” “Although,” he adds ruefully, “it would have been good if we’d scored a goal.”

When he was asked to recall how he felt about the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, prime minister Robert Menzies paused briefly before echoing William Blake’s poem “Jerusalem.” His were “green and pleasant” memories of the “Friendly Games.” In reality, the Olympic village was a hastily built brick-and-fibro “Jerusalem” in what the local Olympic organisers themselves had described as a “desolate tract of land.”

The Olympics are many things – but ultimately they are perhaps least of all a sporting contest. They are described as moments of pride when not just the city, or the country, but more abstract national qualities are on international display; they are frequently seen as a moment of arrival, a coming of age, a process of national maturity. Revived and reinvented in 1894, the modern Olympics are the celebration and encapsulation – along with the commemoration of casualties of war – of the strangest of modern political phenomena: the nation-state. Olympic villages bear passing witness to this compressed moment of nation-building and myth-making, and linger in strange half-lives long after the games themselves have moved on and the athletes have been forgotten. They are the future as represented by the past. •

I would like to thank the many people who gave their time and experiences so generously for this article and who welcomed a complete stranger so openly into their homes and lives. They made this article so much fun to research and I hope it reflects a place they recognise. They are: Robin Grow, Dr George Giuliani, Associate Professor Deb Orr, Dr Hussein Haraco, Ismael Gabow, Blanche Wong, Brother Harry Prout, Jeff Percy, Kerry-Ann Joyce, Brian Joyce and Aileen Erikson.

This essay was first published in Griffith Review 53: Our Sporting Life.

The post Green and pleasant memories appeared first on Inside Story.

But this is just the colour and movement in the AEC’s data, the melodrama that plays out in the foreground. In the background lurks a deeper story, one that tells us a whole lot more about how our political system functions. That’s the story told by the predictable donations, the routine donations, the donations so familiar we hardly notice them any more.

The data released covered the three elections – in Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales – during the 2014–15 financial year. Victoria’s data is juiciest because of that state’s open-slather donations regime; indeed, the state’s ombudsman, Deborah Glass, describes Victoria as among “the least regulated jurisdictions in the Western world in terms of political finance law.” Apart from gaming licensees, anyone can make a donation of any size, and only those donating more than $13,000 must disclose the fact. Victoria is essentially the wild west of campaign finance.

So it’s no surprise that the list of donors in the lead-up to the 2014 Victorian election is a who’s who of firms and industries that are regulated by or have business before the government. Most prominent of all were property developers, perhaps the people with the most to gain from favourable state government decisions.

Take Bill McNee’s VicLand development firm. VicLand made a massive windfall profit when Matthew Guy, then planning minister and now opposition leader, rezoned 250 hectares of warehouses and industrial plant at Fishermans Bend for large-scale redevelopment. VicLand donated over $100,000 to the Liberal Party during its term in government and contributed $52,000 to the party’s unsuccessful 2014 election campaign.

Michael Yates, a developer who donated $20,000 to the Liberal campaign effort, made $30 million on a South Yarra apartment tower deal that went ahead only after Guy approved it over the objections of the local council. Yates made a $25,000 donation during the approval period too. When he was asked if he was aware of Yates’s generosity, Guy said, “I see Michael Yates at many functions, he is a well-known developer.”

Nigel Satterley AM, who donated $20,000, made major profits thanks to decisions to unlock land for development on Melbourne’s urban fringe. Watsons, the Mornington Peninsula developers who happened to benefit from decisions to allow the development of Melbourne’s green wedges, donated $80,000. Parklea – $30,000 – was lucky enough to own swathes of land near Torquay released for development by Matthew Guy in 2014. All were perfectly legal donations, but all are worrying for their potential to create conflicts of interest and compromise decision-makers.

While Labor got its share of developer dollars, most flowed to the Liberals. We can probably put that down to the fact that the Liberals were in power rather than to any ideological affinities. The donations are not coincidences or sincere expressions of political values; they’re made with an eye to the decision-makers who, by the stroke of their pens, can make or break fortunes.

Then again, even that paints too simple a picture of things. It would be a mistake to view these donations as direct transactions, as corruption in the narrow sense of the word. Indeed, it’s important to stress that nothing even slightly illegal is happening here. These donations are more about networking, about sending signals. A $20,000 donation is about proving your congeniality, your willingness to cooperate, to the party in power. It keeps you in the Rolodex, gets your calls returned. It’s part of a bigger system of give and take, of patronage and courtship – one step in the complicated dance of governments and vested interests.

And – crucially – it takes two to tango. Governments are just as interested in big developments going ahead as the developers are. It’s a chance to don the high-vis jacket, to announce new jobs, to demonstrate progress, to get cranes on the skyline. This is the yardstick by which governments are now measured. So we are not dealing with one-way, one-off transactions. This is a tight-knit, long-term relationship. In a sense, political parties govern in coalition with developers, or with other business interests. Generating the capacity to govern – to have some influence over the economy and the physical shape of our communities – requires these coalitions.

All this is to say that these very routine donations, from developers and from other interests, should be looked at more as the sharing of resources within a governing coalition, rather than as specific cases of corruption. All the donations mentioned here fall well within the guidelines and are perfectly legal – indeed, the fact that this behaviour is within the bounds of the existing regulatory framework is what should concern us most. It may not be corruption in the brown-paper-bag sense of the word, but it is a “corruption” of what we might expect from democratic government, government for the people and for the public interest rather than in the narrow interests of developers or political partisans.

Changes are obviously needed. A NSW-style scheme that bans developer donations, puts tight limits on how much can be donated, and lowers the disclosure limit to $1000 would be a solid start. Queensland and Western Australia have made some progress in this direction. Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and, of course, the Commonwealth are the laggards – and others, like the Australian Capital Territory, are even going backwards. A serious reform push, in multiple states, would be necessary for any changes to be workable and lasting.

But reformers beware. When we target the developer–politics nexus, we target a seriously tangled relationship. It can be hard to tell where private interests end and government begins. If the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption has taught us anything, it’s that untangling the pair can get very messy indeed. •

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The bar never opened. Instead, Westbury set about putting empty shops and offices to use by matching a grab bag of artistic and community uses with space. He waded through the inevitable regulatory, financial and material obstacles that stood in the way of making that happen.

The result was Renew Newcastle, a not-for-profit company that has transformed inner-urban Newcastle. Its success was recognised in 2011 when the world’s largest travel publisher, Lonely Planet, proclaimed the evolving industrial seaside city to be one of the top ten cities to visit, partly because of its embrace of transition and regeneration. Renew has gone on to launch more than 200 creative and community projects in Newcastle and across Australia.

Creating Cities chronicles Westbury’s journey and, in the process, exposes many of the issues facing urban areas in transition. The book was made possible by a record-breaking Australian crowdfunding campaign – an unsurprising avenue to publication given its topic. Apart from some small editorial errors, the bookis well-written and engaging, moving from chapter to chapter at times like an impulsive hitched ride, yet all the while maintaining momentum.

The book is personal, and anyone expecting an objective review of Renew Newcastle’s success will be left wanting. Despite an engaging reflection on the processes of Maslow’s Hammer at work (see chapter five) there is little acknowledgement of the subjectivity inherent in the author’s analysis of his home town. Nor are there perspectives from those outside the process, though it would be interesting to explore how Renew’s ventures have been received by the public, and whether its modus operandi has had any unintended consequences of exclusion, complication or veto.

As an urban planner, I’m acutely aware of why we have the regulations that so often seem to stand in the way of Renew’s creative force. Cities are made up not only by the anomalous but also by the everyday: the fire regulations, parking provisions, building codes and engineering specifications that make buildings survive and places work. Creating Cities chronicles how cities can benefit from a more balanced approach – a mindful contravention of regulation in the name of making something work. Indeed, the book opens with a story of the author’s grandfather, who erected (in concrete) a home-made sign back in the 1960s to provide direction to an otherwise obscured public park in northwest Newcastle. Now, the globalisation of the atypical, made possible by communication technologies, is exposing and upscaling metaphorical home-made signs. Flux is no longer ancillary to the status quo. Idiosyncrasy is the new normal, and that home-made sign foreshadowed an appreciation of the hand-made and bespoke.

This grounding makes Creating Cities an important record of how figurative signs are made and erected, and how they can change people’s lives and define space. Yet the book’s true contribution comes from the way it exposes the immense complexity of issues facing urban areas increasingly pressured by fluidity but literally set in concrete. Although Westbury never explicitly acknowledges it, Creating Cities is essentially a story about the tensions of geographical scale. It provides an instruction manual for how communities can use technologies to resist consumer monocultures, all the while working within regulatory and physical constraints. •

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In 2005 she married Jason Osborne, an IT professional who worked in a city bank, and they began planning a future with children and their own home. They didn’t even bother looking in the inner city. Alice’s friends told her “it would be six, seven [hundred thousand dollars]-plus for anything decent.”

Alice’s sister lived in Point Cook, a new suburb twenty-five kilometres southwest of the CBD. It was growing fast, with new shops, schools and childcare centres. The couple liked what they saw. They bought off the plan and in a couple of years moved into their four-bedroom home. They caught the Werribee train to work, and life was good.

Then Alice had their first child, William, and took nine months off. When she went back to work two days a week, Jason took three months’ paternity leave. After he returned to work, they enrolled William in the new childcare centre at nearby Sanctuary Lakes while Alice continued her part-time job.

The two days Alice worked were hectic. She woke at 5 am so she could get to work at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute by 7 am. (Jason dropped William at childcare at about 8 am on his way to work.) This allowed Alice to leave for home at 3.30 pm. She was anxious to keep William’s days in childcare as short as possible.

Naturally, problems sometimes occurred. On one day, Alice left around her usual finish time to get back to Point Cook and pick up William. But at North Melbourne station she heard announcements that trains were suspended indefinitely on the Werribee line. There were replacement buses, but she was already imagining the crush to get on board. By now it was after 4.30, and the childcare centre closed at 6.30 sharp. Alice “began freaking out.” She called Jason at his CBD office. They made a snap decision to brave the traffic in a taxi. The fare cost $90.

With the birth of their second child, Lucy, Alice again took nine months maternity leave, then returned to work. Jason again took paternity leave for three months. During that time they decided that their carefully calibrated “tag-in, tag-out” arrangement was unsustainable.

They assessed options, laid out spreadsheets on the dining room table, pored over the weekly budget. Could they afford to live on one salary and keep up the mortgage? If Alice continued to work as before, Jason would have to get two kids off to childcare during peak hour. He’d probably get to work even later than 10 am. As well as it taking longer to get two kids out of the house, Point Cook’s growing population and increasing traffic congestion had by that point doubled the time it took Jason to drive to the train. He also had to park further away from the station. Would it hurt his career?

There was also the high cost of childcare, which would eat into Alice’s salary. But the logistics – the traffic, the limited public transport, the exhausting distances – proved to be the clincher. Remembering that day at North Melbourne station, the frantic taxi ride, Alice gave notice to her employer. For the foreseeable future, her career in public health was over.

She tried to keep her hand in with some university teaching, tutoring in genetics a couple of times a year. But she found it too hard to keep abreast of developments in her field of prenatal screening for birth defects. On the other hand, she was over-qualified for most jobs that came up around Point Cook.

The family lives more frugally since Alice stopped working in public health. Their last proper family holiday was three years ago, though sometimes they go camping. Two days a week Alice works at William’s primary school. She collects a half-day’s salary for teaching sewing classes, and dabbles in a sewing business from home. Perhaps she’ll consider getting a teaching qualification herself once Lucy starts school, so she can work part-time while staying close for school pick-up.

One thing they won’t do is move from Point Cook. The community spirit is strong, and Alice loves the place. But for all its positives, she is clear that if she lived closer to the city she would not have been forced into the trade-off that cut short her career.

The Osbornes are typical of millions caught on the far side of the new urban divide changing Australia and challenging longheld ideals of economic opportunity and fairness. This is the growing gap between people who live near the centre of Australian cities and those who live near the outer fringes.

The two groups experience city life very differently. For those on the wrong side of the divide, poorer access to jobs affects their ability to maintain and build a career over time, and long commutes are expensive and exhausting. In some cases, commutes can make juggling the responsibilities of home and work so difficult that some – usually women – have to give up work altogether.

Employees living furthest from the centre of Australia’s five biggest cities also get paid less. The average yearly individual income among employees living within ten kilometres of Australia’s five largest cities is a quarter higher than that of employees living more than twenty kilometres from city centres.

In Sydney, the highest-earning twenty-five to sixty-four-year-olds are clustered around the inner suburbs, Sydney Harbour and the North Shore. Typical incomes in Bondi, by the sea, and St Ives, in the north, are also comparatively high, above $60,000. Incomes in western suburbs such as Bankstown and Wetherill Park are typically below $40,000. In Brisbane, typical individual incomes are highest – above $60,000 a year – among people living near the centre in places such as Bulimba or Ashgrove, and in well-located riverside suburbs. Incomes in more distant suburbs are typically below $40,000.

The income gap between inner and outer suburbs is growing. Since the mid 1990s, income growth among people living in suburbs close to city centres – Alexandria in Sydney, for example, and Albert Park in Melbourne and Morningside in Brisbane – has been 3 or 4 per cent a year (adjusted for inflation). Incomes in the west and southwest of Sydney, the far southeast and northwest of Melbourne and in the southern suburbs of Brisbane suburbs have barely grown over the same period.

The changes are reshaping cities, the opportunities they offer and their very identity. Living north or south of the Yarra River used to be Melbourne’s biggest class marker. The working class lived in the north, the well-heeled in the east and the south. But people on high incomes have increasingly clustered in inner suburbs on both banks of the river. In Brisbane the economic and cultural divide between people living north and south of the Brisbane River is eroding, with proximity to the city centre increasingly desirable.

The pattern is less pronounced in Perth, where incomes have grown strongly across the metropolitan region, a legacy of the recent mining boom. Perth’s smaller manufacturing base also means the decline of that sector has not hit the city as hard. Nevertheless, income growth is still highest close to the city centre.

Part of the reason outer suburban residents earn lower incomes is that they are more likely to be employed casually in lower-skilled roles. Casual employees account for almost half of all sales workers and labourers in outer suburbs but fewer than 10 per cent of the management and professional jobs concentrated in city centres. The average weekly wage of casual workers Australia-wide is $538 per week, less than half the average weekly full-time wage of $1276. Almost a third of casual employees are underemployed and want to work more hours.

Differences in wealth, or assets, can give a more meaningful indication of people’s material living standards than differences in income. For example, a retiree may have a low annual income despite having accumulated extensive assets during a long career. It is difficult to get an accurate geographic breakdown of wealth in Australia, but we can use house prices as a rough proxy for wealth distribution in Australia’s big cities.

The highest property prices are increasingly found in suburbs close to the CBD. Households with the greatest levels of wealth congregate in the parts of cities with the best access to jobs and transport. The further you go from city centres, the more house prices fall. The declines in house prices as you get further from the CBD are steepest in Sydney and Melbourne, the two cities with the greatest concentrations of knowledge-intensive jobs in the inner city. They are also the cities that sprawl furthest and offer the worst access to jobs.

Of course, access to jobs and transport are just two factors in creating a person’s wealth; education and skill levels are also vital. A strong link now exists between skill levels and where people live. University graduates are concentrated in Melbourne’s inner suburbs, for example, and in some middle suburbs east of the city centre. Outer suburbs have lower shares of university graduates. And the closer residents live to city centres, the greater the number and range of high-skilled jobs they can reach by car, bicycle, foot or public transport, which better services the inner city.

There are many stories like Alice’s. In common with a great number of people who live far from city centres, she isn’t reaping the full material benefits that living in a city should bring, benefits that previous generations of Australian city residents enjoyed before the new divide set in. There are a number of ways this division can be broken down; here, we’ll focus on one key area for change.

Enabling people to live closer to jobs and transport, and to choose the kind of home they want, means that more homes need to be built – especially semi-detached terraces, units and townhouses, and low-rise flats – in established inner and middle suburbs.

Critics of greater inner-urban density sometimes conjure up images of downtown Shanghai, or of high-rise apartment towers dwarfing suburban homes. But well-designed new housing, close to jobs and transport, can be found in Potts Point in Sydney, South Yarra in Melbourne, New Farm in Brisbane and Subiaco in Perth, among other places. These are some of Australia’s most populated areas, but they are also desirable and often prestigious places to live.

The benefits of giving people more housing options are considerable. Households wouldn’t get everything they want, but a wider range of choices would make a great difference to many people’s lives. The whole community benefits, too. Enabling people to live closer to jobs would contribute to economic growth by giving people a wider choice of jobs and employers a better choice of employees. And if new housing doesn’t get built in places with good access to jobs, it will continue to be built in areas with poor access to jobs, exacerbating the growing social and economic divide.

The biggest barrier to new housing near employment centres is the system of state and local government rules and processes that dictate where and how new housing is built. The complexity and delay built into these processes can make getting permission to construct new housing expensive and uncertain, and frequently impossible. Dramatically simplifying and streamlining these processes is an urgent priority.

Less complexity shouldn’t mean lower standards, though. In fact, higher standards are essential if the community is to accept a simpler, faster and less costly system.

Local residents’ interests are protected by arbitrary barriers that slow down all proposals to build housing and make them more costly or completely unviable. A better way to achieve clearer and higher standards is through clear codes or standards that determine approval for more kinds of home development. Housing codes can protect existing residents from badly designed developments while reducing the costs of planning approval processes.

Compliance with the code could be assessed by a builder, surveyor or consultant, and permission to build would not have to be sought through an authority such as a local council. This doesn’t mean a free-for-all: buildings that are later found not to comply with the code can be demolished or modified at the developer’s expense, with substantial penalties for the professional who endorsed it. Alternatively, planning approval could be granted by an authority such as a local council, but through an accelerated process.

Codes would cover aspects of the scale and appearance of buildings and how they integrate into a street. These include height and overshadowing in outdoor areas, privacy and the appearance of new developments from the street. They would also cover internal features, such as how much sunlight can enter living areas, and the amount of private open space. Homes that comply with the relevant housing code will be well designed and respect neighbourhood character.

Some state governments are using these kinds of code already, but largely for detached houses or in limited locations. They are not yet enabling the mix of housing in the mix of locations that people want. Applying housing codes to all residential areas would make a big difference to the availability of a variety of new housing.

Sometimes governments call existing rules and processes “codes” but allow for a lot of discretion and uncertainty in practice. If codes are to offer certainty, developers and builders should not have discretion over whether to apply them. Local communities’ interests should be respected from the start by the government involving them in developing the housing code that applies to their area. In most cases communities shouldn’t need to go to a tribunal or court to enforce local rules.

Ministerial interventions in the approval process for individual developments erode the trust local residents have in the system, giving them little reassurance that their interests will be respected. Planning ministers should decide the content of the rules, guided by deep community engagement. Indeed, they have a democratic mandate to do so. But they should not be the umpire as well.

And, as the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption points out, clarity and simplicity also reduce the risk of corruption.

To succeed, any change needs to work for existing residents of established suburbs, as well as for prospective residents and the city as a whole. Genuine engagement is essential to achieving change that ensures everyone has their interests respected, even though not everybody will get everything they want.

The first step is citywide engagement to allocate responsibility for managing population change and building new homes across the city. This should reflect the broader needs of the city and the interests of all its residents. Plans should identify where new housing will be built, and what new transport connections are required to improve residents’ access to jobs. If the plans are based on good engagement that creates a real sense of community ownership they will also help different levels of government and different organisations work in the same direction, rather than opposing developments for short-term political gain.

To turn the plan into reality, each local council must have realistic housing targets. Every area needs to accommodate its share of population growth. Housing targets can distribute growth fairly and encourage local councils not to think only about short-term benefits to local residents at the expense of people living elsewhere in the city.

Local communities can then agree on how to meet their housing target in a way that works best for their area. As in Vancouver and Seattle, local residents should decide on design guidelines that are sensitive to the existing character of their neighbourhood. Buildings that can house the same number of households can be made to look and feel very different.

The community should also be involved in deciding what mixes of housing should go where, so that different types of household can live in the area, including older downsizers, young couples, families and single-person households. Finally, issues that existing residents rightly care about – such as maintenance of privacy, minimisation of overlooking and overshadowing, and placement of garages – should be built into local codes.

State governments have a critical role to play. They have the authority to push local councils to stick to their housing targets. They can require local plans to include enough land zoned to allow new housing. They can offer praise and extra funding to those that are succeeding, while naming and shaming laggards, and if necessary applying financial penalties.

In line with citywide plans, state governments also need to ensure more housing is accompanied by better transport. Depending on the location, this could involve more infrastructure, or better ways to manage congestion and parking. These transport improvements need to be paid for and implemented, not promised then forgotten. Otherwise, geography will increasingly be destiny. •

This is an edited extract from City Limits: Why Australia's Cities are Broken and How We Can Fix Them.

The post The new urban divide, and how to deal with it appeared first on Inside Story.

I was flicking through a magazine when a shirtless man brushed past in a semi-naked blur. Near what looked like the water sports section, he stopped abruptly at a rack of souvenir t-shirts and singlets. With no need of a changing room, he tried on a couple of different items right where he stood. Less than two minutes later, and for a modest outlay, he strode out of the shop wearing a brand new navy blue singlet, complete with NT tourism logo.

I wondered what had moved him to go NT formal like that. Perhaps he was feeling the cold. It was the dry season, after all, and the temperature was in the low twenties. Perhaps he had a meeting to go to. Either way I wasn’t all that surprised. I’d seen it all before, years earlier.

The first time I arrived in the Territory was in the wet season of 1992. I’d been surfing Brisbane’s couches through the recession we had to have, and despite the less than hectic schedule, life on the dole had worn thin. So too had Queensland. I’d spent an entire lifetime in Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s state, and I’d seen his perjury trial implode, to cheers from Queenslanders, because of one resolute juror with connections to the National Party.

This was the post-Fitzgerald era, when Queensland was supposed to be all shiny, new and on the move. In that moment, it felt pretty much like the Queensland of old. Worse than that, too many of the locals were proud of it.

A friend suggested that there might be jobs in Darwin when the tourists hit town during the dry season. Perhaps he just wanted me off his couch. Nonetheless, it was a good idea.

When I flew into Darwin I learned that fifty years earlier, almost to the day, 188 Japanese aircraft had done the same, though with considerably more intent. On the morning of 19 February 1942, fresh from a successful attack on Pearl Harbor a couple of months earlier and buoyed by the fall of Singapore just days before, the Japanese navy launched two air raids on Darwin and its surrounds, signalling the beginning of a series of attacks that would continue until November 1943. By the time they’d finished, the Japanese had raided the north sixty-four times.

I was a little surprised, and a little embarrassed, that I had no real clue about the scale of the bombing. But I could draw comfort from the fact that I wasn’t alone, and that the government of the day had planned it that way. Careful not to spread panic across the country, and determined to avoid crediting the Japanese with a victory of any significance, the Curtin government deliberately kept the news low-key and vague.

It didn’t take long for other surprises to surface. Darwin wasn’t like anywhere else – not even a bit – and the signs came steadily.

My first job was behind the bar at one of the city’s upmarket hotels on the Esplanade. There, where a level of decorum among the guests was assumed, I learned that propriety didn’t necessarily extend to the staff. On my first night in the cocktail bar, in white shirt and bow tie, I polished wine glasses and wiped down available surfaces in an earnest display of how to be a new and keen employee. Down on the floor, doing push-ups, was the hotel’s reservations manager. She was in her fifties; everyone was impressed.

One Friday I joined the maintenance guys for lunch. The pub around the corner was doing fish and chips and a ten-ounce beer for a fiver. Half of Darwin’s tradies were there and it was hard work even getting to the bar. Joe Cocker’s “You Can Leave Your Hat On” was blaring at somewhere near eleven on the dial. I could tell by all the hollering and cheering that Darwin’s tradies really liked their fish and chips. The attractive young lady up on stage with the can of shaving cream and the dance moves was popular too.

Later that year, Roy – a thirty-something Queenslander who’d come to Darwin a decade earlier “for a look around” and had forgotten to go home – invited me to join him for a round of golf. I knew enough about golfing etiquette to spend the morning before tee-off cobbling together a suitable costume: collared shirt, tailored shorts, longish socks. On the ride out in the car, I began to wonder if the finer points of golfing had eluded Roy, who wasn’t wearing much more than a pair of shorts. This wasn’t all that alarming; Darwin is hot, after all, and he was prone to general shirtlessness anyway, despite the ravages that a decade-long diet of beer and cigarettes had visited upon his physique. He probably had a shirt in his golf bag, I thought. After he entered the pro shop and paid for the round, played eighteen holes, and celebrated the end of the game with a beer at the nineteenth, all without a shirt, I began to suspect that not only did he not have one in his golf bag, but he might not even have one at home.

In Roy’s defence, it was November, during what Territorians call the “build-up,” that time of the year before the rains come, when the heat and humidity combine to inspire statistically significant numbers of locals to drink more, fight more and generally engage in more antisocial behaviours. In 2014, researchers from Charles Darwin University said this about the effect of the Top End’s annual troppo season on locals’ mood: “We accept the fact people are more aggressive and there are more fights and more alcohol use.”

The first worrisome feature of such a statement is that there is a particular time of the year when the locals drink more. The second is that it’s accepted. But Darwin’s that kind of place, and much else is accepted too. In 1992, at least, I noticed an unusually high proportion of people with just one name. Surnames, it seemed, were not compulsory, and in many cases not advisable; not for tax purposes anyway. I didn’t meet anyone called Sebastian or Tristan, though, nothing that flamboyant. I did meet a Rat and a Mongrel. I kept my gaze low and brief.

Occasionally I met a born-and-bred Territorian. One of them was called George. I got to know him pretty well, well enough to be invited into his home. While George didn’t have a surname, he did have a small saltwater crocodile and a pet python in his yard. He told me he’d been banned from his local pet shop for buying guinea pigs and mice with unusual regularity.

George told me about Christmas in 1974, when Cyclone Tracy came to town. He was just six years old at the time, so he couldn’t remember much – only that there were lots of presents strewn about the streets and that he and his mates had fun investigating on their bikes. Others I met along the way had more harrowing tales of Tracy. One long night behind the bar, I passive-smoked a pouch and a half of prison-issue White Ox – the tobacco of choice among those for whom old habits linger – while listening to a crumpled and damaged drunk recall his night in the harbour on a boat that went down with his friend on it.

Tracy wasn’t, of course, the first cyclone to ravage the Northern outpost. Notwithstanding the Larrakia people and what they must have known and experienced over thousands of years, death by cyclone was also not totally unknown to the white interlopers. In 1875, Palmerston, as it was then called, lost around a third of its entire population – many of them high-ranking public servants – to a cyclone. Oddly enough, they were off the coast of North Queensland on a steamship headed for Adelaide at the time. In 1897, 1917 and 1937, cyclones again caused death and widespread destruction to the area.

I left Darwin in late 1994 in a hurry. I’d been warned it might go that way. A friend had told me I’d wake up one morning and decide it was time to go. I didn’t take him seriously at the time, but on the walk to work one morning I skipped the front door and headed to a travel agent. She told me that if I waited two weeks I’d save a couple of hundred dollars on the fare. “No thanks,” I said. “I need to go now.”

It was the booze of course. No great story there. Not in the Territory, anyway. I just knew that if I didn’t leave then I might never leave at all. The evidence of that possibility was everywhere.

After twenty-one years, Darwin in 2015 is almost unrecognisable. It’s been unrecognisable before, only this time the change has been gradual, not cataclysmic. Somewhere along the line, the Gold Coast aesthetic arrived. High-rise apartment blocks, once scarce, now dominate the skyline, so much so that the hotel I once worked in – then the second-tallest building in town – is now difficult to spot, obscured by a four-tower beast next door offering “Darwin’s most spectacular views of the harbour and esplanade.” My hotel used to say that. I guess it doesn’t anymore.

Since the mid 1990s, the population of Darwin has increased by around 75 per cent. The city now sits just a mining project or two short of 150,000 people. It certainly looks like it has the apartments for them. But the housing market is soft in 2015 and a sizeable chunk of the apartments are empty. Darwin has the highest vacancy rate of any capital city in Australia. I got that from the NT News, so it must be true.

Rupert’s NT News, so the blurb goes, “represents the people of the Territory with fair, investigative and quirky journalism… is unconventional, bold, unique and unashamedly Territorian, and allows readers to escape the daily grind and to be informed while also enjoying the lighter side of life.” Much of that seems like fair comment. Few papers in Australia straddle the sublime and the ridiculous quite like the News.

On cue when we arrived, the Museum and Art Gallery Northern Territory was holding an exhibition entitled Yes, It’s Real: Legendary Covers of the NT News. As I wandered through the show, I had the opportunity to explain some of the paper’s past headline triumphs to my young children; not an easy task with pearls such as “WHY I STUCK A CRACKER UP MY CLACKER,” “Man arrested after cops spot suspiciously small package in his undies” and “HORNY GHOST HAUNTS HOUSE: If you thought Casper was friendly, you should meet Kevin.”

I left the exhibition keen to grab a copy. Outside a newsagent in Fannie Bay, I saw the day’s headline: DEATH ROW COW FALLS INTO DARWIN HARBOUR. I didn’t buy the paper. I didn’t need to. All was well in Darwin.

I dropped in for a haircut in a barber shop just off the Smith Street Mall. Gianni, the barber, who I didn’t recognise when I first sat down, told me that he’d cut my hair before. Indeed he had, though in his old salon a street behind, more than twenty years earlier. I remembered the last haircut he gave me too; it cost me a coffee. A day earlier, under duress, he’d agreed to fashion for me what might have been termed an experimental mullet. In my defence it was the early nineties and mullets were a popular accoutrement for the gentlemen of the day. But Gianni regarded the style of mullet I had requested as particularly objectionable. I should probably have heeded the warning; instead, I thanked him for his concern and paid the bill.

Doubts set in rather early. As I left the salon, a shop window next door afforded me a glimpse of the new do in full flow. Oh dear. The mullet, of course, is more an attitude than a hairdo. I didn’t have the swagger to pull it off. The next morning at opening time, I was back there pleading for remedial action. Gianni took to it with the clippers – and a degree of vindication – and sent me out for a cappuccino.

I remember the coffee because a cappuccino was an unusual request in Darwin in the nineties. Darwinites like their coffee, that’s for sure, but in those days it came in a carton and sat in the flavoured milk section at supermarkets and burger joints. Hot coffee, in a cup, just wasn’t the thing to do. These days, if the proliferation of coffee shops is an indication, Darwin’s just like every other city in Australia – teeming with rock-star baristas and customers with strong views about crema.

I drove past the block of flats in Smith Street where I used to live. It hadn’t changed much. Buildings made of besser block tend not to, I guess. I was getting my bearings, though, and Darwin was feeling comfortable again. As I sat in an idling car outside the flats, I remembered a wet and wild night watching one of the Top End’s celebrated wet season thunderstorms. It was early January and my neighbour and I had both been woken by thunder in the early hours. I joined him in his flat to watch the show.

While it is customary to hyperbolise when describing the intensity of storms, it really was like nothing I’d ever experienced, even in a lifetime in Queensland. It wasn’t just the ridiculous heft of the rain – which hadn’t even bothered to form into droplets – but the lightning that set it apart.

For a few months every year, Darwin is a meteorologist’s theme park. There are few, if any, more lightning-prone locales on the planet, so lightning shows are close to a nightly event from November through to January. In the 2002 wet season one fabled storm produced “1634 lightning flashes in just a few hours.” That’s a lot of lightning. While I didn’t get an accurate count of the number of flashes that wet January night, I remember well the last one I saw before scurrying inside. It landed just across the road and shut down the city for most of the next day.

With only a few days left of this visit I thought about ticking off the tourist list, but realised there wasn’t much else that I needed or wanted to see. Instead I wandered about the city, meandering in and out of bookshops and art galleries. David Gulpilil was in the mall outside a bookshop chatting with tourists while he worked on a painting. He had a polite note near an upturned hat asking for a donation for photos. Business was going well.

On the last Thursday evening in town I went to the Mindil Beach Market, got some Indonesian food and sat on the beach for the sunset. I took a beer down with me too. I felt I had to, for cultural reasons as much as nostalgia. In 2013, NT chief minister Adam Giles told an Australian Hotels Association awards night crowd that “having a coldie” was a “core social value” in the Top End. If there is anything that politicians have schooled us in tirelessly over the past couple of decades, it’s the importance of observing local values.

This time I left Darwin by car, a far less ignominious exit than the 1994 airlift. I told the attendant at the petrol station on the way out that I was heading home to Melbourne. “Oh yeah? You’ll want to turn left at Adelaide then.” •

The post Top Endings appeared first on Inside Story.

Spirit of Progress put the lives of Vic, Rita and Michael on hold in order to explore a moment when high art encountered people on the fringes of Melbourne. Going back to the mid 1940s, the novel explored a Carroll family legend – of an eccentric aunt who became the subject of Sidney Nolan’s 1946 painting Woman and Tent. The novel provided an intriguing tangential view of Nolan’s circle, giving Carroll the chance to consider more self-consciously the relationship between art and small lives lived in relative poverty beyond the interest of history. This is, of course, one of the things Carroll himself is trying to achieve in his series of novels. He is exploring moments in the lives of ordinary suburban people, the kind of people who rarely attract the attention of artists and historians.

For all the references to speed and progress in the titles, Carroll prefers to stand still and contemplate the past. His novels take the time to examine the possibilities of each moment from within the internal consciousness of each character. We learn everything from memories triggered by an event in the narrative present. Michael, in particular, is always looking backwards, often with nostalgia for his rapidly receding childhood and youth. At the end of The Time We Have Taken one of his friends, an artist, paints a commemorative mural for the suburb’s supposed centenary, which depicts all its people looking back at their past rather than turning towards the future with pioneering energy. Technological progress appears in the novels – diesel engines replace steam, cars get faster, television arrives in every home – but the suburb remains a placid, almost silent, haven of domestic life. Curiously, Vic and Michael become obsessed by golf and cricket respectively – contemplative sports whose longueurs are punctuated by moments of excitement. Perhaps this is what suits them so well to Australian suburban life.

Inevitably, in Forever Young Michael has grown older and left the suburb for a wider world – Melbourne’s inner city and ultimately Europe. He is now in his early thirties, on the point of trading his electric guitar and his rock band for the life of a writer and a trip to France. It is late 1977 and Whitlam’s Labor Party is about to be defeated for a second time by Malcolm Fraser. Typically, Carroll avoids the most dramatic and memorable moments of Whitlam’s career – his victories of 1972 and 1974 or the dismissal of 1975 – to mark the forgotten election that sent him from politics. Michael has written an article depicting Fraser as a Macbeth figure, crippled by the guilt of his accession to power, and this leads to a brief brush with Canberra politics.

His old university housemate, Peter, has become a Liberal Party functionary, and he approaches Michael to write sympathetic pieces for his party. This brief encounter allows the novel to reflect on Peter’s mistreatment of his lover in The Time We Have Taken, and see a pattern in his manipulations of women. Michael, too, feels guilt towards the women in his life; he has ended a love affair insensitively and neglects his mother. Political guilt provides only a distant echo of the central guilt of men about their behaviour towards women. (Vic is long gone from Rita’s life.)

But the technique that served Carroll so well in the earlier novels is straining under the need to move to a broader setting and more mature problems. The constant use of the present tense, shifting between the thoughts and memories of different characters, becomes relentless. And new central characters – Peter, and Michael’s grieving girlfriend Mandy – appear without the kind of background that elicits interest and sympathy. The two women suffering from the thoughtless selfishness of men, Mandy and the seasoned journalist Beth, are surprisingly fragile in the face of adversity, but they are sketched figures, rather than full characters.

Whenever Rita gets her turn to think, the novel comes alive. Now that she has left the suburbs behind she becomes feisty and engaged with the world, and she leaves Melbourne to travel to Europe on a tourist bus tour. This allows the novel to loop back to the subject of Spirit of Progress, with a scene in Tuscany in which Rita encounters two expatriate Australians in a village coffee shop. She recognises one of them as Sam, the now-famous painter of the woman and the tent. After this awkward meeting, Rita begins an extended reflection on her life and the relationship between ordinary people, like her, and the art that claims to portray them:

Not people but types. The types that they make jokes about on television, or put in books or on the stage, the types that everybody laughs at. Or that become paintings put up on the walls of public galleries so that everyone can come along and gawk. And it’s not you; it’s the way they saw you. And that’s just it. Once they’ve pinned you to the wall and caught you the way they wanted you to be caught – once you’re there and helpless and pinned up on the wall the way they saw you – that is what you become. It’s a sort of theft.

The other artist in the cafe, Art, begins a corresponding meditation on the meeting:

For it is almost as though she has stepped out of one of his paintings, stepped out of one of those anonymous peak-hour crowds, either going to or coming from work, and entered his studio, offering the nagging observation, “No, no you haven’t got me right, have you?”

He goes on to consider the nature of nostalgia and the way art preserves “mythic memories.” The juxtaposition of the two meditations is brilliant; it is the finest writing in the novel.

Of course, Carroll is offering a self-conscious debate about his own practice. Like Art, he is creating “mythic memories” rather than recording a real world, but he wants to defend his subjects from mockery. The importance of nostalgia as a source of Carroll’s art may be the reason that Michael’s adult experiences are comparatively unsatisfying; they are simply too close to the author’s present. It is the life of his childhood that excites his imagination. Michael travels to France to become a writer, confirming the novel’s suggestion that distance in place (as well as time) may be necessary to give an artist perspective.

Like James Joyce re-creating Dublin from Paris, like Art in Tuscany, Michael will have to rely on his memories of the Melbourne suburbs for inspiration. We are told that Art’s father was a tramway mechanic and his mother a shop assistant. We know that Sidney Nolan’s father was a tram driver – and George Johnston’s David Meredith is also the son of a tram driver. Johnston’s novel of Melbourne suburban life, My Brother Jack, is cited several times in the course of Carroll’s Glenroy series. The novels invite us to compare them with other literary and visual depictions of suburbs and small towns – including the more satirical versions by Patrick White and Barry Humphries.

When a novel invokes relatively recent times it calls on a reader’s own memories. Carroll relies on a shared experience between author and reader to provide background to the moments he chooses to explore. The passions and drama of public events have little impact on the main characters. There is, for example, no delineation in these novels of the importance of Whitlam’s government to Michael’s generation – this is mentioned only in passing. He also avoids any of the repercussions of the Vietnam war. These absences from the novels almost force the reader to remember them.

Carroll has remarked that he is not interested in writing realism, and these novels only distil a few drops of what a man like Carroll – or Michael – might have experienced. Real life in the suburbs is likely to include a noisy crowd of siblings and other relatives, school classes full of other children, people on buses and trains, tradespeople and salespeople, church congregations, fellow workers. Carroll strips his characters back to Michael’s immediate circle – he has no siblings and few friends, just his parents, some neighbours and girls he likes. In the earlier novels, Vic and Rita go out to work – Vic to drive his engines, Rita to demonstrate new appliances in the country – but they bring home no anecdotes, no stories of encounters with the world. At home, they hardly speak to each other as they withdraw into thought.

This slow turning over of the suburban experience is an ambitious project in the style of some of the great literary projects, such as Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, or Anthony Powell’s more sociable A Dance to the Music of Time, or even Philip Roth’s steady creation of a history of postwar America on the basis of his own experience. It makes one think of Patrick White coming back from Europe after the war to fume at the ugliness of the outer suburbs of Sydney. Things may look rosier at a distance of fifty years – or half the world away. At the end of the novel Michael sits at his desk in the French countryside recalling his mother’s voice: “Tell them how it was, behind the flying ducks and the laughter; behind the quaint feature walls and shadow boxes and ornamental boomerangs; tell them how it really was, if they should ever ask.”

Carroll’s extended version of the suburbs is rich with nostalgia under a peach-coloured sky. But readers will have their own views on whether this is “how it really was.” •

The post Looking backwards appeared first on Inside Story.

Woodford was a prosperous, conservative parish on the edge of the ancient Epping Forest. The arrival of the railways, and more recently the underground, had unified London and, here as elsewhere, made possible the new kind of development the conservationist and poet John Betjeman would call “metroland.” Woodford’s air suited the higher class of civil servant, City gentleman and politician. Clement Attlee, another patrician radical who had done a stint in the East End, lived here; Winston Churchill was elected local MP months after Sylvia moved in, and would remain so for twenty years.

Both men were to attain the summit of power in the 1940s. In the span of Sylvia’s own extraordinary life, her years in Woodford might appear a retreat from activism rather than a springboard. But after two epic decades, her energies were refocusing rather than drawing in. While living there she wrote huge books, corresponded and campaigned indefatigably, and scandalised neighbours by cohabiting with her second great love (after the founder of the Labour Party, Keir Hardie), the Italian revolutionary Silvio Corso. The couple lived in a house they renamed Red Cottage, and opened a teashop catering to day-trippers on their way to the forest.

Ethiopia’s invasion by fascist Italy in 1935 gave Silvia a new cause. Indeed, she was “one of Churchill’s most vociferous constituents” on this and other subjects, taking him to task for his complaisant stance towards Mussolini. On the invitation of the emperor, Haile Selassie, she left Woodford in 1956 to make her home in Addis Ababa with her son Richard, who was already becoming (as he remains, in his late eighties) a respected scholar of the country.

She had also taken a close interest in her London environs. Indeed, among the speakers that day in Woodford – who also included Germaine Greer and the cultural historian Patrick Wright – was a local historian who described the relationship between conservative Woodford and the radical Sylvia in terms of wariness gradually leavened by amusement. One of his recollections was particularly memorable. Sylvia’s range of acquaintances included local farmers, several of whom had lived all their lives around Woodford and yet had never been to the city, whose skyline, nine miles away, was visible from the fields they were working.

This detail raised an echo of Melanie McGrath’s family memoir Silvertown, published in 2002. Its tale is rooted in that neck of east London’s docklands whose menfolk once unloaded sugar and other booty of empire from huge wharves while women in nearby factories processed it into gooey sweets. The book’s valuable social history is concentrated in the figure of Melanie’s grandmother, Jenny Fulcher, who was born in 1903 (the year the twenty-one-year-old Sylvia helped her then more prominent mother Emmeline and sister Christabel to found the Women’s Social and Political Union). Jenny worked in a clothing factory, where her hands were scarred by the crude tools, survived poverty and pulverising wartime air raids, opened a cafe, endured an unhappy marriage, and found endless comfort in Silvertown’s confectionery range.

Her granddaughter honours Jenny at the end of her life:

So there she was, at ninety-one, a tiny woman with no teeth who had borne two children but had never seen a naked man; a woman who had been born in London but had never visited the Tower or St Paul’s; a woman who would not talk to her local shopkeeper in case she had to pronounce her name. But a woman whose strong sense of place it is hard for me to imagine. Jenny Fulcher was someone who belonged.

In turn, the mental relocation from Woodford to Silvertown reminded me of a vignette in Roger Mills’s book Everything Happens in Cable Street, published in 2011. This is a lovingly researched collection of memories of that ribbon-like thoroughfare just north of the docklands, most famous for the “battle” of October 1936 in which Oswald Mosley’s fascists were prevented from marching through a substantially Jewish area. (In a familiar pattern, scholars struggle in vain to demythologise that incident.) Like McGrath’s, and all good “local” books, this one conveys the sense that the neighbourhood it documents was the centre of the world for its inhabitants.

Alongside the tale of the Japanese merchant sailor who lodged near Cable Street in the early 1900s, left a parrot in lieu of rent and then failed to return – thus “The parrot that spoke only Japanese” – is one of a girl about to start work in the 1920s in a job that involved travelling the short distance west to Aldgate, the busy junction where the East End ends (or, from the west, begins). Her mother was alarmed. Aldgate! What might happen to you there?

The area of Bethnal Green, a few streets north of Cable Street, was the site of a three-year research project by Michael Young and Peter Willmott, in the 1950s, seeking to understand “the effect of one of the newest upon one of the oldest of our social institutions” – respectively, the housing estate and the family. The co-authors’ household survey and interviews, filtered with calm confidence and lucidity, made the resulting book – Family and Kinship in East London, published in 1957 – a landmark of social history as well as of modern sociology.

The controversy over the work that began with its publication (was it overly sentimental, selective, middle-class in its lens?) continued for decades. Yet the inestimable value of the book was widely acknowledged: its recording of a way of life at a moment when forces that would spell its end are gathering pace. In the next decades, many of the “old” East Enders would continue to be rehoused in high-rise flats and relocated to new towns such as Dagenham, then just beyond London’s eastern boundary, as a fresh immigrant cohort – mainly Bangladeshis – began to arrive.

Michael Young’s parents were Australian and Irish, and his first eight years were spent in Melbourne. His energies moved between politics (he drafted the Labour Party manifesto in 1945), research, writing and social innovation (the Consumers’ Association, the Open University and the Institute of Community Studies, or ICS, are three of many organisations he founded or conceived). Along with his substantial achievements, this transgressiveness makes him seem the kind of figure all too rare in Britain: perennially modern and democratising.

In 2000, I had the good fortune to meet him in his ICS eyrie on Bethnal Green’s idyllic Victoria Park Square. (With a spark of genius, the institute was renamed the Young Foundation after his death in 2002 at the age of eighty-six.) As he scooped his regulation lunch, a tin of Heinz tomato soup, we talked about a successful recent project he had initiated, a phone-based translation service allowing Bangladeshi women (for example) to obtain health advice.

He spoke of the intense localism of the old East End. People didn’t just belong to “Bethnal Green” but to particular streets within it. Some could recall the sole occasion on which they had left the borough, usually on a day-trip to Southend on the Essex coast. (At this point I mumbled a Scottish comparison. He paused, gleamed, said “You’re Scottish – I thought you were German!” and then, offering his hand across the table, “Friends again!”) One man referred to the old people’s home where his elderly mother lived as “over the water,” meaning the south bank of the Thames, a mile or two distant. It sounded like another world, “as far as the moon.”

These are snapshots of a vanished past. But they have echoes in the modern city, even if these tend to be muffled by demographic transitions, shiny surfaces and aural kaleidoscopes. The entire lives of many in London – including in today’s Bethnal Green – continue to be circumscribed by a few streets, the area beyond unknown or alien. “London is whatever can be reached in a one-hour walk,” wrote the lodestar of now ultra-cool psychogeography, Iain Sinclair.

A Somali friend who runs a small technology shop recently told me he had left his north London niche twice in the last two years, both times to visit relatives near Mogadishu. Many studies of kids in trouble, such as Harriet Sergeant’s fine account of how she got to know a south London teenage gang, Among the Hoods, note how confined is their world. True, more education, money and freedom mean greater mobility, imaginative as well as physical, including the route to work; but even higher up the scale, Londoners’ ability to bind themselves to a small area of the huge city and make it theirs, to choose local attachment and feel its tug, is striking.

By some mix of necessity and choice, almost every old Londoner is born, and every new one becomes, a localist (if also a “cosmopolitan localist,” in Luis Moreno’s useful term). London’s outward-facing reputation is as a “world city,” shaped over centuries by forces – power, trade, empire, migration, globalisation – that have absorbed people, offered them opportunity, impinged hard upon them, and obliged them to cope. But from the inside London is very much a “local city” too, a reality underpinned by its social geography and governance (Lewis Mumford described London as a “federation of historic communities”).The infinite is ever balanced by a pull towards the intimate. It’s part of London’s accidental genius that these elements have continued to interweave, each containing and entering the other. A mix of global, historical, civic and organic elements gives London what is most enduring and familiar in its character.

This is symbolised above all in the transport network, especially as conveyed in two masterpieces of modern design where the individual can visualise both the city entire and her or his own place within it: the classic underground, or “tube,” map designed in 1931 by Harry Beck, and the London A-Z, the indexed street map created by Phyllis Pearsall in 1936. A line and route on the map signifies that place. Around it is a further constellation – a borough, a neighbourhood, a street, a cluster of shops, a familiar building or landmark, a corner, all the way to Virginia Woolf’s “room of one’s own.” Along the route, something changes. It may not go as deep as Jenny Fulcher’s, or demand so much or last as long. But that something is also how, if you weren’t born one, you become a Londoner.

London’s very mix, its all-human-life-is-here aspect, makes it a place where anything said about it can be qualified by the opposite. It’s crowded, yes, but retreats are everywhere. It’s a concrete wilderness with a green oasis across the road. The fetish of height that grips its skyline is undercut by the longing for a human scale. It’s cold and friendly, abrupt and gentle, frenetic and calm, dirty and fresh, monochrome and colourful – all in the space of an hour.

That variability extends to the intense arguments now under way about London’s economic and social direction, and about the city’s impact on the rest of the United Kingdom. Is London, which produces around a fifth both of national GDP and of its tax revenues, a success story that benefits Britain, or a fantasy island that strangles it? Celebrants and doomsayers find evidence to make diametrically opposing cases with equal certitude.

The former point to the way that since the financial hammering of 2008–09, London has been in the vanguard of Britain’s economic recovery (which in turn compares well with the flatlining eurozone). London’s lead over other regions on most major indices – output growth, employment, investment, start-ups, incomes, tax revenues – owes much to structural factors that give the city its exceptional resilience. These include size, strategic location (in relation to both Europe and global time zones), institutional stability, diversity and concentration of skills. The city has expanded to 8.5 million people – as many as in Scotland and Wales combined – with 37 per cent of them born outside the United Kingdom. London’s undiminished ability to absorb immigrants, most of whom are young, tens of thousands arriving after Poland and the other east-central European states joined the European Union in 2004, is testimony to its ingrained optimism.

London has other prime assets. It is a global financial centre, transport hub, seat of government, tourist destination, site of unmatched networks of expertise, and home to leading businesses, universities, media and cultural institutions. The very synergy of all these factors adds further rocket-fuel. Success feeds on itself (and indeed, the buzzing culinary culture should be added to the list). Other British cities are doing well in the rebranding business, often with culture in the vanguard – Newcastle, Dundee, Hull, Bristol – but it is no criticism of them to say that London’s range and cachet give it permanent premier-league status.

In response to these “boosters,” the “begrudgers” offer a much less flattering vista of modern London (the coupling is Roy Foster’s, in Luck and the Irish, his forensic analysis of Ireland’s three decades from 1970). London may be galloping, but towards increasing inequality and inequity, underpinned by an economic model tilted towards plutocrats (often of dubious vintage) and the very highly paid, and away from almost everyone else: hard-pressed workers (often part-time and low-wage), young people, recent immigrants, and those dependent on fixed incomes and welfare.

London, in this view, is characterised by “growing inequality and drift towards being a tax haven for the world’s super-rich” (Danny Dorling, professor of geography at Oxford University, writing in the New Statesman), or is perhaps a “wonderful city whose grip on national life is now endangering the country’s survival” (the Financial Times’s Matthew Engel). These trends, facilitated by the Conservative-led government’s indulgence of the already privileged, undermine national cohesion and social fairness. Britain is in effect being run for the benefit of a rich minority in London; the city’s dividends, including lavish infrastructural spending, make it a “giant suction machine draining the life out of the rest of the country” (Vince Cable, the avuncular Liberal Democrat business secretary in the increasingly pantomime-horse coalition government).

There is a lot more in either vein, both jubilant and gloomy. But there is also a view, common across a wide spectrum, that London needs rebalancing, both internally and in relation to the country beyond. Among the live issues is London’s governance, in particular how the model introduced by Tony Blair’s government after 1997 – an elected mayor and assembly with responsibility for city-wide services, including transport, and some planning functions – could be extended. As the next elections in 2016 approach, with the jockeying to be Boris Johnson’s successor especially keen on the Labour side, a prominent theme will be redrawing London’s powers so that they better serve the great majority of Londoners.

The argument that London needs greater self-government has been sharpened by the Scottish referendum process, and the substantial levers over taxation that Scotland will soon secure (if the recommendations of the all-party Smith Commission are legislated). In the argument over the United Kingdom’s future, London felt constrained in promoting its own interest as long as Scotland’s breakaway seemed possible. Now, though, it has no reason to hold back.

Why, ask columnists in the Evening Standard – the city’s free, and very successful, daily paper – should London not have the same autonomy, and ability to shape its economic future, as Scotland? The reform of stamp duty on house purchases by the Conservative chancellor, George Osborne – announced on 3 December in his “autumn statement” on Britain’s finances – will have a disproportionate effect in London, with its concentrations of wealthy property. Surely, then, Londoners should benefit from the proceeds? This is just one policy area that accentuates the belief – unlikely though it can seem to those raised on a diet of hegemonic London – that the argument for greater democratic accountability can also be applied to the metropolis. Tony Travers of the LSE, foremost specialist in London’s governance, has spoken of the rise of a “near London nationality,” accentuated by perceived tax unfairness.

True, London’s interest within the ever-evolving British constitutional settlement has to be measured against the claims of other regions, including the north of England, where the proposed Scottish package is also concentrating minds. (Edinburgh’s control of aviation fuel tax, for example, will give it a competitive advantage over airports across the border.) The government-backed City Growth Commission has led the case for an integrated approach to planning, transport and investment that would link Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield and other cities, thus creating a so-called “northern powerhouse.” A consensus on the political and constitutional aspects of this regional project, or even on its boundaries, has, however, yet to be reached.

In this respect London, like Scotland, has the advantage of an existing institutional architecture and a coherent sense of self-identity. Several think tanks and their specialist units have been or are weighing the reform possibilities. The London Finance Commission’s report of May 2013 – set up by the mayor, with Tony Travers as chair – pressed for the city to control its business rates and property taxes, noting that 74 per cent of London’s funding comes in the form of a grant from central government, three times that of Berlin and nine times of Tokyo.

The Centre for London’s manifesto for the city, written by Ben Rogers and published in October, echoes this view. “London’s star shines almost too brightly,” it says. “Its very success is putting huge pressure on housing, infrastructure and living standards – at a time when public money is in short supply.” It recommends that London should have more powers over the taxes generated there, and over regulations and social services (such as planning and welfare), as well as make its governance more accountable and improve links with – even expand into – its hinterland.

All this emphasises the fact that the “London” of boroughs, voters, workers and neighbourhoods, and the “London” that symbolises the site of the United Kingdom’s central – and still over-centralised – government, are not the same. (There is also a third dimension: the City of London, both medieval city-state with its own mayor, corporation, land, privileges and residents, and host to the financial district which helps sustain Britain’s global niche.) Outside the capital, the first London tends to disappear under the other two; but it exists, and most of its inhabitants can’t afford the luxury of being either boosters or begrudgers. This London is busy refitting itself for the trade-offs that may usher in a more federal and democratic – though also messy and uneven – United Kingdom.

When people in Britain see London as exceptional, it is above all housing that they have in mind. Since the 1980s, the city has concentrated and amplified the dominant trends of Britain’s housing economy: a turn towards home ownership (accelerated by the transfer of many council houses to the private sector), successive price bubbles, ultra-sensitivity to interest rates in the context of enormous mortgage debt, a tightening rental market, and a deficiency of supply as population has risen and house-building has not kept pace with demand. Through all this, house prices acquired the status of a national obsession, though always questionable as a measure of real wealth.

In recent years, London’s housing market has become even more a world of its own. Prices have soared far beyond the capacity of people on modest salaries. The average price in central London has grown by 44 per cent since 2009, and is now around £500,000, more than double the national figure. The number of affordable properties is way short of demand, while rents have also increased exponentially. Those in search of a place to live, without the security of an existing family home – 180,000 households are on waiting lists across the city – are squeezed every way they turn. Moreover, the purchase of properties by wealthy buyers (including from Russia and east Asia, often for investment as much as residence purposes) further skews the market and accentuates the vast and growing disparity between the high-end incomer and the would-be mortgagee and renter.

Wealth and poverty, extremes of comfort and hardship, have always coexisted here; today, the more precipitous divides (over income and life-chances as well as housing) are putting modern Londoners’ social compact, and the city’s competitiveness, under particular strain. The frenzy of overheating is captured in the Guardian’s “Let’s move to…” weekend profile, aimed at a young, urban demographic. The 21 November feature on Poplar in east London, which Cable Street runs through, has an exhortatory headline (“Be quick, the gentrifiers are coming”) but Tom Dyckhoff can’t even fill the “bargain of the week” slot. He concludes sadly: “When even Poplar is out of your league, you know something’s wrong.”

Indeed, people in their twenties and thirties struggling to get onto (or climb) the elongated “property ladder” are hardest hit. The rate of those moving out of London to provincial cities is increasing markedly, according to a new report by the Office for National Statistics. Everywhere, the less secure are finding innovative ways to share, lodge, cram, house-sit, squat or – no longer the last resort – go back to mum. The vagaries of “regeneration” can also oblige even settled residents with growing families to look elsewhere. Tim Sowula, a former colleague, writes in the Kentish Towner of his regret at having to leave his home area for distant Leytonstone:

The sad thing about moving out of Kentish Town isn’t necessarily leaving the area, but the sense that it may be impossible to live there again… Of all places, has it joined the ranks of London’s privileged communities? And has that gate quietly shut to most over the last decade?…

My personal situation is typical in that it raises a question of what will Kentish Town be like in the future if, for the first time, the traditional pool of people who could previously settle and have families – small business owners, creatives, public sector workers and middle-class professionals – can no longer afford the type of property that would allow them to do that…

A sad paradox of Kentish Town – and many other once earthy London neighbourhoods – now gracing homes and property pages is that getting “on the map” of cool areas means sliding off the map of where most folk can actually live. NW5 used to be a refuge for foreign people; now it’s becoming a refuge for foreign money.

The last point is well taken; over two centuries, a swathe of political exiles (Karl Marx included, as well as Joe Slovo and Ruth First of the African National Congress) found a haven in the ribbon of London stretching up through Camden and Kentish Town to Hampstead. Some of the artistic émigrés of 1950s–60s Australia also made a berth in “not yet trendy Kentish Town,” which along with Camden was then part of “the working-class and increasingly alternative inner north,” says Stephen Alomes in When London Calls: The Expatriation of Australian Creative Artists to Britain.

For Tim, whose article provoked a lively debate, there are consolations. Leytonstone is “still less than a half hour from the Heath (via the handy Gospel Oak line) with a vibe that reminds me of Camden in the eighties.” Thanks to that transport system, wherever you are, the whole city is always, well, your Oyster.

On a policy level, there are some positive signs: local councils such as Newham in east London, site of the Olympic Games in 2012, are working hard in tough conditions to provide affordable homes; architects have designed imaginative low-cost and self-build schemes; and pressure to develop derelict sites and make some of London’s many discarded buildings habitable is increasing. But where housing above all is concerned, a big yet targeted effort – and there is no shortage of proposals – is urgently needed. Something in London has to give.

The critics of London from inside tend to be frustrated patriots, writing in the spirit of George Orwell: London is a family with the wrong members in control. The real begrudgers are outside. Here is the deepest gulf between London and the rest: a psychological one, and as important as any material. The commuters who flock in each day from its wide orbit share the city’s rewards and stresses, but distance from the metropolis seems increasingly to lend disenchantment. The capital has often been seen (from Scotland, England’s regions, or Wales) as remote, privileged and unfeeling. In the context of people’s often straitened circumstances since the financial crash, of well-founded perceptions that government policy disproportionately favours London, and of gathering national or regional sentiments, this image too has gorged on itself.

The Londonphobic dish has been garnished with additional flavours – most with a long pedigree, but capable of taking new forms. They include a nativist and anti-immigrant sprinkling (often more coded than explicit), loathing of the financial sector and its scandals (which, justified in itself, can carry a whiff of moral superiorism towards the city as a whole), and all-purpose anathema of “Westminster” and its politicians (conveniently interchangeable with “London,” and vice-versa, depending on the target of the moment).

The London government’s control of spending and strategic planning entrenches regional dependency and encourages suspicion rather than collegiality – a tendency reinforced by Britain’s political map, with its inert blobs of Tory blue and Labour red (though other colours are leaking in from the margins). Even projects designed to connect England’s north and south – such as the high-speed rail link, or HS2, between Leeds and London, to be completed by the early 2030s – are viewed by many in the north as extensions of Vince Cable’s “giant suction machine.” (Vince himself, who represents Twickenham in southwest London, has come round to supporting HS2.)

Scotland’s referendum confirmed how attenuated the bonds have become between the various parts of the United Kingdom, how strong aspirations to quasi-independence from London now are, how vital are spending and fiscal powers in making those aspirations real, and how a slow dynamic of mutual disengagement, once released, is very hard to reverse. The intense and absorbing debate about whether and to what extent London benefits or damages the rest of the United Kingdom in terms of traditional measures of inward investment, taxation, and transferred revenue is unresolved. But its very terms suggest that London, at least in economic terms, might no longer “need” non-London. In its present form, London’s success is helping to disintegrate the United Kingdom.

The responsibility for the fate of the kingdom, however, is not London’s alone. The resentment towards the city has long taken on a life of its own, detached from its main source in the central government’s control of most financial levers and thus the ability to shape public policy. Much of the antagonism towards London has become misdirected, indiscriminate and self-flattering (reliant, for example, on near exhausted tropes of rootedness and authenticity). At the same time, it has its own “existential” logic. A place so big, rich and powerful tends to skew outsiders’ perceptions (vide the United States). In a sense, the extremes of affection and hostility London attracts derive from the same source: that the city is beyond compare.

London also has no domestic rivals, which enables it to capture cosmopolitanism and, without having to try, render everywhere else provincial (contrast Barcelona, Milan, Istanbul, Mumbai, Osaka, São Paulo, or Shanghai). In non-London, the city exerts the irritating trick of being unmatchable yet unignorable; like the fabled upas tree, nothing can grow in its shade. It’s all too tempting, then, to define yourself against it, using whatever is at hand to further your cause.

Anti-Londonism, admittedly, takes many forms. Scotland’s blend during the independence debate merits a study of its own. But it is striking how the once varied repertoire of attitudes to the capital has withered to a monotonously negative register.

The theme of an overbearing metropolis whose influence – carried ever further afield by its cash-rich settlers and their asphyxiating tastes – corrodes what it touches and reduces what it neglects, is drawn by the perceptive Matthew Engel in his new book, Engel’s England: Thirty-nine Counties, One Capital, and One Man. The book is an affectionate search for the surviving quirks of England’s historic counties, shadowed as ever in this genre by a lament for a land of lost integrity. (The many earlier excursions down the rolling English road include William Cobbett’s Rural Rides and J.B. Priestley’s English Journey, published respectively in 1830 and 1934. “The Thing,” Cobbett’s inspired term for the hated establishment, is a precursor to today’s “Westminster elite.”)

In an accompanying article on 21 November, Engel is scathing about London. The city’s “remorseless expansion, dominance and control,” he writes, means that today, “every part of the body has become defined by its relationship with this heart.” Across England he observes ubiquitous Londonisation: “a process usually bringing financial enrichment while impoverishing local distinctiveness.” But looking ahead to May 2015, he predicts that “it is unLondon, in its infinite variety, that will decide the election.”

London’s response to such criticisms has often been a wounding indifference. Its flavour is reminiscent of the encounter in 1866 between the visiting Scots professor John Stuart Blackie and the renowned Balliol college head, Benjamin Jowett. “I hope you in Oxford don’t think we hate you,” said Blackie, to be told, “We don’t think of you.” An article published on 12 December suggests that this might be changing. In it, the Financial Times’s senior political commentator Philip Stephens draws a different moral from the national misalignment, namely that “London should break free from Little England”:

London does not need a mayor; it needs a prime minister. Britain is fracturing. Scotland may yet quit the union and England turn its back on Europe. The Conservatives are throwing up barricades against the immigrants who are the capital’s lifeblood… This is a moment to imagine a different future: independence.

The vision comes complete with border controls (“the M25 orbital motorway is the readymade frontier”), a federal constitution, membership of the European Union, and openness to skilled immigrants. For Stephens, who on the day of Scotland’s referendum described the “heart of the nationalist case” as “the politics of grievance and identity, of a nation done down by foreigners,” London’s adversaries are domestic.

Doubtless, the pinched English nationalists of [UKIP, the United Kingdom Independence Party] and anti-immigration pressure groups would cry foul. Tant pis. Their vision of statehood, fixated on the proportion of the population that is “white,” is confounded by London’s success. Saloon bar bores in the home counties can be left to their anguished debates about identity. Londoners should break free.

No prospectus of the United Kingdom’s future, whatever its starting point or sympathies, seems able to accommodate its capital. Londoners’ own instincts, as much as their interests, revolt at the thought of a country governed by the embittered nativists of UKIP. For their part, leading pro-independence Scots such as Lesley Riddoch strain every intellectual sinew to associate these two groups. Anti-Londoners such as Danny Dorling can barely contain their rage against the city, as if its very existence is an offence. Fashionably lurid dystopias of the city abound, from the macho ultra-leftist China Miéville (in the New York Times) to the Russia expert Ben Judah (in Standpoint).

London can take it all. But it is hardly surprising that a good number of Londonists are being provoked into writing their own script, in some versions of which the city turns from dumpee to dumper with Nixonian relish: “you won’t have London to kick around anymore!”

Across the great divide, there is ever more distrust and caricature than empathy and curiosity. London and much of the nation are increasingly strangers to each other. A compelling example of how the gulf can operate arrived on 19 November, the eve of a by-election in Rochester & Strood, an estuary constituency in north Kent, thirty miles east of London (thus well within commuting distance, and with a mixed social profile). The sitting Conservative member, Mark Reckless, had defected to the meteoric UKIP, pledging to regain the seat under his new colours and thus emulate the example of Douglas Carswell, who had become UKIP’s first MP by the same route in September. In the event, and despite strenuous Tory efforts, he did so, albeit with a diminished majority that could be vulnerable in the general election.

But UKIP’s qualified triumph was overshadowed by an incident on the last afternoon of campaigning, sparked by a tweet posted by the Labour MP and shadow attorney-general Emily Thornberry, who had joined the party’s desultory canvassing. (Labour held the seat 1997–2005, and in Nashaubah Khan it had the most impressive candidate by far, yet third place was the height of the party leadership’s ambition.) The tweet showed the a plain residence with a white van parked outside, bedecked with two large and one smaller English flags – the red “St George’s cross” against a white background. It was coyly captioned “image from #Rochester.”

Robert Doisneau it was not. Not even Martin Parr, documentarist of prosaic English life. In other hands, in other circumstances, in other times, it might have seemed innocuous. But in this instance, the who, what, when and how of the image-tweet ensured that by tea time its author was at the centre of a media–political firestorm. And by then, there was no room for doubt about its why. Snobbery, it seemed, was the only possible motive: an instinctive disdain for the kind of patriotic working-class household that had once been the backbone of Labour’s support but which the party had now abandoned. A Labour MP during an election would once have knocked on Dan’s door – his name, the world soon learned, along with the colour of his toothbrush, was Dan – and sought his vote; now she regarded his domain with, at best, an anthropologist’s curiosity. Click, tweet, pass on. Goodbye, Dan. Farewell, Labour.

What clinched the outrage was that Emily is a prosperous, middle-class London lawyer, who – with peerless congruity – represents part of Islington (more exactly, the constituency of South Islington & Finsbury). This is the area of London that came to signify New Labour’s modernisation of the party in the mid 1990s, and the network of progressive, confident and super-salaried professionals most associated with the process. Moreover, the Englishman’s castle she snapped was not in historic Rochester but in Strood, the more workaday (and, as if it mattered, once Labour-voting) part of the constituency. Emily hadn’t even clocked precisely where she was.

Britain loves nothing better than a row about class, especially when it comes with a twist of toxic prejudice. This one was almost too perfect. By now – and it was still only mid evening – a single synapse on its way to Emily Thornberry’s dendrite seemed to encapsulate Britain’s entire post-1945 history in a way that David Kynaston’s thousands of pages couldn’t hope to emulate.

There was more to come. The late evening news shows were reviewing the epic events of the day when they found themselves reporting it. Labour’s leader, Ed Miliband – his aides spinning that they had “never seen him so angry” – had sacked Thornberry from the shadow cabinet. The act, both purgative and self-protective, amplified rather than defused the sense of crisis around Labour. Ed dug deeper the next day when he was asked what went through his mind when he saw a combination of house, white van and England flag. The correct political answer, which Groucho Marx’s four year-old child would know, is: “A hard-working guy who supports the England football team.” A tiny pause as Ed rifled his files. Then: “Respect… the first rule of politics is that you respect the voters.” It sounded like another line from the anthropologist’s playbook.

By next morning, Thornberry, on her way to parliament, was delivering a spare apology in the accepted modern style (for “any offence caused”) to reporters besieging her Islington townhouse, where Dan – signed up by the Sun – was soon pictured draping an English flag across the railings. The Sun’s involvement seemed further to confirm the precision of the story’s entire script. Rupert Murdoch’s flagship tabloid – still Britain’s largest seller, even if circulation has dipped under two million – had made “white van man” a shorthand for the kind of independent, straight-talking and proudly English-British figure that was close to its ideal reader. The phrase, as so often with the British media and advertising industry’s dragnet sociology, was both widely adopted (as badge of pride or convenient daub) and soon supplemented (in this case with associations of racism, sexism and illiberalism).

In the media lifecycle of the tweet that launched a thousand columns, the contrast between “white van Dan” and snooty Emily was a gift. Every other outlet played its part, with the Daily Mail providing a helpful guide to the lucrative north London lairs of Labour’s upper crust, and all the papers measuring the chasm between it and the party’s traditional base. More discomforting thoughts were kept in check. For one, that Dan might not at all symbolise the “natural Labour voter” (Lauren Fruen, the smart Sun reporter who bonded with him and his partner over football and their overlapping roots in east London, found he didn’t know a by-election was happening); for another, that Emily Thornberry’s own world might be more than a cultural stereotype.

Thornberry often refers to her own upbringing in a council estate near Guildford, southwest of London, by her mother following her parents’ divorce. Her brother Ben, himself an enterprising all-rounder who drives a (red) van, was unearthed, confirmed the picture and defended big sis against the charge of snobbery. More interesting was that he also referred, as had Emily in her first response to criticism before the storm fully broke, to the “weird” stereotyping of Islington. It’s not a cause likely to win followers outside the pages of the Islington Tribune, yet that itself is reason to dwell on it. After all, “Islington” is as much a media construct as “white van man,” the pair forming – as Kenan Malik writes in a well-judged New York Times piece – polar opposites in Britain’s political iconography. And cases like Thornberry’s, though rarer now that the sun has set on the New Labour era, show that the easy engulfing of Islington by “Islington” still has potency.

It used to be that leafy Hampstead, next to the eponymous heath in northwest London, was the catch-all signifier for Labour dottiness or left-wing excess (as in “Hampstead liberal” or – fetch the crucifix and garlic! – “intellectual”). The high, or low, point of the formula was probably the press pursuit of Michael Foot during the chaotic election campaign in 1983, when the sixty-nine-year-old Labour leader – with his stick, thick glasses, disobedient white locks, and dog Dizzy (named after the nineteenth-century Tory prime minister Benjamin Disraeli) – took his morning constitutional on the heath.

Foot was, admittedly, a Hampstead socialist-liberal-intellectual brought to life – though even here, scruple requires mention that he was a resident of Highgate village, to Hampstead’s northeast, beside the eponymous cemetery where Karl Marx and other luminaries are buried, and a place with quite its own character. A reminder is in the title of the local paper, the Hampstead & Highgate Express, the much loved “Ham & High.” That’s the trouble with – or the beauty of – London. It’s granular, ever-reducible, with cultural borders (as well as other types) on almost every turn.

The “Hampstead” twitch made a rare appearance days before the Thornberry affair, when Jason Cowley, editor of the venerable New Statesman – founded in 1913 by the Hampstead-dwelling Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb – broke from his and the weekly magazine’s benign view of Ed Miliband by branding the current Labour leader “very much an old-style Hampstead socialist.” The article echoed the case made over several years by specialists in Milibandology – notably the pungent Dan Hodges of the Telegraph – but the resulting furore suggests that this jibe too still carries a sting (and worse, argues David Cesarani in the Jewish Chronicle, a stigma).

The shift from Hampstead to Islington in the media “imaginary” of Labour and the left derives from an over-egged account of a restaurant meeting in 1994 between the rising Labour stars Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, days after the sudden death of John Smith, the Scots lawyer who had become Labour leader only two years earlier. Their agreement that Blair, the junior partner, would stand for the succession, is regarded as the semi-formal birth of New Labour, which would sweep to power in 1997. Again as so often, a more or less arbitrary designation flashed into life and then withered into a hand-me-down, the connection to what happened at Upper Street’s Granita restaurant vanishingly remote.

Islington, long before then, had been used to slights, if the poem that prefaces John Nelson’s 350-page history, published in 1811, is a guide. (“Old Iseldon, tho’ scarce in modern song, / Nam’d but in scorn…” – though it goes on to praise the then village’s health-giving waters). The media’s modern identification of Islington with a privileged Labour elite may equally amount to less than a hill of beans in Britain’s crazy political world. It would be hard to identify any material harm the “scorn” has inflicted. Except perhaps to occlude the fact that Islington is a real place where actual people live, which happens to be as interesting and diverse as most in London or beyond. It is also, like all the London boroughs around it – Camden, Hackney and Lambeth, among thirty-two in total – a focus of belonging for its residents, who on the whole exist along the same spectrum as those of any other city in Britain. (In 2011, they numbered 206,000, 45 per cent of them "white British," including 4000 Scots and 1200 Irish). Nor is it inordinately rich, even if the wealthy there are in the top bracket: in fact, across a range of social indices, Islington is the thirteenth-poorest borough in England and Wales.

This difference between Islington and “Islington” struck me forcibly a decade ago during another brief media-political uproar. Boris Johnson, then editor of the conservative Spectator magazine, had published a crass and inaccurate column – drafted by Simon Heffer in polemical mode – criticising, inter alia, the “flawed psychological state” of “many Liverpudlians” in relation to the Hillsborough tragedy of 1989, when ninety-six football fans died in a pre-match terracing crush. The BBC’s flagship morning radio program interviewed the Liverpool Echo’s editor, who lambasted the apologetic Johnson, justly condemned stereotyping of the northwest city – and along the way, took various swipes at those who traduce Liverpool’s good name at “Islington dinner parties” and “posh Islington restaurants.” The interviewee’s unawareness of his own inverted snobbery (or snobbery tout court) was matched by the BBC interviewer’s indulgence of a puffed-up non-metropolitan voice.

Trivial in itself, the episode was a reminder that social prejudice feeds off laziness of thought and language, and that the warping potential of class in Britain requires an ever vigilant eye. Being anti-“Islington,” or Londonphobic, or any variety thereof, I remember thinking, is the socialism of fools. Many external depictions of London today – more concerned with “othering” than understanding, with flattening than discriminating – have the same bad smell. No political good can come of them.

My own Islington (and London) patriotism evolved over a decade, and was forged by a passionate attachment in particular to two points at either end of Islington’s winding trajectory: Clerkenwell in the south, where I worked, and Archway in the north, where I lived – the former for its richness of history and associations, the latter for its all-inclusive humanity. Clerkenwell, hiding in plain sight on the edge of the City – where Chaucer delved, Samuel Johnson scribbled, Chartists orated, Dickens observed, Fenians bombed, Lenin plotted, Lubetkin designed, Italians settled, watchmakers and jewellers crafted, and dissidents of every hue gathered – is inexhaustible. Archway, huddling beneath its infamous early 1960s tower at the tip of that “river of metal,” the Holloway Road, is elusive in a different way. Not even its mother would call Archway beautiful. But stay, mingle, tune in – not least to the voices, from Ireland, Turkey, Poland, Zimbabwe and all points beyond – and its pulse of life is generous.

Islington’s local history museum and centre, now based in Clerkenwell, are the best resource for learning about this fascinating area across centuries of change. But Archway is a good place to see that change struggling to renew itself: in the housing schemes planned around Junction Road, the efforts of the Better Archway Forum, the campaigns to protect Whittington hospital, the innovative art projects, the burgeoning street markets, the local library’s outreach (and the story of libraries in Archway was itself a project by the artist Lucy Harrison), the Archway with Words literary festival, and plans to develop the tower (or just to make it disappear). Life in Archway, as across London, is tough for very many. But again like the rest of London, it’s a neighbourhood where tolerance and familiarity are everywhere. You can’t be a stranger long in Archway – partly because so many before you started out as just that.

Archway’s experience of “regeneration,” convulsive and modest by turn, has several cycles to go. (It is, after all, the place where the immortal Charles Pooter, in the Grossmith brothers’ Diary of a Nobody, published in 1892, “struggled to live a life of middle-class propriety.”) Here as everywhere the much abused process is a complex interplay in which people’s confidence and agency can be enhanced as well as eclipsed. The very pace of recent change in London, to people’s neighbourhoods and working lives, on and beneath the surface, produces many-sided reactions, of which one is an even stronger affinity with primary social units. Everywhere in London people are researching and writing histories of their street, their locality, their borough, collating information and oral testimonies, laying on exhibitions, as well as creating autonomous arts colleges and educational projects (such as Hackney’s Open School East) that self-consciously belong to a particular area and seek to tap into its currents.

Several books published in recent months alone – The Gentle Author’s Spitalfields Life, Martin Plaut and Andrew Whitehead’s Curious Kentish Town, Rose Rouse’s A London Safari: Walking Adventures in NW10, and Julian Mash’s Portobello Road: Lives of a Neighbourhood – are examples of this broad trend. They draw on the same energies that are fuelling Londoners’ desire for more self-government. In principle, these energies underline London’s affinity with developments elsewhere in Britain. But without an appreciation of this fact, and in the absence of any process that can connect disparate regional–national ambitions, mutual distance grows.

Many Londoners want devolution both to their city from the UK state, and to more local levels from city-wide government. Such aspirations are becoming a factor in the debate over Britain’s constitutional future. It would greatly elevate public debate were they, and London's distinct political realities, accorded equal respect with their equivalents in non-London. Today, reductive views of London are a weapon of stupidity against democracy. They are also self-defeating, since there is so much for everyone to learn in the experience of this infinite yet intimate city. •

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The impact on the big clubs is obvious enough, and they have had no trouble making their voices heard in the media. But those who live in the Cross know that there is more to Darlinghurst Road than the big operators, and I haven’t read or heard anything about how the new rules have affected small businesses. So I decided to ask them myself.

After interviewing twelve small businesses along Darlinghurst Road’s famous Strip, it was clear to me that their fortunes reflect whether their clientele is made up mostly of club-goers, backpackers or locals. Not surprisingly, businesses reliant on club-goers are feeling the greatest impact. A liquor store worker told me that sales are down 40 per cent, not only because customers are down, but also because the large clubs are ordering less stock. One salesperson complained that the regulations are costing him twelve hours of pay per week because the shop now closes at 10 pm rather than midnight. A tobacconist reported that his sales are down 25 per cent. Many owners told me that taxi drivers are hurting, too, because traffic to and from the Cross has plummeted.

Despite their overwhelming numbers on weekend nights, though, club-goers are only a fraction of the customer base for most small businesses. More important are backpackers. Many small businesses complained that falling numbers of backpackers have left them out of pocket. One juice shop worker said that its drop in customers has been entirely due to fewer backpackers. A Thai massage parlour owner told me that his sales are down because tourists come for a massage after getting off or before getting on the plane, and now there are fewer of them. A busy cafe owner reported that fewer tourists come for breakfast. One convenience store worker was more optimistic: while business had been slow, he felt backpacker numbers were increasing as the Australian dollar fell.

Businesses catering for local customers, however, were uniformly upbeat about the changes in the Cross. One small business owner, who insisted that he didn’t agree with strict lockout laws, conceded that the changing character of the area augured well for his business. Another owner thought the place would “flourish – in six to ten years time this area will be like Double Bay, and we’re going to benefit.” A new pop-up outlet suggested that at least one entrepreneur saw opportunities in a quieter Cross. Several takeaway food stores have closed, and while some premises are still empty – partly because, as one owner pointed out, landlords have not adjusted their rents to take account of the change in trading conditions – in other cases very different restaurants are taking their place.

One new owner had spent more than three years in Kings Cross and Potts Point before making the decision to open a restaurant. “I feel lucky to come here at this time,” he told me. “Kings Cross is transitioning from a night-time to a day-time business model, and I understand it’s hard for some people. But for me, it’s a good thing.” He said that his customers include people from down the street in Potts Point, who would have been unlikely to venture up to the Strip before. “It’s a good sign – and they’re happy to find something new.”

Business owners recognised the need for changes in the drinking culture, but some asked what positive measures accompanied the lockout rules. Although the new restaurant owner said that the council has proven very helpful in helping him set up his business, three other shop owners complained about red tape causing delays in applications for outdoor seating. As one businessman put it, “Sydney should be a twenty-four-hour city – we have a Mediterranean climate here. We should be doing what Melbourne does.” Yet applications for outdoor seating, which would change the feel of the street, have met with unexplained delays, frustrating business owners looking for ways to recoup costs lost to fewer backpackers and club-goers.

If the council plans to create favourable trading conditions for small venues, then regulations must adapt: one cafe owner told me that she was licensed to serve alcohol until 2 am, but was not allowed to advertise the fact, which meant that most people still went to the big clubs and pubs for a drink. Others questioned whether the Medically Supervised Injecting Centre should remain in a street trying to attract customers to outdoor seating areas.

The owners and workers I interviewed were more than happy to talk about their business and the future of the Cross. Most of them were waiting for the summer months to measure the full impact of the lockout laws. Staff in a tattoo parlour commented, like many, that the drag on business caused by the lockout doubled up with the generally slower winter months. “The timing was unfortunate,” commented one. “But nobody ever asks us before they change the rules.” Will the state government’s review of the lockout laws, which has been brought forward to next year, consult not only with the big fish of Kings Cross, who have the resources to push their case, but also with a full range of businesses which together create the unique feel of the Strip? •

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The session was presented as a well-deserved tribute to Pat Fiske, producer, director, writer, long-term activist; and, for the record, a one-time builder’s labourer, in that brief day of milling liberationist action. A woman could be seen shouldering a plank and wielding a shovel on a construction site, as she could be seen campaigning for election — or, in this film’s helter-skelter action sequences, helping to occupy the threatened sites in The Rocks or on Victoria Street, Kings Cross, and being forcibly carted off by the cops; she could run a residents’ action newsletter and be disappeared and killed for it, as Juanita Nielsen was, and live on in this film’s capacious memory chest. Here women from the nicest possible suburbs are seen discovering their own powers of resistance; here Betty and Kath from Hunters Hill appear, middle-class, middle-aged and modestly spoken, to tell us that in their struggle to save Kellys Bush, their forested patch on a northern arm of the harbour, they wrote to some thirty organisations for help; only the BLF wrote back.

Kellys Bush is still there. The black bans became green bans, and much of Sydney was rescued. Then along the way, the BLF met its enemies among the master builders and developers; the venal, old-style union bosses; and the bean counters and punishers of Robert Askin’s state government. Those forces won, in that the BLF was deregistered, and its most vocal members became reluctant but active parts of local government. But, the film asks at the end, was it a defeat? In many senses yes, an honourable defeat for that time, but there were undoubted gains: for one thing at least, in the

continuing tradition of resident action, and the wider understanding that communal force can be exerted for the public good. What was most centrally at stake for the BLs in the early 1970s was the scope for low- and middle-income people to go on living near the city and in it.

Rocking the Foundations first emerged two years into the time of Hawke’s Labor government, a time when we could believe that the gains won by the BLF were endorsed in the world at large. The film is a miracle of orchestration, with images from numerous archives linked to 1980s footage shot by Fabio Cavadini and Martha Ansara, in a great work of editing by Fiske, Jim Stevens and Stewart Young, with the dancing energy and an edge of sweetness in Davood Tabrizi’s music. The shovels and jackhammers and giant cranes do their work at close quarters; the sheer brutality in the destruction of the old and beautiful makes its impact — you could weep for the Capitol Theatre of once-upon-a-time. We see the high-rise blocks going up, with the windy canyons between them: someone’s relentless idea of modernity.

The film is made of faces and ways of speaking, like those of the stalwart Nita McCrae and her cohort in the battle for The Rocks; Bob Pringle, Joe Owens, Janne Reed, Bud Cook, along with Jack Mundey, still black-haired and eloquent — they become people we know, and now can meet again. This union’s demands were for basic rights only grudgingly recognised, if at all, before then: decent pay and conditions; occupational health and safety; recognition of skills and skill development in fast-changing conditions of construction. Beyond all of that, the BLs claimed their right to active concern for the wider social world, sharing in the massed opposition to the Vietnam war and the marches for Aboriginal land rights, insisting that the liveable city should remain real and imaginable.

When such a film returns, the yield is renewed knowledge of a lively inheritance, of struggles worth remembering and reviving. Seen again on the big screen in the week of Gough Whitlam’s death, its impact connects with his due in the headlines: their story, his story, have to do with the largest issues of justice. In such a week, it was rather grimly satisfying to know that Rocking the Foundations continues in constant demand from its distributor, Ronin Films. Coming from the period of the so-called Australian film renaissance, it’s worth the whole stack of those genteel, conformist costume dramas that made up the prestigious art-film list. Documentary? Just call it cinema.

Antenna also offered, among much else, a chance to look again at The 50-Year Argument, shown earlier at the Melbourne film festival. This is an affectionate view of the New York Review of Books from its founding in 1963, co-directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi. The journal’s beginning was incitement: Elizabeth Hardwick wrote an article denouncing the blandness of most reviewing, asking for serious, longer-form attention to the consideration of books. This was taken up by Jason Epstein of Random House; he, his wife Barbara, Robert Lowell, Hardwick and Robert Silvers together founded the NYRB, in the wild belief that they could publish all they wanted so long as they could pay the printer. The film tells some very good stories, and gives us the milieu; this has been the heart of metropolitan intellectual life, its disagreements circling around a liberal consensus; work on politics, science, art, religion, social struggles, feminism – nothing has been alien. We get a lot of the irreplaceable Gore Vidal as both player and commentator; and there’s a lively grab from Town Bloody Hall and Germaine Greer’s famous dialogue with Norman Mailer, with interpolations from Susan Sontag. The benign central figure, Silvers, is seen getting older, working obsessively on and on, in a giant cavern made of books, endless haystacks of them. (One possible response from any writer watching this is to think: how can you possibly want to make one more?)

As film about print, this one hasn’t quite the edge of Andrew Rossi’s Page One (2011), on the New York Times and its survival. I’d have liked to know more about Barbara Epstein (1928–06), and about important changes of the NYRB’s collective editorial mind. Some readers believe they have noted genuine shifts in the coverage over time – on, for example, the Middle East; against the background of strong pro-Israel belief over the decades, the steadily dawning understanding that the Palestinians do have a case. That said, The 50-Year Argument matters as an eloquent affirmation of a city’s and a whole society’s intellectual life, engaged, working and active in a marketplace, outside academia, but extending indefinitely the understandings won within it. And not least, defying all the odds: this is a work of print on paper, surviving by virtue of quality and substance.

Documentary was once taken to be primarily information, instruction for citizens (and guaranteed boredom for schoolkids). Over the past half-century it has burgeoned in ways that make the single term questionable; we’re talking of film essays, film polemics, film argument and film history, of cinematic exploration along endlessly various tracks. Antenna offered a high-level reconnaissance of recent international production; from all of it, if there’s one film you’d want all Australia to see and take on board, it would have to be David Fedele’s The Land Between. And that, as it happens, seems to be a film the gatekeepers would rather you didn’t see.

It’s a film about refugees, desperation, homelessness and exclusion. A few hundred migrants from sub-Saharan Africa are found camping in a mountain forest area of northern Morocco; many have fled from wartorn and impoverished parts of Mali, some are from Cameroon. They’re not far from the Spanish coastal enclave of Melilla, separated by a well-guarded triple wall strung with barbed wire. The refugees we meet are determined to breach the wall and somehow get from there into Europe. (I had to go to the atlas; I didn’t know Melilla was there.) In the forest, the wanderers find food in garbage heaps; they tend fires; we watch them improvising shelters from sheets of plastic and making floors from cardboard. They pray aloud together and sing like an opera chorus, and they care for the kids (who play around happily, and look amazingly well). They tell their stories freely to the camera, all affirming an insistent belief in a God who is somehow, somewhere guiding them, and a completely unfounded certainty that Europe will in time become a home. We learn that many who have scaled the walls and reached Melilla have been sent back, only to be beaten, abused and hounded by the Moroccan authorities. Like the “boat people” struggling towards that Australia they have believed in, these too are punished for their desperation, and punished for sustaining their hope.

Out of their talk, “Europe” figures as a paradise, tantalisingly close and reachable – except that we know it isn’t. The characters who emerge most strongly are the vocal, determined Yacou Traore, and Aicha, a valiant young mother of four who sees her life as an ongoing fight for her children. She saw her husband tortured to death in Mali; the children are both her purpose and her recovery. There is no clear resolution for these or their friends; the audience must take in and live with the facts of their endurance. The last news of Aicha is that she and the children are in a place of immigration detention, a place which sounds horribly like Nauru or Manus.

David Fedele is an Australian, working independently from London. He made several return visits to the community; his extraordinary film took some years to make. It was judged the best feature-length documentary at the FIFE (International Environmental Film Festival, Paris) for 2014, and has won three other awards in festivals in Naples, in Lampedusa (that point of entry for so many refugees, and the place associated with so many drownings), and in Rome at the Festival del Terre.

Four international prizes, however, aren’t enough to get the film on to Australian TV. Both the ABC and SBS have rejected it, sight unseen – they declined preview DVDs from the distributor. There’s no money for a theatrical release. Perhaps NITV will consider it, and Maori TV in New Zealand seems to be interested. I’d like to chain our immigration authorities to their seats and make them watch it – twice.

Unlike other nationally-based programs, the Palestinian Film Festival has no sponsorship. This year it is running in six sessions over next weekend (6–9 November) in Sydney, and five each in Canberra (7–9 November) and Melbourne (14–16 November). The Sydney program offers another chance to look at Hany Abu-Assad's splendid Omar, one of the best films of the year, which has been on release in Melbourne.  

Meanwhile, like Antenna, the Canberra International Film Festival thrives; there’s still a week of it to go. Not to be missed: a great afternoon of documentary this Saturday, with Particle Fever (that’s the one on the Large Hadron Collider, packed out at earlier film festivals by spellbound non-science-minded audiences) and China’s 3 Dreams, highly recommended. •

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While Scotland may evoke images of lochs, isles and bens for many readers, it is also a country highly characterised, and dominated, by its two main cities, Glasgow and the capital, Edinburgh. Although they lie a mere forty-five-minute train ride apart, they share a rivalry as competitive and bitter as Sydney and Melbourne’s, Madrid and Barcelona’s, or Moscow and St Petersburg’s – and perhaps it is all the more antagonistic for the short distance that lies between them. Though Aberdeen, with its GFC-defying oil wealth, may be emerging stealthily as another centre of power, Scotland remains heavily skewed towards the Glasgow–Edinburgh axis. Despite the rivalry, their combination dominates the country politically, socially and culturally.

Indeed, the two cities’ differences and their joint dominance can be seen in the closely watched evidence of their voting preferences in next week’s referendum. With the better-heeled, financial services–fuelled Edinburgh seemingly anxious not to upset the status quo’s applecart, the key referendum battleground appears to be the “red” Clydeside of Glasgow, where unionist Labour once had a strong base yet has been outflanked on social justice issues by the campaign in favour of independence.

This makes Robert Crawford’s biography of the two cities, On Glasgow and Edinburgh, a timely look at a complex relationship. As he points out, this is the first time both cities have been considered together in a “serious volume exclusively devoted to both,” a project that appeals to me as a reader originally from Glasgow. While I will always belong to my hometown, I also greatly appreciate the very different qualities on offer, just a short trip away, in Edinburgh. Living now in Melbourne, I see some similarities with the Sydney–Melbourne rivalry that often seems to dominate Australian cultural life (to the chagrin, perhaps, of residents of the other state capitals, not to mention smaller regional towns). Like their counterparts among other uncomfortable twins, Melburnians and Sydneysiders seem to be at great pains to assert identities based on not being from the other place.

But the Glasgow–Edinburgh competition still seems to me to be a deeper one, with the belonging to one city or the other defining everything from a person’s accent and colloquialisms to what people put on their chips (brown sauce in Edinburgh; ketchup, vinegar or just salt in Glasgow). Glasgow has always seemed to me a bit different from the rest of Scotland anyway, while Edinburgh is a fitting capital, giving a glimpse of culture and traditions from further afield. This may be due to Glasgow’s large Irish-descended population (of which I am a part), its (post)industrial character (arguably giving it more in common with Belfast, Liverpool or Birmingham than with other parts of Scotland, as Billy Connolly has remarked) and perhaps a certain insularity that comes from being the most populous city but not the country’s capital.

Crawford opens On Glasgow and Edinburgh by exploring this formative rivalry in more detail. Glasgow looks westwards to North America, he argues, while Edinburgh is a staunchly European capital, despite the years of emasculation after the 1707 Act of Union with England, which only ended with the re-establishment of the Scottish parliament in 1999. The cities can also be thought of in a gendered way, with more “feminine” traits attributed to Edinburgh and Glasgow having a more “masculine” character. Each city has had its own “golden age,” with Glasgow’s flourishing strongly tied to the Industrial Revolution and Edinburgh’s having coincided with the Enlightenment a century earlier. And, of course, there is the familiar stereotype: working-class Glasgow is rough around the edges, while aristocratic and bourgeois Edinburgh is snooty.

The book then splits into two parts, of five chapters each, examining Edinburgh and Glasgow in turn. Crawford, a professor of modern Scottish literature at the University of St Andrews, takes the reader on a tour of each city by progressing geographically along various important thoroughfares rather than chronologically. While this ensures that the narrative is more engaging than a linear historical account, it also means that the book is more accessible to those already familiar with both cities’ geography.

Crawford’s literary background is in evidence in his strong focus on the intellectual and creative history of each city, somewhat at the expense of other histories such as the social or economic, or even the very contemporary. While Edinburgh is evidently a grand and historical city, and so, if less obviously, is Glasgow, both cities continue to change and innovate, and their demographic characteristics are constantly being altered by immigration and emigration, a point not well captured in Crawford’s narrative.

Contemporary music and visual arts, especially coming out of Glasgow, are little mentioned in the book, despite the city’s producing a disproportionate share of Turner Prize nominees and winners and a host of world-famous and critically lauded bands, including Belle and Sebastian, Mogwai and Franz Ferdinand. Glasgow as a creative city has been a major selling point of its post-industrial revival, so it is a shame that it does not receive more attention.

Crawford’s account is nevertheless engaging and informative, even for citizens of either city. (I certainly learned a lot, particularly about Edinburgh.) And it captures and helps inform a renewal in interest in Scotland and its largest cities, and their place in the world, in the past, present and a possibly independent future. •

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No one ever called Glasgow the “second city of the Commonwealth.” The operative word was always “Empire,” even if the accolade, during the Victorian period when it took hold, was contested with Liverpool, that other great port city in England’s northwest. Two centuries on, visible interest in Glasgow’s role in Britain’s empire is mostly limited to exhibitions or the local-history trails that wind around Jamaica Street and the mansions of the “tobacco lords.” But Glasgow was always good at shedding old layers and adorning itself with new, and its hosting of the Commonwealth Games, launched with an exuberant opening ceremony on 23 July, shows it has kept the knack.

The gusto of its embrace is evident in the ubiquitous flags of the seventy-one competing states and territories, the advertising posters and information brochures, the climax of the worldwide “queen’s baton relay,” the spin-off conferences and art projects, the welcome from friendly guides (who, as in Sydney’s Olympics, can do so much to shape perceptions of an event and its home city.) The pre-tournament norovirus health scare, and controversy over Team Scotland’s garish uniform – more suitable for a Brigadoon theme park, say critics – provided newspapers with plenty of stories before the competition began. All this, plus the work invested in building or upgrading facilities since Glasgow was awarded the games in 2007, gives the organisers reason to hope that by the finale on 3 August, it will have done the best possible “brand awareness” job.

As for the legacy, measuring it will, as ever, keep researchers busy for years. The running cost, currently at £560 million, is a third over initial estimates but not excessive by the scandalous standards of recent big projects in Britain. There is visible investment in parts of Glasgow’s poorer east end where the events are taking place, such as Dalmarnock, Bridgeton and Rutherglen: fresh transport upgrades and links, construction work around the athletes’ village (which will be converted into 700 new homes). But a longer-term jobs boost in these areas, where call centres and retail outlets are the lead employment options, is at present still mist over the Clyde.

The sport and the legacy aside, of more immediate concern to many is the extraordinary political psychodrama that surrounds the games. When Scotland’s largest city outvoted Abuja to win the games, no one could have foreseen that they would be held seven weeks before a plebiscite on the country’s independence. As things turned out, the combination of location and timing adds a spicy ingredient to an already overheated meal, where every cryptic celebrity morsel – David Bowie’s “Scotland, stay with us,” J.K. Rowling’s “Death Eaterish” open letter, Billy Connolly’s “the Scots will get what they deserve” – is devoured in an instant by the referendum maw.

Clearly, a ten-day spectacle where Scottish and English athletes compete under “their own” flag (unlike in the Olympics, which is all Union Jack-ery), and where there are countless other sub-plots, is conducive to a feverish spasm or two. The Telegraph speculates that home crowds will boo the English, a suggestion pooh-poohed by the paper’s own columnist Allan Massie. Scotland’s minister in the London government, Alistair Carmichael (a Liberal Democrat), warns the leader of the Scottish National Party, or SNP, Alex Salmond, not to use the games as a campaign tool. (Salmond’s flourishing of a Saltire flag in Wimbledon’s royal box when Andy Murray won the men’s final in 2013 won him more ridicule than acclaim.) A pre-emptive call for dignity is a cannier flag for a politician to wave.

The refovirus, though, won’t be easily contained. Joan McAlpine, the SNP member of the Scottish parliament – last encountered rewaging the Great War on Scotland’s behalf – says the Commonwealth Games are “[not] just a sporting inspiration” but “a great example of cooperation between people who share some historic ties but are also proud of their distinctiveness and independence.” On the other side Tristram Hunt, a prolific historian who doubles as Labour’s education shadow minister, writes in the Sunday Times that of all Scotland’s cities “outward-looking, trading, multicultural Glasgow reveals the benefits of being in the UK.”

This drumbeating context of high stakes and potent symbolism may ensure the odd kerfuffle. Yet the Scottish public, polls say, will be unforgiving of any effort to exploit the games, not least for the disrespect to everyone involved it would entail. Glaswegians’ instinctive warmth and hospitality might prove the best prophylactic.

The Commonwealth Games are unlikely to swing a single vote. But Glasgow will find its own way to imprint itself on the occasion. In the run-up, many in Scotland’s largest city – at 600,000, a fifth more populous than the capital, its great rival Edinburgh, forty miles to the east – have been reflecting on how the event fits into its history.

One theme is the need to recall the substance of “second city of the Empire” rather than citing the phrase while forgetting its roots. The notion itself can be traced to 1825, though it gained currency from John K. McDowall’s A People’s History of Glasgow, published in 1899 when the city’s industrial prowess was approaching its zenith. John M. MacKenzie, leading historian of the cultures of imperialism, writes that it was “a sort of mantra of pride in place and achievement that elite Glaswegians clung to and successfully disseminated among other classes for more than a century.”

Empire went deep into the city’s life: its trading networks and business interests, architecture and civic institutions, its newspapers and entertainments, its class divides and ethnic components. In a fine essay, “‘The Second City of the Empire’: Glasgow – Imperial Municipality,” MacKenzie also notes C.A. Oakley’s argument in his 1946 book The Second City (“a truncated reference that everyone was expected to understand immediately”) that Glasgow held the informal title from 1800 until at least 1914, in the process holding off competition from Birmingham, Sydney, Montreal, Toronto and Calcutta.

But the reputational overlap with Liverpool also makes sense, for it reflects how similar the cities’ modern journey has been. Each experienced rapid growth to becoming mercantile hub and industrial powerhouse; each accumulated vast wealth founded on trade in slaves, sugar and tobacco, alongside great poverty; each received a huge inflow of rural migrants (Irish in both cases, Gaelic and Welsh from respective hinterlands, but also sailors-turned-settlers of black Caribbean and Chinese origin); each incubated many political ideologies, by turn Unionist and Liberal, radical and socialist. No wonder that a certain affinity between the people of the two cities arose, even as their masters vied for status in an imperial league table where, of course, London was the undisputed champion.

The legacy of that epic period was painful, both in the depressed inter-war years and again since the 1970s. Empire’s long withdrawing roar, and strategic failures to adapt, left multiple problems: loss of industry and skills, low investment, global competition, high unemployment, educational failings and poor health, all compounded by short-sighted (or worse) governance. In places like Glasgow and Liverpool, the memory of former grandeur – however hard actual conditions had been for many at its height – can make the sociologists’ “cycle of deprivation” seem all the more intolerable. In face of it, the only realistic option has been substantial adjustment (“regeneration,” the boosters would say) with the long-term aim of economic viability in a healthy social environment.

For such proud but diminished cities (Glasgow’s population, over a million in 1961, fell a third by 1991), this latest stage is strewn with rocks: akin to reversing in mid-ocean the great liners they were once famous for building. The story of regeneration is routinely told by the winners and flattened into an easy “before” and “after” marketing-speak that falsifies both. (I vividly recall a Glasgow friend looking back from the 1990s to the 1960s and saying of the urban fabric and public life of the city: “Things were neither so bad before, nor are they so good now.”) The wasteful projects, false trails, bad decisions, scandals and pork-barrel politics also need to be registered – and Glasgow has had many of those.

Amnesia is fuelled by other Glasgow impulses: make it new, build it big, show it off, knock it down and start again. A case in point was a plan to blow up five of the six remaining Red Road public housing tower blocks, also in Glasgow’s east end, as part of the Commonwealth Games’ opening spectacle. Built between 1964 and 1969, and the highest in Europe at the time, the flats were a symbol of that era’s municipal modernism, but had long suffered from neglect, disrepair, and abandonment. Many ex-residents, including asylum seekers, nonetheless saw the public demolition of their former homes as a sort of desecration. Their protest forced the whizz to be abandoned. The words “insensitive” and “trampling on our history” were much used, to a discordant murmur from a million of the city’s ghosts.

Ill-judged, yes, but the “blow-down” – announced as “an unforgettable statement of how Glasgow is confidently embracing the future and changing for the better” – also went with the grain of much of Glasgow’s history. The spirit of the planners and architects who smashed a maze of motorways through the city centre in the 1960s still rules. Along the way they pulverised the tenements of the huge, working-class, multifarious Gorbals district – once routinely seen as “notorious,” now as a ripe source of fond if standardised memoir. (So powerful is this imaginative shift that it reframes even postwar social-realist depictions, such as A.L. Lloyd and Bert Hardy’s shaping Picture Post feature, published in January 1948, or David MacKane’s film The Gorbals Story, released in 1950, which adapted Robert McLeish’s 1946 play.) In Glasgow even more than elsewhere in Britain, it can seem (to adapt August Bebel) that regeneration is the socialism of the victors, nostalgia the socialism of the losers, and that both are wrong answers to a real conundrum.

If Red Road was one case study in how Glasgow works, another was visible in its council leader’s decision to countermand the result of an open architectural competition for the redesign of its traduced civic heart, George Square, in time for the games. This had been won in January 2013 by John McAslan, a son of Dunoon in the Clyde estuary, who found early inspiration in the “implacable, superfunctional forms of American nuclear submarines” stationed there. His history-respecting modernism is embodied in his company’s majestic renovation of London’s Kings Cross railway station.

McAslan brought the same vision-in-place approach to George Square, but the judges’ verdict was instantly overturned by Gordon Matheson, the Labour chief of Glasgow’s city council, an act that prompted a formal complaint from the Royal Incorporation of Architects in Scotland and a police investigation. Both ran aground. On the eve of the games, Matheson warns against Scottish independence in the Labour-loyal Daily Record and boasts, “We were the second city of the empire and are set to become the first city of the Commonwealth.”

The cycles of destruction and remaking of Glasgow’s civic landscape mirror the great changes in its economic life, which today make public services, finance, tourism, the creative sector and broadcasting more important than industry as a source of employment and wealth. (Shipbuilding and engineering do survive on the Clyde, if much reduced, and its industrial past is at the core of the city’s identity.) The city, like every other in Britain, also floats on a sea of intoxication – the sociologist Dick Hobbs calls it the “alcohol economy” or “night-time economy” – whose social and personal costs are notably high. A brave psycho-social assessment, Carol Craig’s The Tears that Made the Clyde: Well-Being in Glasgow, connects people’s problems of ill health, poverty, addiction and male aggression to the city’s industrial experience.

The milestones of regeneration have often been instances of “cultural urbanism”: the opening of the Burrell collection, the refined trove of a shipping magnate, in 1983; a garden festival in 1988; designation as European city of culture in 1990 and as the UK’s city of architecture and design in 1999. The “Glasgow’s Miles Better” advertising campaign, also launched in 1983, is often credited as image-changing, helped by its not-so-coded dig at reputedly snooty Edinburgh. (Robert Crawford’s rich, literary study On Glasgow and Edinburgh maps this strange relationship, into which all brought up in its shadow are acculturated. Once, in England, when I answered a query about my origins to a new acquaintance from the multicultural area of Maryhill, north of Glasgow’s city centre, his instant reply was: “You mean you’re English?!” Nothing in my upbringing in Edinburgh – entirely Glasgowphile, as it happens – had prepared me for that.)

The most ambitious current project is the government-funded Clyde Gateway, begun in December 2007 with a twenty-year remit to reclaim (and decontaminate) derelict land and transform those poorer neighbourhoods along the lower Clyde to the city’s east. The long-term figures sound impressive, as they always do: a prospective £1.5 billion of private investment (with £200 million already committed), 20,000 more people moving into the area, with the same number of jobs and half as many houses provided. Phil Jones and James Evans, in their Urban Regeneration in the UK: Boom, Bust and Recovery, published in 2013, are cautiously positive, but say quality of local services and a healthy social texture are important in attracting potential incomers. Otherwise, they warn, “the development runs the risk of becoming a car-based commuter settlement, with all the resultant implications for sustainability.”

This latest phase, as with its predecessors, has prompted efforts to ensure that processes are transparent and benefits shared, often fought by Glasgow’s vigorous activist and community networks, or by a periodically lively left (that is, when not misled by the macho demagogues who are its curse). Some are using the opportunity of the games to make regeneration their own. In Dalmarnock, for example, pressure from a group including Labour councillor Yvonne Kucuk secured substantial funding for the Dalmarnock Legacy Hub, which will build a new multipurpose centre offering medical services and a nursery school.

The Commonwealth Games’ critics include the Glasgow Games Monitor, which questions the proclaimed economic and social benefits, and Restore George Square, which currently denounces the “civic vandalism” represented by a huge merchandising tent in the square’s midst. In addition, the veteran rights activist Peter Tatchell – pointing out that homosexuality is a criminal offence in forty-two of the fifty-three Commonwealth states, with severe penalties, up to life imprisonment, in at least seven – calls for the British and Scottish governments to press for adherence to Article 7 of the Commonwealth Games Federation’s constitution. The Article states that “there shall be no discrimination against any country or person on any grounds whatsoever, including race, colour, gender, religion or politics.”

Another timely initiative during the games seeks to connect Glasgow both to the world and to its own past. This is a series of events exploring the city’s and Scotland’s role in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonial slave plantations, and their relationship to empire more generally. The program, convened by the novelist Louise Welsh and the architect Jude Barber under the rubric of Collective Architecture, takes place at the impromptu Empire Café, the Glasgow Women’s Library, and in walks around the city. It builds on a growing body of valuable work on a neglected subject, including Stephen Mullen’s It Wisnae Us: The Truth about Glasgow and Slavery, published in 2009.

In the Commonwealth Games’ opening ceremony, amid the quirky charade of Scottish emblems, there were touching references to more noble Glasgow and Scottish connections: Nelson Mandela’s memorable visit to the city that had twice honoured him during his prison years, including an address to cheering crowds in a drenched George Square, and his compatriot Pumeza Matshikiza‘s rendition of the folklorist Hamish Henderson’s renowned Scots-language hymn to cross-racial solidarity, The Freedom Come All Ye. The spectrum from here to the world evoked by the Empire Café sets a ground of debate which will continue irrespective of the result in Scotland’s independence referendum on 18 September.

The inclusive enthusiasm of both crowd and participants at the launch event underlines the therapeutic attractions of a brief suspension of political hostilities. Whatever happens during the jamboree, they will resume the instant it’s over. So too will Glasgow’s restless search for a future that lives up to the best of the humanity within. •

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IN THE grand, white, pillared building facing Indonesia’s National Monument in Jakarta is the office of Indonesia’s most talked-about figure, city governor Joko Widodo, popularly known as Jokowi. Although he has yet to nominate as a candidate for the Indonesian presidency, Jokowi is leading in all the major polls, some of which see him attracting as much as 45 per cent of the vote, with his nearest rival at around 12 per cent. Just last week, the Indonesia-based magazine Globe Asia named him Man of the Year. “Jakarta’s governor has redefined politics with his down to earth, get-your-hands-dirty style,” the magazine said. “The next stage – the presidency.”

On the afternoon I arrive to interview Jokowi, three mothers with babies born with dangerously oversized heads (a condition known as hydrocephalus) are waiting on the front porch, a space frequented by members of Jakarta’s large population of urban poor. An assistant from the governor’s office listens to their story, registers them and gives them some money. But they don’t leave. By four o’clock the crowd has grown and journalists are beginning to position themselves for a brief interview opportunity. Jokowi appears through the large doors, dressed in a crisp white shirt and black pants. Indonesians often comment that he looks like a “common person,” and he was once depicted by Tempo, Indonesia’s highest-selling magazine, as a becak (pedicab) driver. But today, perhaps because of the grandeur of the surroundings and the way the crowd reacts, he seems somewhat regal.

Having politely answered questions from the journalists, Jokowi moves closer to the car. The mothers approach, intent on telling their story. He listens, interrupting only to say “go on” a few times. “Why then do you want to talk with me if you have already received money from us?” he asks once they’ve finished. “We wanted to see you in person,” says one of the mothers, “and see if you are as handsome as you are on TV.” Everyone laughs, but clearly these mothers haven’t just come for the money. They have embraced the Jokowi phenomenon.

JOKO Widodo, a little-known furniture retailer, became mayor of the central Javanese city of Solo in 2005. He won again, in a landslide, in 2010, only to resign in 2012 to run for governor of Indonesia’s capital. He came to Jakarta with a reputation for incorruptibility, and had recently been ranked third in the annual World Mayor Prize. Jokowi’s running mate was Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, a Sumatran-born Christian of Chinese descent, popularly known as Ahok, who had a reputation as a clean straight-shooter who got things done.

While most Indonesian politicians still use television advertisements and posters in their campaigning, the Jokowi–Ahok ticket used campaign tools that were still unusual in Indonesia – including BlackBerry messaging, kooky YouTube videos, and matching t-shirts for the candidates – to promote its brand of “new” politics. The pair won the October 2012 election with 53.8 per cent of the vote. But their distinctive approach, and their momentum, didn’t stop there.

A large part of Jokowi’s success can be attributed to his blusukans, or “unscheduled visits.” He arrives, unannounced, in different parts of Jakarta to talk with local people about the issues affecting them. His skill lies in being interested in the details: where the bus stops, how the rubbish is collected, where the drains are blocked. As he showed the mothers outside city hall, he has a seemingly rare ability for a politician – he listens. Jokowi and Ahok also turn up at government offices, followed closely by television cameras, and have often caught public servants resting on their laurels. In a city crippled by traffic chaos, frequent floods and a debilitating bureaucracy, these visits helped create the hope that the two men would find solutions to some of Jakarta’s biggest problems.

Back in his office after a long day of visits to different parts of the city, surveying flood damage and talking to journalists, Jokowi sits comfortably in his chair. A naturally warm character, he seems relaxed despite his hectic schedule. As we begin our interview, he puts away the notes prepared for him by his staff, and talks off-the-cuff about the importance of the media, and in particular television, in his transformation from Solo mayor to the most popular candidate for president. “I learnt in Solo how to manage the media and to differentiate from other candidates,” he tells me. “We go to the problem locations. We go to the poor people, to the riverbank for example, and this is sexy for the media. If you interview in the office or shoot television footage in the office it is not sexy…” Jokowi has a talent for responding to questions spontaneously, and often jokes with journalists and fans. Before our interview, Indonesian actors starring in a new film had arrived to take photos with him to help promote the film. Many in the media describe his style as the “antithesis” of the way previous Indonesian leaders, including the current president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, behave in public.

Like Jokowi, deputy governor Ahok is a “different” kind of politician, and not only because of his ethnicity and religion. When I arrive at his office to interview him, he immediately invites me to lunch with his staff. All issues are open for discussion, and during the hour-long meal it’s rare for more than twenty seconds to go by without Ahok contributing in his rapid-fire Indonesian. In contrast to the more softly spoken Jokowi, he has a quick, direct manner. He jokes, he points, he interrupts. It’s led the Indonesian media to describe them as a good-cop, bad-cop combination.

“This is a rebellious generation,” Ahok tells me. “People have seen the same type of politician and they are bored. They want someone different.” And there is little doubt it’s working, not only in the polls, but also on the ground. A monorail and a mass rapid transit network are being built to address the city’s enormous traffic problems. More public buses are on the roads. Plans have been developed to restore Jakarta’s historic Old Town, rundown for decades. Rivers are being widened and reservoirs developed to prepare for the imminent flood season.

One of Jokowi and Ahok’s most successful ventures has been to move street vendors from beside the road to create more traffic lanes in the notorious preman (local thugs) area of Tanah Abang. “Tanah Abang was a symbol of unmanageability,” says Indonesia’s foremost author, Jakarta resident Goenawan Mohamad. “It was chaos. Jokowi was seen as a chaos-crasher.” Jokowi told the Jakarta Post that the move was successful because “there was a process that we went through. We approached them, prepared a concept and organised the strategy. We involved the locals, talked to the street vendors. We aimed to demonstrate the process to the public.” The scheme made headlines all over Indonesia. “Jakarta is a testing ground,” says Goenawan. “If you can get things done here in Jakarta you can get things done nationally.”

Jokowi’s popularity soon extended across Indonesia. In early 2013, when pollsters started to include him among potential candidates for president, they found he was already leading the race by a slim margin. By December, he had reached the low to mid 40s. One recent poll showed that he could run with any candidate as vice-president, no matter how unpopular, and still win. And he hasn’t even nominated yet.

WITH residents of the other Indonesian islands often complaining about Jakarta-centric politics and pushing for greater decentralisation, how has the governor of the capital gathered so much support? One way to approach this question is to examine the role of Indonesia’s media. Jokowi’s blusukans are not only about the people he meets in person: they have become major media events, making for great television in particular. People hug him, they smile and cheer, some even cry. “We are 80 to 85 per cent certain that TV can change the mindset of the people, and if TV can give positive information it can change perceptions,” says Jokowi. “If I stay in the office do you think they will cover me?”

According to market research company Roy Morgan Indonesia, over 98 per cent of Indonesians surveyed watch television in any given week. Even before the Jokowi phenomenon, around 70 per cent of stories on national TV news stations were from Jakarta. Indonesians from all around the archipelago were watching this politician with a new style of talking directly with the people. Internal data from twenty-four-hour national news stations MetroTV and TVOne shows that when Jokowi is on the news, the ratings surge, while other political stories, especially corruption stories, cause viewers to switch channels.

When kompas.com reported that senior politician Amien Rais had criticised Jokowi, more than 11,000 readers commented, the highest number for a single story since the site was established in 2008. Politicians naturally became wary of criticising him. Just last week, seven out of the top eight most-read stories on kompas.com had Jokowi in the title (and the eighth featured Ahok). Kompas.com is largely read by urban, middle-class office workers, so clearly Jokowi’s popularity is not only among less well-off voters who might relate to Jokowi’s becak driver image. Chief editors of media companies say that the Indonesian media has never seen a phenomenon like Jokowi before.

As Kompas chief editor Rikard Bagun says, “He is the people’s darling, not the media’s darling. They feel he is close to the people. The media is just amplifying the people’s views.” Outside Jokowi’s home island of Java, stories circulate. In Maluku, 2700 kilometres from Jakarta, I was told by a local that Jokowi is great because he trusts his people and thus “never travels with a bodyguard.” Even further east in Papua, a local told me he would vote for Jokowi because “everywhere he goes, he travels with four Papuan bodyguards.” According to one letter to a daily newspaper, “Jokowi is so accustomed to feeding his people first, he eats only whatever is left over. That’s why he’s so thin.” Another explained that Jokowi was appealing because he is “a commoner, the type riding on ojek, metro mini or angkot, lost in the daily traffic to work.” Ahok agrees, saying, “People want the same as them. They see him as from the same village as them, as a simple man with similar protocols to them.” Above all, Jokowi seems to give people hope that Indonesian politics is changing for the better.

“Because I go out of the office, the media will follow,” says Jokowi, pictured here talking to journalists in Jakarta last October.
Eduardo M.C./ Flickr

What makes the Jokowi phenomenon all the more absorbing is that Indonesia’s presidential candidates usually own national media companies. Golkar candidate Aburizal Bakrie, who owns TVOne and Viva News, has made it clear that his outlets will operate in a similar way to Fox News in the United States. Hary Tanoesoedibjo, whose MNC Group television stations command around 42 per cent of the audience in Indonesia, is vice-presidential candidate for the Hanura Party; the party’s polling has improved since Tanoesoedibjo became involved and his media started to push its interests. Surya Paloh, who owns MetroTV and the newspaper Media Indonesia, is founder and presidential candidate for the Nasional Democrats. Potential Partai Democrat candidate Dahlan Iskan owns Jawa Pos Group, which has over 140 Indonesian-language newspapers nationwide, the largest print media group in the country. Even the current president owns a newspaper, Jurnal Nasional.

Jokowi and Ahok have bucked this trend, achieving tremendous success without playing the game of media ownership or paying journalists for regular coverage, which is also a common feature of local politics in the archipelago. “Since Solo, for nine years I have kept this policy,” Jokowi says. “It has not been difficult. Because I go out of the office, the media will follow.” Media moguls with political ambitions were originally very happy to see the Jokowi phenomenon increase their audience and readership, but now that he is the clear presidential favourite they are toughening up their coverage. Journalists from Bakrie’s and Tanoesoedibyo’s media companies have been told to avoid reporting Jokowi, or to focus on criticising his policies. Surya Paloh’s outlets were issued a similar directive last year, although last month he seemed to have a change of heart – the result of internal pressure from editors or poor ratings, perhaps, or because Surya might be holding out hopes for a coalition with the party of which Jokowi is a member, the Democratic Party of Struggle.

In any case, Indonesians can prepare for a media war in the lead-up to the first round of legislative elections in April. “People sometimes tell me, ‘You are not on TV because you don’t have a newspaper or a TV station,’” says Jokowi, “but the people are smart, they know why. People know, and they will switch channels. For me it’s not a problem if they don’t cover me.” On 16 January a rally was held to pressure the Indonesian Broadcasting Corporation to punish media stations which push their political party interests. Jokowi says he is not interested in owning media – “there is more than enough media in Indonesia” – and believes that media “should be independent,” although he stops short of saying media owners should not be allowed to run for political positions. “It’s okay as long as their companies give accurate information and are independent,” he says. Ahok points to the fact that they have used new media to great effect previously, and can put out content on YouTube. “I don’t care if they slander us. That’s why I put up my own content.”

But if nationwide television news stations are partly responsible for Jokowi’s popularity in an archipelago of thirty-four provinces and 17,000 islands, would a blackout or constant criticism mean a reduction in his popularity? “You have to trust the people,” says Goenawan Mohamad, “Look at the other alternatives. There was a vacuum and Jokowi stepped in. They vote for him because there is a need for a guy like Jokowi in Indonesia.” Try as they might, the old-school elite political candidate–media mogul might never be able to compete with Jokowi’s new brand of politics. Kompas’s Rikard Bagun agrees, “Jokowi is an antithesis to other candidates because he invites the people to discuss issues. There is a collective expectation that we need somebody to change things and they found it in Jokowi. He’s part of our destiny.”

FRIDAY 10 January is the Democratic Party of Struggle’s forty-first anniversary. Jokowi’s media caravan leaves early for South Jakarta, where he attends a ceremony beside the party’s founder, the former Indonesian president (2001–04), Megawati Sukarnoputri. Megawati is the most important person in Indonesian politics at present because it is she who will decide whether Jokowi will be the party’s presidential candidate. To do so, she will have to decide whether to run herself. Despite her clear unpopularity – she has lost in the last two elections to current President Yudhoyono and is currently only polling in the single digits – she still harbours a desire to remain as the party’s presidential candidate. As George Orwell once wrote, no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.

Jokowi doesn’t speak, and Megawati briefly announces that she will make a decision on the party’s presidential nomination once the legislative elections are completed in April. They leave the stage and enter the party’s headquarters, and the media temporarily relaxes. Suddenly Jokowi returns from the room and heads to his car, his long legs fully stretched at fast walking pace to avoid the crush of people following. Journalists scramble into cars packed with television cameras. “Only Jokowi and God know where we are headed next,” one journalist tells me. If God did happen to show up, I wonder, which of the two would the media caravan follow?

Our car is involved in numerous close shaves trying to keep up with the convoy. Soon we are at Halim Air Field in South Jakarta, where Jokowi is checking on the progress of the former military airport that will soon become commercial. He is continuing his practice of dropping in unexpectedly to check on the development of government projects. After the airport we stop suddenly beside the road, where Jokowi holds an impromptu press conference explaining that the road will need to change from four lanes to six to meet the traffic demands to the airport. Journalists again scramble for positions, and he takes detailed questions on the spot without any notes or assistance from his staff. He is distracted only by a passing angkot (local public transport), from which a group of young girls squeal, “It’s Jokowi!”

Then it is back to the cars, fighting through Jakarta’s traffic, to check on another location, this time in North Jakarta. We’ve visited four locations and it’s not even lunchtime. Jokowi rarely spends more than a few hours each day in his office, though he visits Megawati regularly. Such is the balancing act between trying to be an effective governor of Indonesia’s capital and pleasing the woman who holds the key to his nomination for president. Yet polling shows that even if he switched parties, he would probably still win.

A RUN for president will raise fresh questions about whether the Jokowi phenomenon can continue its push for a more transparent, action-oriented political sphere. Even if he does win, some fear that the diminishing powers of the presidency mean that he would lack the capacity to make significant changes. And, as Barack Obama found, when you run on a campaign of hope you are only ever going to disappoint people.

Jokowi is remaining tight-lipped about his presidential hopes, telling the media to ask Megawati if they want to know about the party’s candidate, and when I ask how he sees his future he only says, “All we can do is keep working hard.” But all that matters for now is whether he will have the opportunity to run for president and, in this relatively new democracy, whether the majority of Indonesians will get the chance to vote for the person they most want in that role. As for how long this media phenomenon will last, only time will tell. In the meantime, Indonesians are embracing an approach that could change the nature of politics in the country, and gives many of them the hope that things can change for the better. •

The post The Jokowi phenomenon appeared first on Inside Story.

ONE of my regular neighbourhood walks takes me past a fine example of Queen Anne architecture. The elegant family home has three sculptural red-brick chimney stacks towering from its multi-gabled roof, its ridge lines capped with decorative terracotta ornaments. A fretwork verandah frames the generous curve of a bay window that greets the street. The house is well maintained, but its charms have begun to look slightly faded in recent years. The paint on the woodwork is no longer fresh and a front garden that was once cared for now looks as if it is simply maintained.

“Mary,” who owns the house, is in her late eighties and has lived there alone since the death of her husband several years ago. In popular parlance, she is the archetypal little old lady rattling around in the old family home. In the language of public policy and economics, Mary is an “overconsumer” of housing and her choice of dwelling is “inefficient.” By living in a residence that could comfortably accommodate a family, Mary is contributing to the “underutilisation” of Australian housing. Put another way, she is helping to reduce supply and inflate prices.

The number of older Australians like Mary who live alone in large homes is startling. An analysis of 2011 census data reveals that of homeowners aged seventy and over who live alone, 62 per cent have a house with three or more bedrooms. That adds up to 238,078 houses with at least three bedrooms occupied by just one person. The situation is similar for houses owned by older couples (with at least one partner aged over seventy): 82 per cent of these dwellings – 332,752 houses – have at least three bedrooms.

The share of older people or couples living alone in large houses is generally higher in regional and rural areas than in capital cities; it is also noticeably higher in Western Australia and Queensland than in the other states. Older homeowners in the Australian Capital Territory are the real standout, however: more than three quarters (77 per cent) of older singles in the ACT reside in a house with three or more bedrooms, as do more than nine-out-of-ten older couples (93 per cent).

Given the way that ageing is transforming Australian society, the phenomenon appears certain to become much more pronounced. In its 2010 Intergenerational Report, Treasury projected that the share of the population aged over sixty-five would rise from 13 per cent to 23 per cent by 2050 (an increase from three million to more than seven million people). Within that group, the number of “very old people” – people aged eighty-five or more – is expected to more than quadruple, from 400,000 to 1.8 million. Since close to 80 per cent of Australians aged sixty-five or older own their own homes, that means legions of Marys are potentially “rattling around” in large houses.

In addition, the final act of the outgoing parliament was to pass the final legislative elements of the Living Better, Living Longer package, which will see the focus of aged-care policy and funding shift even further towards providing support to people in their homes rather than in residential facilities. In many ways this is a welcome reform, since most people want to remain living independently for as long as they can. It could have a downside, however, if it encourages older people to stay in houses that are too big for them and that they can no longer keep in good condition. If more and more older Australians end up living in unsuitable, poorly maintained housing, then the costs of delivering aged care to the home will rise rapidly as service providers, and by extension governments, are called on to provide more cleaning, repairs and modifications.

Not only that, but if the share of older Australians living alone or as couples in large houses continues to increase, then underutilisation will exacerbate the shortages and cost pressures that already strain our housing system. It will delay the redevelopment of the middle rings of Australian cities – the so-called greyfield suburbs – where there is great potential to increase affordability and sustainability by replacing ageing detached houses on large blocks with more diverse, medium-density dwellings.

But it would be highly presumptuous, even draconian, to insist that someone like Mary should downsize simply because she has grown older and now lives alone in an empty nest. People of all ages live in houses that have many more rooms than occupants. I could include myself in this category, along with numerous friends and acquaintances who might take offence if I were to tell them that their housing choices were “inefficient” and amounted to “overconsumption” or “underutilisation.” Those spare bedrooms are needed for visiting friends and family, as home offices, studios or music rooms, or to provide a refuge when sleep is impossible because a partner is snoring. The big backyard is needed for pets, for outdoor entertaining, for children to play in, or for growing vegies.

One other factor that we may fail to recognise, or at least admit to ourselves, is that an owner-occupied house in Australia is a highly tax-effective vehicle for accumulating, storing and passing on wealth. Under such conditions, it is hardly surprising that those who can afford to do so often buy houses that are larger than we might actually need.

THE idea that it is inappropriate for older couples or older single people to continue living in large houses is known as “the mismatch argument.” Crudely put, it is an argument that denies agency to older people, especially older women, by suggesting that they don’t know what is best for them and have therefore become trapped in dwellings that are too large and too expensive to heat and cool, to keep clean and to maintain. The argument takes no account of how older people might use and enjoy their extra rooms for hobbies, professional activities, accommodating guests, study, entertaining or hosting family gatherings – activities that often make a major contribution to an older person’s physical and psychological wellbeing. The mismatch argument often has a moralistic undertone, a suggestion that by “underutilising” big houses, old people are denying others, especially young families, the chance to live in an ideal home.

On an individual level, Mary’s choices, like mine and like those of my friends and acquaintances, are entirely a personal concern. At a societal level, however, the sum of our private choices can add up to a major public problem. The point is not to tell Mary or anyone else how to live their lives, but to recognise that our choices are framed by policies that create incentives and disincentives that have a profound impact on outcomes. If these policies deter older homeowners from downsizing then this acts as a brake on supply and keeps housing costs high.

Nor is it being morally judgemental to acknowledge that housing purchased at a particular stage in life may no longer be suitable in altered circumstances. A freestanding three-bedroom home bought by a working couple to raise a family in is not necessarily ideal for a widow like Mary in her eighties.

If government policies deter older homeowners like Mary from downsizing, then their choices are potentially being constrained rather than expanded. As a result, their wealth will remain locked up in real estate rather than being used to make later years more comfortable. Someone who “overconsumes” housing is apt to “underconsume” other goods and services, particularly if he or she is on a fixed income like the pension, and could end up shivering frugally in a cold, rundown but spacious house, rather than turning on the heating or calling in a plumber.

A range of newer financial instruments – including reverse mortgages and partial sales – can enable older homeowners to convert some of their equity into cash to meet immediate needs without moving house. But in a paper for the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute, or AHURI, Rachel Ong and her co-authors note that retired homeowners typically “appear to view housing wealth as precautionary savings that are only rolled out in extreme circumstances.” In other words, people are often reluctant to draw down on their housing wealth to meet current expenses.

Evidence of this could be seen recently on another of my local walks, which took me past a house in a leafy street with a neatly made protest sign posted in the front garden. The sign criticised the local council’s refusal to offer discounted rates to the resident, a single pensioner. Given that the house was probably worth well over a million dollars, it was hard to feel a great deal of sympathy for the homeowner’s plight.

There is evidence that many Australians are open to the idea of moving into a smaller residence as they grow older. A detailed survey carried out by AHURI reveals that while the majority of us want to “age-in-place,” this doesn’t necessarily mean that we expect to stay in the same house. For most, attachment is less to a particular pile of bricks and mortar than to a local area – to the network of friends, services and familiar places that bind them to a community.

SO WHY don’t more people downsize and either indulge in a bit more SKIing (Spending the Kids Inheritance), or acting like OWLS (Oldies Withdrawing Loot Sensibly)? There are two answers to this question. The first has to do with the type of housing we build, the second with the way we tax it.

Almost three-quarters of occupied private dwellings in Australia have three bedrooms or more. As a result, people who want to move to a smaller house have limited options, especially if they want to stay in the same locality. Zoning and planning rules often exacerbate this situation by inhibiting the construction of more diverse housing stock. Under a new zoning system introduced in Victoria, for instance, local governments have been given extensive powers to determine what kinds of development can take place in different locations. The City of Glen Eira in Melbourne’s southeast is the first local government to implement the system. It has classified almost 80 per cent of the municipality as a Neighbourhood Residential Zone. This enforces a binding two-storey height limit on all buildings and a limit of two dwellings per lot. The aim is to protect the amenity and character of quiet residential streets and concentrate higher-density development along major roads, public transport routes and shopping strips. It’s likely that most Glen Eira residents are pleased with the immediate outcome, but in the long term the planning may not serve them so well. Any residents who want to transition in future from a freestanding family-sized home to something smaller will almost certainly find that they have to leave Glen Eira’s leafy streets behind.

But a lack of housing choice is not the biggest barrier to downsizing for older Australians. More important is the way we tax property and the way this interacts with pension payments.

Let’s return to the example of Mary. She has no economic incentive to move into a smaller residence. Quite the opposite: were she to downsize, Mary would be financially penalised. First there is the transaction cost of any move – particularly stamp duty, which would amount to tens of thousands of dollars. Second, because her home is her primary residence, it is exempt from the assets test for the aged pension; if Mary were to sell the house, though, the proceeds from its sale would not be exempt.

Given its location in a quiet, tree-lined street close to a park, shops and transport, Mary’s Queen Anne home would be worth more than a million dollars. If she swapped it for a $500,000 unit and saved the difference, then she might well find herself ineligible for the aged pension. For a single homeowner with assets worth up to $196,750, the basic pension is currently $733.70 per fortnight. For every $1000 in assets beyond that threshold, the pension reduces by $1.50. In other words, if Mary downsizes, then for every $100,000 that she puts in the bank she stands to lose $150 a fortnight, or about 20 per cent of her age pension.

The Productivity Commission recognised this problem in its comprehensive review of aged-care policy, Caring for Older Australians. Its recommended “first best option” was that the means test for the age pension should treat income and assets “in a consistent manner.” In other words, certain types of wealth such as a family home should not be excluded from the assets test or treated differently from other types of wealth, like bank deposits or shares. Recognising that this was unlikely to be adopted as policy, the Commission recommended a more politically palatable fix in the form of a government-backed Australian Age Pensioners Savings Account Scheme. Older Australians would be able sell their homes, and deposit the proceeds in the account, without affecting their government entitlements.

The government initially rejected this recommendation on the basis that it would increase pension outlays and would be expensive to set up and administer. In the most recent budget, however, the Gillard government announced that it would trial a similar but much more limited scheme over three years, beginning in July 2014. Under the trial, which is set to cost $112.4 million and benefit around 30,000 people, pensioners will be able to put up to $200,000 from the sale of their home into a special account that is exempt from the assets test. The trial is hedged with caveats. To be eligible, pensioners must have lived in their own home for at least twenty-five years. Funds are only exempt from the pension test if they remain in the account. This rather undermines the thrust of the Productivity Commission’s original recommendations, which were designed not only to encourage retirees to downsize but also to free up the capital in their homes so that they could use it for other purposes, including making a greater contribution to the cost of their own care.

There is a deeper and more fundamental objection to the pilot project – and to the Productivity Commission’s proposed Australian Age Pensioners Savings Account. Schemes like this will only benefit those who already have substantial housing wealth, and will exacerbate rather than redress inequality. They offer nothing to older Australians who live in rented accommodation or to those who own poorly located property that is not worth much money.

Given the potential value of her house, Mary could do well even without the Commission’s plan. If she were to downsize, by either purchasing or renting a smaller dwelling, then she could probably spend the rest of her days living comfortably on the proceeds from selling her house, without ever needing to draw a pension. The only loser in this case would be Mary’s son, who would see his inheritance gradually reduced.

AND this brings us to the nub of the issue. In Australia, the family home is exempt from any form of taxation except the stamp duty paid on purchase. It is exempt from both capital gains tax and land tax and is not included in the assets test for the age pension. As a result, we use the family home as the primary store of personal wealth to be passed on to the next generation.

In research commissioned by the Brotherhood of St Laurence, economist Judy Yates calculated that in 2005–06 owner-occupiers benefited from government tax expenditures (that is, revenue forgone) totalling $45 billion. In a background paper for the Henry Tax Review in 2010, researcher Gavin Wood and his colleagues showed how these substantial benefits to homeowners increase with age and wealth. They calculated that, in 2006, the tax treatment of the primary residence represented an annual average subsidy of more than $5000 to homeowners aged over sixty-five. The exemption of the primary residence from the pension assets test increased the subsidy, on average, by another $2500.

Older Australian homeowners have “huge incentives to stay put,” says Yates, because they are getting the equivalent of a tax-free income. “They have almost no housing costs and sit on an asset that has the potential to appreciate. Unless you start removing those kinds of incentives, there are not a lot of reasons to trade down, especially for people whose houses are already in good locations.”

A high rate of home ownership has enabled Australian governments to keep pension rates relatively low by international standards, because most retirees do not have to pay rent. In many ways, this has served the nation well, but the system is beginning to fray at the edges. The incentives to use the family home as a store of wealth contribute to house price inflation, and as Yates has shown, the decline in affordability is contributing to a decline in home ownership rates in younger age groups. Already there is a strong correlation between renting and poverty among older Australians. In future, an increasing number of pensioners might not have the traditional welfare buffer of owning their home.

Government now also offers huge tax concessions on superannuation, a second form of wealth accumulation that is meant to fund an increasingly long-lived old age. It is debatable how long the nation will be able to afford to maintain both schemes as the ratio of working-age adults to retirees declines. It is also questionable whether a better society will emerge from two tax concessions that increase inequality by offering disproportionate advantages to the wealthy and those on high incomes.

Once a benefit has been granted, though, it is very hard to take it away. The concessional tax treatment of the family home is so entrenched that it has become deeply embedded in our cultural assumptions. We feel that we have a right to stay in our homes and pass them on to our kids. We worked hard to acquire property, doing it tough to pay off mortgages while riding the interest-rate roller coaster. The subsidies that support our home ownership remain largely invisible to us. To suggest that the family home should be taxed, or included in the pension assets test, is to risk being labelled unAustralian. There is no sign that either side of politics will be brave enough to canvass such radical ideas.

The one tax reform that could conceivably be implemented with bipartisan support would be the abolition of stamp duty and its replacement with a broad-based tax on the value of land. The ACT is the only jurisdiction in Australia currently moving in this direction. It is recognised across the political spectrum that stamp duty adds to Australia’s housing affordability problems and has other negative side effects, such as discouraging people from moving from regions of low employment to places where the job prospects are better. By reducing the transactional costs of moving house, the abolition of stamp duty would remove one significant impediment to downsizing with age. A land tax would also capture some of the windfall gains that accrue to home-owners from sitting on a well-located property, and from government investments in civic improvements and better infrastructure. And as Judy Yates points out, “the arrival of an annual land tax bill might also prompt some older Australians to ask themselves whether they really want to be paying for the privilege of living in such a large house.”

I don’t know why Mary has chosen to stay in a house that is much larger than her apparent needs. Perhaps it is because she likes the area. Mary is on friendly terms with her neighbours, who often phone or drop by to make sure that all is well. Perhaps she has never seen any reason to move. Perhaps she has considered moving but feared it would disrupt the network of friendships that anchor her in the community. Perhaps she likes to live surrounded by her memories in the home where she and her late husband raised a family. Whatever her reasons, Mary has every right to stay put. The question is whether the tax and pension systems should be encouraging her to do so, or whether it is time to change the policy mix in a way that might prompt her to consider other options and also help to make Australia’s housing more affordable and more equitable. •

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THE gap between the demand for and supply of new housing has pushed rents so high that many singles and families are being driven to renting a room. While this was frequent in the 1930s, what had become very rare over many decades is no longer so despite our much richer society. Numerous households trying to avoid astronomic rents have secured a mortgage to buy an apartment or house but find repayments have also pushed them into a poverty trap.

Statistics from the government’s own agencies, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the National Housing Supply Council and the Australian Bureau of Statistics reveal a serious and steadily increasing housing shortfall (estimated in June 2011 at 228,000). This has led to a worsening in rental affordability, which has increased the number of households in “housing stress,” defined as rent or mortgage repayment of over 30 per cent of gross household income. Compared with an increase in average earnings of 57 per cent the rise in average rent over the past decade has been 76 per cent for houses and 92 per cent for apartments. It is therefore hardly surprising the number of homeless people has increased. According to urban policy analyst Patrick Troy, in his 2012 book Accommodating Australians, Australia has one of the most expensive housing markets in the developed world.

Australia is clearly experiencing a housing market failure. With rising unemployment, recessed economic growth and record low interest rates, a Labor government, with wisdom and labour values and seeking to win over the electorate in an election year, should surely have undertaken a major initiative to reduce the housing gap (and also reduce the growth in unemployment).

If the federal government were to establish a National Housing Authority, or NHA, it could borrow, say, $10 billion annually to build around 40,000 apartments or houses. Since the funds would be borrowed by the NHA, this would not be a cost to the budget; and the NHA could cover its costs while renting housing for $200 to $300 a week less than private sector housing. How? First, as a government authority it would borrow at around 2 per cent below the market rate. This would save renters about $100 per week. Second, unlike the private sector it could provide housing as a non-profit service, saving renters another $100 to $200 per week. Moreover, the increased supply would substantially reduce market rental. The states have shown they are incapable of or haven’t the will to deal adequately with this problem.

If the government wished to assist low-income earners further, especially those on welfare payments, it could provide a budget subsidy on a proportion of these houses reserved for such families and singles. The annual cost of a weekly subsidy of an additional $200 on 20,000 houses would be $200 million.

Since rent or mortgage repayments represent by far the largest item in low- to middle-income families’ budgets, this plan would make the single largest contribution to reducing poverty. Indeed, it would be a more effective means of poverty reduction than increasing welfare payments, which are often absorbed in rent increases or in the type of spending that fails to raise living standards.

Other major social bonuses could be achieved from such a public housing scheme. There could be statutory requirements for quality architecture, incorporation of town planning principles and considering employment opportunities and public transport in the location of NHA housing. Some cities have vacant land within short travelling distance of the CBD, once occupied by factories, which is often suitable for public housing built in a park-like setting.

No discussion of dealing with Australia’s housing pain should omit reference to the inequitable and counterproductive tax concession of negative gearing, which raises the demand for houses and thus leads to increased rents. Moreover, it costs the budget over $5 billion – or 83 per cent of the cost of the Gonski school funding proposals – each year. The Commonwealth’s current annual offer is 25 per cent of the Gonski proposals on condition the states provide an additional 13 per cent.

As Anglicare Australia’s recent Rental Affordability Snapshot report comments, “The availability of affordable… and appropriate housing underpins good health and the social, educational and economic participation of individuals… There was a time in Australia when the right to housing was central to the government’s business. Time has eroded that sense of responsibility… With housing supply down and rental affordability worsening it is surprising there are not reforms in place on the scale of the NDIS or Gonski.” •

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WITH just over half of its 1.4 billion citizens living in cities, China is already home to the world’s largest urban population. A new campaign by premier Li Keqiang aims to create another 400 million urbanites over the next decade. Chinese technocrats hope these new city folk will reignite a slowing Chinese economy, boosting domestic consumption and services while reducing China’s reliance on global trade and investment.

Many of the people the planners have in mind already live in cities like Beijing, but as migrants without formal “urban residency” (or hukou in Chinese parlance) or access to public services and benefits. Urbanisation will be about settling migrants into permanent “communities” (shequ) with proper housing, healthcare, education and other public goods.

Urbanisation will also involve moving farmers and even nomads into newly created satellite cities like Lanzhou New City, which will eventually house over half a million new residents on 800 square kilometres of reclaimed land.

Inevitably, spatial dislocation on this scale will create new social problems and immense new challenges for China’s communist leaders, whose top priority remains staying in power by maintaining social stability and economic growth.

The lynchpin in the party-state’s attempt to remain on top of urbanisation is a poorly understood system of social management called gridisation (wanggehua).

Here party officials are literally mapping urban communities in order to create a high-tech matrix of segmentation, surveillance and social control. Human Rights Watch has already chronicled the development of this system in Tibet, but its reach and ambitions are far more pervasive.

The grid system originated in Beijing with the cityscape’s massive facelift in the lead-up to the 2008 Olympic Games. With the declining importance of enclosed, cell-like “work units” (danwei) and the rapid development of a commercial real estate market, gaps developed in the ability of local party and state officials to serve and regulate an increasingly mobile citizenry.

In the days of Mao, the danwei and party-controlled neighborhood watch committees not only provided basic social services but also ensured close control over individual activities and thoughts.

In massive urban centres like Beijing today, the lowest level of government is the sub-district or “street level” organ, which is responsible for tens of thousands of often faceless and shifting individuals.

The ten communities across the nearly three-square-kilometre Hujialou sub-district, for example, are home to 70,000 permanent residents and countless more non-permanent residents like me.

In 2004, the neighbouring district of Dongcheng began experimenting with a new system of urban management. Using the latest GIS mapping technologies, officials divided the twenty-five-square-kilometre district into 1652 grid-units (each roughly 10,000 square metres in size) and assigned a small team of party-led officials with primary responsibility for each unit.

Grid managers coordinate the work of “community workers” (like resident committees and security, maintenance and cleaning staff) and create a physical and digital link between local residents and government officials and services. They are responsible for gathering information and nipping potential problems in the bud, ensuring that “minor problems are resolved inside the grid, and larger ones are resolved inside the community or sub-district.”

In short, this new system seeks to reconstitute the grassroots surveillance of the Maoist past in a more fluid, market-driven landscape.

The gridisation of Beijing is slated for completion by year’s end, with other urban centres across China implementing similar plans. There is even talk of extending the method to the countryside in the form of a “rural grassroots grid system.”

As the name suggests, networking software and new computer technologies are central to the new system. In some locations, grid staff are already equipped with wireless, mobile devices and specialised networking software for coordinating activities. Physical observations are backed up with high-definition video cameras, adding millions of “digital eyeballs” capable of recording nearly every activity.

There are an estimated twenty to thirty million surveillance cameras across China, and security officials are attempting (with the help of Cisco Systems and other technology companies) to link these cameras and other monitoring tools into a centralised, interoperative and fully automated system of grid surveillance. With internet and phone usage already closely monitored, there is now little room to hide in China.

The grid system is still developing and manifests itself in radically different ways depending on the location and the type of community under management.

Approaching the two extremes are my own, expat community of Central Park in Beijing and the largely Uyghur migrant community of Saimachang in Ürümqi, Xinjiang.

CENTRAL Park is not your typical Beijing housing complex. Unlike the standard “gated communities,” anyone can wander in or drive through this sprawling compound of twenty-four high-rise towers and 19,000-odd apartments spread over ten hectares of prime Beijing real estate.

The complex’s grid management has been outsourced to Savills, one of the world’s leading property management companies, with residents paying a premium for privacy, security and “an exquisite lifestyle.”

Self-disciplining, middle-class consumers like myself pay Savills staff to keep any “problems” at bay, with a rotating team of six employees looking after our tower and its needs around the clock.

The party-state also controls foreigners through a computerised database of “alien registration.” Under Chinese law, I’m required to lodge my passport with the Hujialou police station each and every time I return to Central Park after a trip abroad, with a 500 renminbi (A$88) fine for failing to do so within twenty-four hours of arrival.

At every turn, people and machines guard my safety and maintain party control. A platoon of private security guards monitors entry-points and conducts regular patrols; tower staff oversee access in person and through computerised card entry.

As an extra layer of protection, nearly a thousand security cameras operate across Central Park. I counted twenty-five devices on my daily stroll across the compound: one right outside my flat door, another in the lift, three more in the tower lobby, and a whopping twenty on my way for coffee, with a further three keeping watch over my espresso.

In the far-western region of Xinjiang, meanwhile, the urban population is slated to increase by more than 15 per cent this decade. Like in China’s vast Tibetan regions, party officials in this restive minority region have been quick to embrace grid management, especially in the wake of the brutal Han–Uyghur race riot that left nearly 200 (mainly Han) residents dead in July 2009.

The region’s capital of Ürümqi is already home to more than 700,000 temporary migrants, many of them housed in ten-square-metre rooms in the sprawling Saimachang slum in the city’s south.

A 2011 survey found that 85 per cent of the nearly 5000 residents in East Saimachang are Uyghur migrants, with over one third from a single rural county near Kashgar.

As a part of Ürümqi’s grid-management system, this once shadowy and chaotic shantytown, which officials insist was one of the key sources of Uyghur violence against Han citizens in 2009, has now been fully mapped, reordered and garrisoned through a scheme known as “sealed-off, small community management.”

Saimachang’s numerous alleyways have been rejigged so that all traffic now flows through a single gated entrance that is patrolled 24/7. Grid officials carry out spot inspections to ensure that all residents are registered, and “hotel-style” check-in and -out procedures monitor movement through a smart-card system and numerous surveillance cameras.

Ürümqi recently installed more than 40,000 riot-proof, high-definition cameras across the city, and security officials now boast of “seamless” surveillance in sensitive areas like Saimachang.

Saimachang and Central Park are worlds apart. Yet, China’s new grid-management system seeks to apply the same optic of individualised, party-state control and surveillance.

With its ambitious scope and scale, this high-tech system of social control will ensure that the party-state continues to spend more money monitoring “enemies” within the grid rather than those over the border. •

James Leibold is a Senior Lecturer at La Trobe University in Melbourne, and currently on research leave in Beijing.

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AT A BUSY intersection on Melbourne’s Nepean Highway, looking out over eight lanes of traffic, stands the imposing bronze figure of Sir Thomas Bent. Amid the noise of cars and trucks, few pedestrians stop to read the text on his plinth, which gives the outline of a long political career – as speaker of the Legislative Assembly 1892–94, premier of Victoria 1904–09, parliamentary representative for Brighton for thirty-two years, and a councillor of Brighton and Moorabbin for forty-five years.

But it is Tommy Bent’s surname that gives the best clue to his character, if not his impact on the city. In the early 1880s, his public and private roles – as commissioner for railways and as a property speculator – neatly overlapped. He not only promised to build railways to MPs’ electorates in exchange for political support, he also pushed through suburban lines that directly boosted the value of his own subdivisions.

As historian Michael Cannon writes, “Hardly a member of parliament whose vote could be bought went without his bribe in the form of a new railway, a spur line, or advance information on governmental plans to enable him to buy choice land in advance – the value of which was enormously enhanced when the line went through.” It was the decade of the land boomers.

Given such naked self-interest, it is remarkable how many of Melbourne’s early railways turned out to be good long-term investments. Despite waste and corruption, much of the network proved useful, giving the city a radial suburban railway that brings “quite remote suburbs close to the city,” in the words of historian Robert Lee. The Port Melbourne railway, which opened in 1854, kicked off decades of railway building that profoundly influenced Melbourne’s evolution as a city of suburbs.

Above: Much of Melbourne’s present-day rail network had been built by 1894. The blue and red indicate lines that were losing money at the time.
Photo: victorianrailways.net

While they didn’t experience the same rail-building frenzy, other major Australian cities also invested significantly in rail infrastructure in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a city of the motor age, Canberra is an exception, although it is worth remembering that Walter Burley Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin did design local rail and tram networks that were never built. That vision influences proposals for a light rail network under discussion in the national capital today.

Sydney’s first railway line, from the city to Parramatta, opened in 1855, and rail lines to Newcastle and Wollongong followed. These became the three main lines that crossed the colony – west to the Darling River, north to the Queensland border, and south to the Murray at Albury. Although these routes would become part of the city’s commuter network, Sydney’s first truly suburban railway was the Belmore line, which opened in 1896.

In Adelaide, a steam railway opened between the city and its wharves in 1856. Extensions were added to the jetties at Grange and Semaphore in the 1880s, and in 1873 a separate route was built to Glenelg. Brisbane’s first railway opened in 1875, a link to Moreton Bay was built in the 1880s, and lines north to Caboolture and south to Tweed Heads followed. In Western Australia, the 1881 rail link between Perth and Fremantle was built primarily to transport goods to and from the port; today, it too serves suburban commuters.

The expansion of Melbourne’s network slowed in the early twentieth century. The opening of the Glen Waverley line in 1930 marked the last outward extension of the system for eighty years. Spending on improvements continued, though, with the Victorian government embarking on what was then the largest conversion to electric rail lines anywhere in the world. Although the final cost of the scheme exceeded £6 million – equivalent, as a share of Australia’s annual gross domestic product, to more than $11 billion today – the efficiency gains quickly became apparent.

Sydney’s electrification was even more ambitious. The city’s rail system was far less developed than Melbourne’s and public transport was based primarily on trams. As tram services converged on the city centre in the morning peak, Sydney’s narrow streets struggled to cope. In the absence of a harbour crossing, there were also problems at Circular Quay, where up to seventy-five ferries an hour were docking at or approaching the wharves.

In 1912 engineer J.J.C. Bradfield was appointed to lead a new Sydney Harbour Bridge and City Transit division within the public works department. He spent the next twenty years trying to realise his dream of electrifying Sydney’s railways, building a loop beneath the city, extending suburban rail lines to the eastern suburbs, and linking lines north and south of the harbour via a bridge. With the first world war intervening, the first electric and underground trains didn’t run until the end of 1926. Legislation for the Sydney Harbour Bridge passed in 1922, and the “stupendous steel arch railway bridge – the largest arch railway bridge in the world” finally opened in 1932.

In retrospect, these decades were a high-water mark for urban rail. As car ownership took off in the 1950s, passenger numbers began falling in every city. In 1955 there were almost seven times as many people as passenger vehicles in Australia; by 2001 that figure would fall to two. In some places, railways were shut down altogether.

But investment didn’t dry up completely. In Melbourne, a city loop was carved out beneath the central business district, opening in 1985. In Sydney, the remaining components of Bradfield’s rail vision were built, with the loop to Circular Quay completed in 1956 and an eastern suburbs line opened in 1979. In Brisbane, the city rail network was finally electrified. Generally, though, these were decades of line closures and plans for new services not carried out.

THEN something unexpected happened. In the 1990s, after decades of stagnant or declining patronage, urban rail began to win back customers. The reasons varied from city to city.

In Sydney, annual passenger journeys rose by a solid 11 per cent between 1998–99 and 2010–11, probably influenced by factors such as increasing traffic congestion and petrol prices. The same factors were at work in Melbourne, but there the numbers almost doubled, driven by rapid employment growth in the inner city. In Southeast Queensland, passenger journeys jumped from an annual forty million to sixty-five million in the decade following the building of a railway to the Gold Coast and a branch line to Brisbane airport.

The most spectacular growth was in Perth, where patronage grew more than 500 per cent in two decades, reflecting major investment in new lines. In the 1970s there had been pressure to close down the entire Perth rail network – just forty-eight kilometres of track – because the capacity of rail was “well above” requirements and buses were considered to offer greater flexibility. A well-organised protest campaign and the election of a new government in 1983 brought a change in policy. Over the next decade, the rail link to Fremantle was reopened, the network was electrified, and new lines were built north to Joondalup and south to Mandurah. By 2010–11, total passenger boardings were approaching sixty million a year, up from fewer than ten million in 1991. Within three months of the Mandurah line’s opening in late 2007, two-and-a-half times as many passengers caught trains each day as had used the buses operating on the route previously.

Adelaide is the exception, and contrasts starkly with Perth. In the early 1990s the networks of both cities had fewer than ten million journeys per year. Two decades on, with no significant investment in rail, Adelaide’s passenger numbers are still below ten million.

Faced with increasing – and costly – congestion in most capital cities, Infrastructure Australia argued in 2008 that major new investments in rail were needed to deal with future decades of population growth and the increasing economic, social and environmental costs of road transport. Some of that investment is under way. In 2010, more than half of the investment recommended by Infrastructure Australia ($4.6 billion in total) was for urban rail (both heavy and light). Projects include the regional rail link to separate regional and metropolitan trains in Melbourne, the Adelaide rail revitalisation program and the Gold Coast (light rail) rapid transit system.

Many more projects are in planning or on wishlists. But there’s a problem: rail is very expensive. State and federal governments lack funds and are averse to taking on debt. Does the history of rail provide any guidance as to how it might be funded in the future?

AUSTRALIA’s first rail line, to Port Melbourne, was built and financed by a private company (assisted by generous land grants for stations, workshops and the route itself). The business proved profitable, and the Melbourne and Hobson’s Bay Railway Company soon opened a branch line to St Kilda and then amalgamated with another private railway to develop a network in the city’s south and east.

But this successful private investment proved to be the exception to the rule. The Sydney Railway Company went broke before its line to Parramatta opened in 1855. When the government took it over, New South Wales became home to what one historian describes as “the first government owned railway in the British Empire.” As economic historian N.G. Butlin writes, Australia’s transport problem was firmly back in the lap of government. It has remained there ever since.

Supporters of rail often argue that governments should simply borrow the money to build new lines, as they did in the past. But this argument ignores a big part of the story: the substantial public debt accumulated to build rail assets also had social, economic and political consequences.

Government-backed bonds sold in London funded Victoria’s spectacular burst of rail construction in the nineteenth century, but the income from these investments fell short of expectations.Rail’s operating costs grew from 50 per cent of railway revenue in the 1860s and 1870s to almost 70 per cent of revenue in the following decade, and there was not enough profit to service the growing debt.

In the mid 1880s, annual investment in suburban and rural railways peaked at a remarkable 6 per cent of Australia’s national product. Between 1875 and 1892 the colonies’ combined public debt quadrupled from £54 million to £198 million – from less than 40 per cent of gross domestic product in 1870 to more than 100 per cent of GDP in the 1890s. When British financiers withdrew their capital, the boom went bust. According to Butlin, over-investment in rail played a leading role in the balance-of-payments crisis and the decade-long depression of the 1890s.

Victoria was left with a legacy of debt. As Michael Cannon writes, the growing interest bill on capital costs and accumulated losses “crippled Victorian budgets for decades.” What he called “the incubus of the railway boom of the 1880s” was still weighing heavily on the taxpayer in the 1960s.

Funding for the ambitious expansion and electrification of Sydney’s rail network was more carefully considered. A third of the cost of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, for instance, was to be paid by a “betterment tax” imposed on landowners north and south of the harbour whose holdings were likely to rise in value as a result of the bridge; the other two-thirds was to be repaid from the railways budget, with the Railways Commissioners predicting a profit of £250,000 in the first year of operation. The state government borrowed money in London to fund the expansion of Sydney’s rail system, with repayments to be covered by increased profits from the electrified suburban system.

But the Great Depression cut passenger numbers and trains faced intense competition from road transport as – in historian Robert Lee’s words – “unregulated private buses picked the eyes out of the most lucrative urban transport markets.” By the time the Sydney Harbour Bridge opened in 1932, the debt situation was so bleak that the premier, Jack Lang, considered suspending loan repayments. Six weeks later the state governor dismissed him on the grounds that Lang’s plan for dealing with the financial crisis was illegal. Robert Lee argues that the events of 1932 have inhibited public transport spending in Sydney ever since. Governments have been “so scarified” by Lang’s fate that they have not dared to make the investments necessary to cope with ongoing growth.

Between 1922 and 1932 £30 million had been spent to electrify Sydney’s railways, build the underground city circle and construct the Harbour Bridge. It was a massive investment, equal to about 4 per cent of Australia’s annual gross domestic product and equivalent to around $50 billion today.

Residents of Sydney and Melbourne continue to benefit from the imprudent spending and mistaken assumptions of earlier generations – and the political corruption of people like Tommy Bent. But it is hard to imagine either city without its existing rail network.

If Sydney did not have railways, residents would need to travel those 5.85 billion passenger-kilometres each year by other means. If buses took three-quarters of these passengers, then their load would triple and extra buses would be struggling through increased car traffic. Since rail currently accounts for 44 per cent of journeys to work in the central business district, a large proportion of those extra buses would be trying to cram into the narrow streets north of Town Hall in peak hour, replicating the tram jams of early twentieth-century Sydney.

Of course, imagining the implications of less rail investment is interesting but not scientific or conclusive. If Bradfield’s vision had never been achieved then Sydney would be a different city. Perhaps it would be less centralised, with jobs more evenly distributed across the metropolitan area. Or it may have fewer people and a smaller economy because growth would have been constrained by lower mobility.

“Transportation technologies have always determined urban form,” says urban economist Edward Glaeser. This means that when we consider investments in transport systems in coming years, we need to think about more than the financial costs and benefits. We also need to consider what type of cities we want and how different transport choices will shape them in different ways. We need to determine our priorities too: do we invest in transport in order to lift productivity and efficiency, to redress spatial inequality, or to protect the environment? Can we do all three?

WE CAN’T build our way out of traffic congestion by constructing more urban freeways, which the evidence suggests will tend to encourage more car and truck journeys rather than fewer. To improve urban efficiency, public health, environmental protection and spatial equality, we need far greater use of public transport – especially with our growing urban populations and the rapid rise in freight transport on city roads. The challenge is to take Australian cities back to the future, to an era when the private car was less dominant than it is today.

Part of the solution is to use existing public transport systems more efficiently by organising networks better and upgrading existing services. As transport planner Edward Dotson told a Victorian parliamentary committee in 2009, it should be possible to “progressively raise the maximum practical, reliable capacity” of Melbourne’s existing rail lines to a target frequency of “no less than twenty-four trains an hour” (or one train every 2.5 minutes). Infrastructure NSW points out that today’s CityRail express service from Newcastle to Sydney is slower than the prewar “Newcastle Flyer” steam train, suggesting significant room for improvement. In peak periods Sydney’s trains carry far fewer passengers than many railways overseas – partly because they use two-door, double-decker carriages, which transport between 50 and 150 per cent fewer passengers per hour than three-door single-decker carriages. (Double-decker carriages have more seats but less standing room and are much slower to load and unload at stations.) Such problems are not simple to fix, but they do not generally require billions of dollars.

The question is whether entirely new rail lines are also a necessary part of our urban transport future. To what extent do we need to replicate the massive investments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?

High-capacity automated urban rail systems (like subways) have five times the passenger capacity of a four-lane freeway. While they’re not as advanced as metros in many other countries, Australia’s newest urban rail lines – the Joondalup and Mandurah lines stretching north and south of Perth’s central business district – have more than three times the capacity of the three-lane Mitchell and Kwinana freeways, which run parallel.

As well as offering the potential for high-frequency, high-speed, high-capacity services segregated from road traffic, rail offers reliability, safety and passenger comfort. It has a much smaller carbon footprint than private car travel: a commuter driving alone in peak-hour Melbourne traffic produces roughly three-and-a-half times the carbon dioxide emissions of a train traveller covering the same distance. And people are generally willing to walk longer distances to railway stations than to bus or tram stops, with obvious health benefits, because trains will take them further and faster.

But rail has disadvantages, too. It takes a long time and a lot of money to build, and is difficult to change. Land must be set aside or acquired. It is generally better-suited to travel in and out of a city centre than to travel between neighbouring suburbs, yet in Australia’s dispersed cities only about 20 per cent of jobs are located in central city areas. (While close to half of the work trips to Sydney’s central business district are made by train, rail comprises only 5.3 per cent of all journeys in the Sydney region.)

Nor is rail always an effective option for trips made for social and leisure activities, shopping, or access to education or health services. Most of these trips are local, and buses are generally a better way of expanding transport options within the outer suburbs of Australia’s growing cities.

Infrastructure NSW argues that investment in new heavy rail lines is not justified and that buses are “the most appropriate public transport mode for most of Sydney over the next two decades.” It proposes rationalising bus routes to create “a primary network of fast, frequent and direct services” that have the speed and reliability to compete with car travel. In practice, this means fewer bus stops spaced further apart, as well as greater priority for buses on city roads – in other words, getting buses to operate more like trains.

But different bus users have different needs. A peak-hour commuter wants the bus to take a direct route with as few stops as possible, whereas a retiree may want to access the shopping centre one day, a bowls club the next and a hospital every now and then. (In Melbourne, more than two-thirds of bus users do not have a driver’s licence.) Even if it involves a slower, more circuitous journey, many users need a bus service that stops at as many places as possible.

Even if improved bus services can meet these twin challenges, the experience of the Mandurah line in Perth suggests that urban passenger rail can do something qualitatively different. Not only can good rail services encourage a more rapid shift from car travel to public transport, they can also induce new travel that had not been previously anticipated. If people find it easier to travel to a wider range of jobs then workforce participation can increase and productivity rise as workers’ skills are better matched to jobs.

Increasing numbers of those jobs are likely to be clustered together. If we accept that knowledge-intensive industries will drive employment and productivity in coming decades then bringing employees together in efficient ways is particularly important. Despite the rise of new communication technologies, evidence shows that proximity matters more in the knowledge-intensive sector than in other industries. Edward Glaeser calls this “the central paradox of the modern metropolis – proximity has become ever more valuable as the cost of connecting across long distances has fallen.” Given its capacity and speed, rail is the most effective way to bring people and firms together.

This is one of the major arguments for the proposed Melbourne Metro, a nine-kilometre rail tunnel with five new underground stations running under the inner city. A report by SGS Economics and Planning concludes that the Metro would enable businesses to achieve “higher productivity through economies of scale and scope” and workers to “more rapidly accumulate skills and knowledge.” There would be benefits, too, from “knowledge spillovers,” as individuals and companies learn from one another.

THIS brings us back to how transport choices shape the city in fundamental ways. Melbourne’s city loop is a vivid example: before it opened in 1985, retail and office space was clustered around Flinders Street station to the south of the central business district. The loop helped to spread activity further north and enliven previously dormant parts of the city. This is the upside of rail’s inflexibility – because it is fixed, it provides a more certain carrot to attract developers and finance.

Recognising the desirability of more rail is one thing. Working out how to pay for it is another. The critique of standard cost-benefit analysis is that it fails to capture the wider economic benefits associated with the increased proximity that investments in public transport can bring. If these pluses can be calculated in project appraisals, along with all the health and social gains, then governments could borrow with greater confidence that increased revenue will fund repayments. This is the approach being taken with London’s £14.8 billion Crossrail project. And while the history of rail funding serves as a warning against amassing high levels of government debt, there are positive lessons from those investments too. The “betterment tax” used to partly fund the Sydney Harbour Bridge captured some of the windfall gains flowing to landowners as a result of linking the city and the North Shore. In Melbourne, a special levy was imposed on city rates to help fund the city loop.

If we build more urban rail in the twenty-first century then it is reasonable that funds should be recouped from those who benefit. Property owners are an obvious example, but it might also be worth considering increased fares, particularly since the subsidies for rail disproportionately benefit inner-city workers in well-paid jobs. Smart cards mean pricing can be used to discourage discretionary journeys taken at certain times in certain directions – in peak-hour heading towards the city, for example.

It seems logical that drivers should also pay because they will gain when new rail lines reduce the pressure on roads. But the relationship between transit and traffic is contested. Some evidence suggests that roads are less congested in cities with large, well-established rail systems, and some studies show that new public transport at least reduces the rate of the growth of vehicle traffic. The counter-argument is that latent demand for road space is so great that even if a new rail line encourages some drivers to catch the train, others will quickly take their place behind the wheel. If this is true then the logical response is a pricing system, such as congestion charging, to manage demand. Governments could sell or lease urban freeways to private operators and allow them to introduce time- and direction-based tolls. The capital raised could be devoted to new rail lines.

None of these measures is politically easy. But there is evidence that voters have a big appetite for changes in urban transport. With leadership and a clear linking of costs and benefits, new urban rail lines might yet have a place in our future transport mix.

Perhaps the most obvious lesson of history is that urban rail can continue to benefit a city more than a century after it is built. As J.J.C. Bradfield wrote about the Sydney Harbour Bridge, “Future generations will judge our generation by our works.” •

Peter Mares is the Cities Fellow at the Grattan Institute and an adjunct research fellow at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research. A longer, fully referenced version of this article is available on the Grattan Institute website.

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WHAT sort of city is Canberra? This is the question at the heart of current debates about urban growth, sustainability and planning in Australia’s capital. It was also the focus of a major conference held twenty-five years ago.

On 29 October 1987, under the auspices of the Australian National University’s Urban Research Unit – recognised in its time as the foremost urban research body in Australia and one of the leading such centres in the world – over one hundred local politicians, academics, administrators and community representatives gathered at the “Canberra, What Sort of City?” conference to consider the challenges of Canberra’s growth and planning.

Conference speakers and attendees came largely from the ranks of the public sector, politics, universities, journalism and the community sector. The private sector was, quite deliberately, not in evidence, as the organisers believed that an “articulate, highly visible and well-endowed private sector” was already sufficiently influential and having no trouble being heard. The forum was designed for the “scattered and under-resourced” interests that had no direct financial interest in Canberra’s planning and development.

If the issue of private sector versus community sector seems to resonate in today’s planning debates, it is not the only issue from 1987 that may sound familiar. The themes that emerged at the conference included concerns about a much larger Canberra population; the need for more employment in the town centres; the importance of transport links; the need for governments and planning bodies to give greater weight to residents’ views and social impacts; the view that Canberra should not copy the errors of other cities but should play to its strengths; and opportunities for increased regional development in areas such as Goulburn.

In his opening address to the conference, John Langmore MP, federal member for the Canberra electorate of Fraser at the time (and now a professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne), also raised a familiar theme when he argued that Canberra was suffering “an administrative and policy crisis” around planning and land administration. Langmore believed that only ACT self-government would provide “countervailing forces” to deal with the problem of unbalanced access to policy-makers, particularly by property developers. (In 1987 the ACT was still administered by the federal government.) Langmore was critical of the “unplanned explosion” of office-building in Civic (Canberra’s CBD) and reaffirmed the value of the leasehold system in encouraging orderly and well-planned development.

Providing one of the conference’s key presentations was Jack Waterford, then assistant editor of the Canberra Times. According to Waterford, when it came to land administration in the ACT, “the due process of fair and efficient administration appears to have gone out the window.” He criticised lease variation clauses (part of “a bastardised leasehold system”) and also the National Capital Development Commission’s support for development in parts of inner Canberra – one result, he claimed, of the NCDC’s having been “browbeaten and bamboozled by the development lobby.”

Waterford also believed that the ACT administration had made a “mess” of Civic, Braddon and Kingston and had failed to give due weight to residents’ interests. The “hideous monstrosities that line Barry Drive and Torrens Street” were, he suggested, “surely the ugliest set of buildings ever constructed in Australia.” Waterford was concerned about the social aspects of planning and was critical of what he saw as the NCDC’s failure to consider the social impact of some of its decisions: the NCDC had become “a pushover for property interests.” He suggested that the seat of the ACT’s new government might more appropriately be situated in Tuggeranong (one of Canberra’s satellite town centres) instead of Civic, given that Civic was, in his view, “quickly being huckstered out to anyone who says he might spend a bob.”

The late Professor Peter Self, who arrived at the ANU in 1982 following his UK career as a journalist, planning policy-maker, government adviser and academic, presented his analysis of Canberra’s problems and a prescription for the future. In his view, Canberra’s basic problem was that “it will grow too fast and become too big to sustain those qualities which still make it an attractive city to most of its residents and a place well worth visiting. The prospects before Canberra require planning to sustain and enhance its genuine qualities, not gimmicks to produce developments which could more rationally and equitably be located elsewhere.”

Self believed that there was value in looking towards greater regional development in areas such as Goulburn. He disagreed with those who claimed that Canberra needed economic diversification, arguing instead that Canberra, like Ottawa and Washington, should play to its strengths as a “government city” and maximise its role as a cultural centre with the added benefits of proximity to mountains, wilderness and national parks.

At a time when the city’s population was about 250,000, he did not consider that “indefinite growth” was in the best interests of Canberra residents or workers and believed that “Australia would be a better place with more cities the present size of Canberra, from one to four hundred thousand.” He also questioned the attempt to make Canberra more “metropolitan” by extensive development in the city centre and the redevelopment of inner Canberra to higher densities. Canberra’s basic problem, he believed, was that it might be unable to sustain its qualities as a “garden city” and as a national focus for visitors.

No doubt influenced by the population decline in central Canberra between 1967 and 1985, Self did not expect that there would ever be “a larger population living close to Civic who will bolster up the demands for retailing and services in Civic.” In fact, he told the 1987 conference, “There are not any precedents for population growth in the inner areas of modern Western cities.”

Jill Lang, associate commissioner of the NCDC, told the conference that calls to “normalise” the growth of Canberra in line with other Australian cities were shortsighted and failed to recognise Canberra’s unique role as the national capital. She also argued for equity and diversity in residential areas, acknowledged the special needs of older people and the increased need for public transport, and proposed that the ACT should have a social justice strategy. Lang believed that new development in Tuggeranong and Gungahlin, together with “redevelopment and consolidation within the existing urban area” would mean that the Y-Plan (based on the towns of Belconnen, Woden/Weston Creek, Tuggeranong and Gungahlin, separated from central Canberra and each other by landscape corridors) would sustain a population of up to half a million.

John Tomlinson of the ACT Council of Social Services shared Waterford’s concerns about the seeming disregard for the social aspects of planning and the detachment of planning from community requirements. He argued for a national Welfare Research Council charged with the development of a national social audit. According to Tomlinson, “Until we have a reliable, cheap planning appeal structure, accessible to all citizens which allows them to oppose whatever plans social planners and developers have for their neck of the woods, then we cannot by definition, have an equitable social planning process. We cannot be sure we are creating a city which ensures that the interest of all citizens is protected.”

“Each individual development project,” Tomlinson suggested, “would require a social impact statement, proper consultation with the people affected and an improved, cheap appeals system before approval for any development would be allowed to go ahead.” In one of the best lines of the conference, he observed that, “while people overseas are prepared to throw themselves in front of tanks in the struggle for freedom, justice and a better life, in Australia it is virtually impossible to get people to throw themselves in front of a typewriter to do an article on social justice.”

Two senior members of the ACT administration also offered their views. Robert Cheshire, director of economic policy, presented an optimistic view of the prospects for the continued diversification of the ACT economy. John Gilchrist, senior officer with the Department of Administrative Services, presented a personal view about planning and questioned whether there was, in fact, any planning at all in Canberra.

In the years since self-government began in 1989, a number of critics have echoed Gilchrist’s concerns, including urban policy expert Patrick Troy, who was with the Urban Research Unit but not in Canberra at the time of the 1987 conference. Troy has recently drawn attention to the importance of a skilled, professional, appropriately resourced planning body. Writing in the Canberra Times earlier this year, Troy argued that the ACT desperately needs “a competent planning authority that bases its policies on sound research into the needs of its citizens rather than the short-term aspirations of developers.”

Another critic of planning in the ACT, ex-NCDC commissioner Tony Powell, has noted that in the years since self-government Canberra has suffered in numerous ways from “parochialism on the part of Territory governments and irresponsibility on the part of Federal governments.” Contrary to Langmore’s firm belief in the value of self-government for the ACT, Powell sees no evidence that the ACT government has, or will acquire, the sort of cohesive and skilled organisation necessary to ensure high-quality design. Powell observes that in the first twenty years of self-government there has been “no imagination, no flair and no innovation that any Territory government can legitimately lay claim to, nor is there any demonstrated awareness of what constitutes a desirable and achievable level of municipal excellence.” In a scathing indictment of Canberra’s major commercial centres, Powell observes, “No country town of any importance would settle for the drabness and untidiness of Civic, Woden, Tuggeranong and Belconnen town centres.”

WHAT the conference attendees could not have anticipated in 1987, of course, was that the ACT’s reliance on land sales as a major source of budget revenue would turn out to be – again in the words of Tony Powell – a “total disaster.” Nor could they have foreseen that the division of planning powers between the national and ACT governments was going to be “a thoroughly botched job,” in the words of James Weirick, Griffin scholar and Professor of Urban Development and Design at the University of New South Wales.

In Powell’s analysis, Langmore’s dream of ACT self-government turned into more of a nightmare. In Powell’s view, self-government has not matched the original expectations of either the Commonwealth or the inhabitants of the Territory. Powell argues that Canberra residents have reaped few if any benefits from self-government while witnessing the decline of the city’s national capital role and the progressive destruction of its garden city townscape. Many would agree with Powell’s assertion that a major problem, which perhaps Langmore did not foresee but which is clear in hindsight, is that the self-government legislation allowed the Commonwealth to avoid accepting a reasonable share of the Territory’s fiscal responsibility. With the terms of self-government resulting in the ACT government being heavily reliant on land sales as its source of income, there is an undue emphasis on satisfying the requirements of the property industry.

In many ways, 1987 seems a long time ago: the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare was first established, John Farnham’s Whispering Jack was at the top of the album chart, Pat Cash won the Wimbledon men’s singles final, Australia’s first mobile phone call was made, petrol was 54.3 cents a litre, and nobody talked about an “obesity epidemic.” It is no wonder, then, that issues that seem to underpin today’s dominant Australian planning ideologies received little mention in 1987. Other than Jill Lang’s prediction that Canberra would need to become a “more consolidated city” for reasons of environmental protection and “a more rational use of scarce resources,” the presentations contained little to suggest that the emerging realities of environmental sustainability had begun to influence urban planning. Public transport was usually mentioned as a way to avoid the traffic congestion that plagued larger cities.

As for the concerns in 1987 about the power of property interests, some would claim that little has changed. Writing in 1998, Canberra journalist Crispin Hull observed that developers continue to propose plans that put their financial interests at odds with the interests of the local community and that, “after numerous inquiries into ACT land and planning and numerous recommendations, governments do not seem to learn.” Hull put the case that residents “should be able to expect governments to look after their interests in a balanced way and should not have to be eternally on the watch.” Three years later, he described the system as still stacked in favour of developers and against residents, and as an “unholy alliance” between the Property Council and “brown-nosing” ACT politicians.

The late Professor Max Neutze, head of the Urban Research Unit, provided the closing remarks at the 1987 conference. He noted that the conference was “part of the political process in which many people will be attempting to change planning and development policies.” That political process has continued more or less unabated, but with increasing frustration on the part of those “scattered and under-resourced” groups. There is a popular view, supported by many in the planning profession, that the ACT planning system has become increasingly dysfunctional and is delivering outcomes that tend to discount or incorrectly interpret the importance of communities and community well-being.

We seem to have come full circle from the territory’s very different circumstances of twenty-five years ago, to have again reached a pivotal point where planning and development policies are under intense scrutiny. There are, of course, some new issues – we are learning more, for example, about the complex inter-relationships between residential density, health, sustainability and social capital, and there are new tools to help governments harness citizens’ knowledge, values and aspirations to help solve complex problems. But many of the concerns that were an important focus in 1987 have emerged in different forms or have re-emerged because they have never been satisfactorily addressed.

The question of what sort of city Canberra should, and will, become has never really disappeared; it seems, rather, to be regenerating with even greater vigour as the choices become more significant and imperfect processes continue to deliver disappointing results. In the years since the 1987 conference, individuals and groups have tried to influence the planning process, but to little avail. “What sort of city” issues were effectively shut out of the recent ACT election campaign, despite widespread community concerns and calls by residents’ groups and high-profile planning experts (such as Powell, Weirick and Dr Jenny Stewart) for a major review of the planning system. Proposals by the ACT Greens, who hold the balance of power in the new ACT Legislative Assembly, include community engagement initiatives but fall short of serious systemic reforms. Meanwhile, as the seventeen newly elected members of the ACT Legislative Assembly take their seats, and as they and 357,220 other Canberrans prepare to mark the centenary of the nation’s capital in 2013, the Australian Heritage Council is deciding whether to recognise, by National Heritage listing, the importance of the city as an example of twentieth-century town planning.

The next generation of planners, community leaders, politicians, academics and decision-makers in the ACT might ponder Jack Waterford’s question – and answer – to those gathered at the ANU on 29 October 1987. “Who would have thought,” he asked, “that the next generation of Australian citizens would find Canberra a worse-off place, as a result of the actions of this generation, than when this generation found it? That, I fear, may prove to be the case.”

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THE shelves of our local video shop have been cleared again. You can buy How Green Was My Valley with Chinese subtitles but not much else. People in the know make their way out the back, past the toilets, to a storeroom behind an unmarked door, where Chinese and Russians jostle with Americans for elbow room and the chance to buy a full season of Homeland for seven or eight dollars. (Homeland is getting mixed reviews from Chinese viewers: “Can’t compete with 24” is a common response.)

The last time the shelves were cleared was a month or so ago, shortly before the National Day holiday. The video shop is just around the corner from the local police station: the police must come around with a warning at critical junctures. The logic of having all these pirated goods in full view 90 per cent of the time and then mysteriously absent for the other 10 per cent is that Beijing should set a good example when there are visitors in town, especially visitors from the provinces. The biggest drought in pirated videos was in 2008, around the time of the Olympics. Of course, there are pirated videos available in the provinces, too; it’s about face, not practice.

Not coincidentally, the internet has become almost impossibly slow. Google can be opened, but not the individual links, and Google books can be searched but not always previewed. People in government offices and institutions aren’t answering email enquiries, or if they do answer it’s to say that the enquiry should be directed elsewhere. Work meetings are being held without reaching decisions; international conferences are being cancelled or postponed. Since life is otherwise normal in many respects, it has taken a while for people to realise that an unusual number of things aren’t being done at the moment.

This has not gone unremarked. As the capital formally entered the advent period for the congress, Beijing’s evening paper published an article scolding Beijingers for their current attitude of “just wait and see, hold on a bit” – an attitude that isn’t helpful, stated the article, to the “scientific development of the capital’s economy” at this moment in the nation’s history. The barely articulated assumption was that nothing untoward was happening. The eighteenth party congress was business as usual: a routine meeting for the routinised transfer of leadership to the next generation of party leaders. The current massive upgrade in security, we might conclude, is just another part of that routine.

The city took a while to show the imprint of the coming event. Even in normal times, this is a place that carries its ideology on its sleeve. Red banners all over the city call on residents to foster the spirit of Beijing (patriotism, creativity, tolerance, virtue), reject heterodoxies (in other words, unauthorised religious affiliations), study Lei Feng (the St Aloysius of the Chinese Communist canon), and be civilised (which means queuing up). Street bulletin boards carry propaganda posters alongside the daily newspapers. In advance of special occasions – National Day, for instance – it is normal to see a rash of fresh banners and floral installations around the city. But before this week, it was possible to walk many blocks without seeing any reference to the congress at all.

Now the banners are proliferating. “Welcome the delegates to the eighteenth congress of the Chinese Communist Party” hangs back to back with “Resolutely develop socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Outside the Ministry of Justice a large floral installation features “Welcome the great eighteenth” against a backdrop showing the city’s iconic modern buildings: the Bird’s Nest, the Water Cube, the splayed legs of the CCTV tower. These are all products of the last decade, and indelibly associated with the regime of party secretary Hu Jintao and premier Wen Jiabao, which is drawing to a close. The shapes on the installation are vaguely suggestive of how the buildings look when they’re glimpsed through the haze of pollution that regularly clouds the city.

With this “great eighteenth” in mind, Wang Xiangwei, editor-in-chief of Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post, turned his attention recently to the problems of the Chinese capital: crowding, traffic, real estate costs, pollution and associated health problems, and an uncertain water supply, to name a few. He had a solution inspired by South Korea’s diversion of much government business away from Seoul: move the capital. For many, the obvious alternative site would be an earlier capital, Nanjing, situated far to the south on the Yangtze River. But Wang’s idea is that the capital should be moved to a site in Hebei province, the province in which Beijing municipality sits, as the Australian Capital Territory sits within New South Wales. He didn’t mention a specific location, but suggests somewhere between 100 and 150 kilometres away from Beijing and easily reached by very fast train. Baoding, around 150 kilometres to the southwest and for some decades the provincial capital, fits the bill.

This good idea is unlikely to advance beyond the pages of the South China Morning Post. The opportunity to bypass the problems of rampant urban growth in Beijing was surrendered in the 1950s, when a sensible proposal to leave the old city intact and build an administrative city to its west – like India’s New Delhi – was rejected. “Beijing’s fate was sealed,” the art historian Wu Hung has written, “by locating the government in the old city.” From this decision flowed the problems of traffic management and conservation that continue to characterise debates about urban planning for the ever-expanding capital.

The city is currently expecting one of the cyclical inflows of visitors that test its best-laid plans for organised flows of traffic. Shiny new crowd control barriers have been installed in the subway stations, replacing the bits of string that used to serve as guidelines to the security stations. The sleepy-looking girls and boys who slouch by the surveillance machines are being joined by smartly uniformed militia. Around 1.4 million volunteers have been recruited to keep everyone in order. Ninety thousand street cleaners have been mobilised. The municipal security forces have taken a collective oath to “wage the battle in unison, carry out the mission with honour, fight with determination and win with resolve!” In short, as the press here reports, “The Great Eighteenth is at hand! The bugle has sounded!” Homeland just can’t compare. •

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IT HAPPENS abruptly, the change in the landscape, flying from the coast towards the centre. The swimming pools and the rooftops of suburbia give way to chequerboards of crops and grazing land. There are no signs of civilisation except for the occasional farm or hamlet with its gouged-out dam, and the slashes of orange dirt highways. This scenery fades out quickly, to be replaced by shattered banks of cloud hanging low over red, calloused earth. To some eyes, the landscape registers as barren and void: terra nullius.

This is where the real world ends, as most Australians know it, and the outback – as in “out the back of nowhere” – begins. Settlers originally feared this part of the continent as a hostile heartland that swallowed up explorers in search of an inland sea. Although the outback provides Australians with so much of their identity, most will never venture here, except for a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to Uluru. One of the unconscious fears that gnaw at the white Australian psyche is how precarious our grip is on this continent. We’re a coastal, rather than a desert, people: we cling to its edges in capital cities that poet A.D. Hope once described as “five teeming sores.” Underlying this fear is the notion of the emptiness, the deadness of the centre.

Alice Springs, or Mparntwe, as the place is known by its traditional owners, the Arrernte people, is at the continent’s centre. As you fly towards Alice, the reptilian spine of the MacDonnell Ranges rises out of the plains. According to the Arrernte, the ranges were created by ancestral beings – Yeperenye, Ntyarlke and Utnerrengatye – caterpillars who originated in the east at a break in the ranges called Anthwerrke, or Emily Gap. These caterpillars travelled west, calling and shaping the physical landscape into being. The ranges form the present town’s ramparts, shielding its southwest side like the remains of a European city’s Roman walls. They are broken by a further, larger granite cleft – Heavitree Gap, or “the Gap.”

Alice Springs is spread out on the other side of the ranges like a baseball diamond, its bottom tip cradled in the Gap. Stuart Highway cuts through town from near the airport, and goes straight on to Tennant Creek and Darwin. If you turn right just inside the Gap, the road heads past a brace of liquor outlets, cheap motels and backpacker hostels and up to Todd Mall, the main drag in the town’s centre. The Mall, a brick-surfaced strip of road, boasts cafes offering al fresco dining and galleries selling Aboriginal artefacts on either side. Tourists, identifiable by their strong walking shoes and hats with flyveils, toil up and down in the heat. Knots of Aboriginal people drift past like shoals of disconsolate fish. They sometimes have limbs misshapen and faces disfigured by violent acts, signs of a hard life. Some humbug tourists and passers-by, unfurling scrolls of canvas with, “You want caterpillar dreaming? Thirty dollars. Bush tomato dreaming – twenty dollars.”

The Todd River, or Lhere Mparntwe, is parallel to the Mall, forming the eastern side of the town’s diamond. Most of the year, the Todd is a dry, sandy highway running through the heart of Alice Springs. Occasionally storms engorge its banks, sometimes overflowing its causeways. When the rains stop, the water seeps away, leaving small shimmering pools, until eventually these disappear. The pinkish mud on the riverbed dries as though it still feels the thrust of water turbulence. Some gums growing in the river strain forwards, as if under the force of a deluge. But the Todd’s main cargo is human. A visiting Irish comedian once described it as “perhaps the only river filled with people rather than water.” People from communities often end up camping in the river because cheap accommodation is scarce.

A causeway near the Todd Tavern at the far end of the Mall connects the town to the Eastside, a fashionable suburban enclave with wide, native-gum-lined streets and large, old Territorian-style houses on suburban-size blocks of land. Sometimes wryly referred to as “the ghetto,” this part of town is home to Alice’s chattering classes, a large expatriate population who’ve come from cities “down south” to work in the local Aboriginal service-delivery industry. Causeways further along the river link to a lush suburban pocket known as the Golf Course Estate, mainly inhabited by the Americans who work in secrecy at Pine Gap, a US military base just out of town, built during the Cold War as part of Australia’s “all the way with LBJ” approach to foreign policy.

About a kilometre north on the Todd is the Bush Telegraph Station, sometimes claimed as the “real reason” for the establishment of Alice Springs. Built in 1872, it was part of the push to run an overland telegraph line from Adelaide to Darwin, then to connect Australia to Asia and the rest of the world. The site was chosen for its proximity to a soak, or waterhole, that Charles Todd, the local postmaster and builder of the telegraph line, named after his wife, Alice. The town was first named “Stuart” in 1888, after the first European explorer to chart the interior. Once the settlement had developed greater critical mass in 1933, its name changed to the softer, more congenial “Alice Springs.” The words roll into “Allypring” in Aboriginal English. Tour operators, national weather announcers and others from out of town often refer to the place as “The Alice.” But many locals simply call it “Alice.”

No place to hide

It was quite true; this town had everything a reasonable girl could want – a hairdressing saloon, a good dress shop or two, two picture houses... She turned into the milk bar at about nine o’clock and bought herself an ice cream soda. If this was the outback, she thought, there were a great many worse places.

— A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute, 1950

I CAME to Alice Springs in late 2003 in search of a “desert change.” I had been working as a public servant in Indigenous affairs since 1998, including for the former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission and the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. As a government bureaucrat, I often used Alice Springs as an entry point for canvassing information from remote communities and organisations delivering services to Aboriginal people in central Australia. Over the years I became more interested in the issues facing this region – enough to consider living there.

In mid 2003, I drove up from Adelaide to Alice Springs with some colleagues to investigate the outcomes of a coronial inquiry into the deaths of three petrol sniffers on the Anaŋu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands in central Australia. We travelled long distances to remote hamlets where we sat in the dirt and talked to Aboriginal people, and slept on swags near the side of the road, fearful of being stampeded by feral camels in the middle of the night.

After this trip, an Aboriginal co-worker suggested that I apply for a job in Alice Springs: the place was always in need of good professionals, she told me. I obtained a position in a government organisation in Alice Springs relatively quickly, and left Sydney almost on a whim. I felt as if I had jumped ship, although it wasn’t so unusual for me to move: something of a wanderer, I had lived in Manchester, Melbourne and Canberra for significant periods.

To some degree, I was seduced by the Centralian landscape and its unexpected contrasts: green and rolling in some parts; burnt orange with the spare, blackened remnants of vegetation in others. I was also tired of the insularity and status anxiety associated with living in Sydney, the city that most embodies Australia’s preoccupations with consumerism and the coast. The grittiness of everyday life in Alice Springs, the thought of being brought face to face with some of the nation’s core issues, appealed to me. I had an idea, too, that I would write about life in the Centre, to try to communicate what it was like, living between two populations.

After six months of living in Alice Springs, my employer folded and I was offered an all-expenses-paid relocation back to Sydney. But I was in no hurry to leave. I had set up a life: a new circle of friends, a yoga class, a reading group, a cycling club, a hairdresser, and so forth. Like Jean Paget in A Town Like Alice, I sensed the possibility of the place. Real estate was affordable by Sydney standards, work was readily available for middle-class professionals, and there were lively cultural and sporting communities to join, all combined with the exceptional landscape and the sheer curiosity value of the place. True, local cinema offerings were somewhat B-grade, but otherwise most things were easier and more proximate than in a major capital city. The internet also made much possible.

When I told friends and family that I experienced a better quality of life in Alice Springs than in Sydney, they looked at me blankly: wasn’t it the stabbing capital of the world? It was hard to explain the split between the “good life” at hand for expatriate professionals and the backdrop of the local Aboriginal population’s poverty and hardship – a split that is fundamental to the nation’s reality.

This divide was no more apparent to me than in my experiences with housing in Alice Springs. For the first six months, I lived in a government-owned unit in a pocket of suburbia informally known as “Larapinta” because of its location on the western road of the same name. It was seven kilometres from the centre of town, with a front-row view of Mount Gillen, a foreboding promontory in the West MacDonnell Ranges. Before leaving Sydney I consulted an online directory, which indicated that my new home would be on the very last street in the town’s furthest-flung satellite. A colleague who’d been brought up in Alice told me that my new suburb was “where the single mums lived” and full of snakes.

I looked out from my unit in Larapinta directly onto a rocky, tussocky hill and the end of my street abutted Crown land. It was untrammelled, scrubby bush crisscrossed by a tangle of tracks made by bikers of various sorts, unable to be bought as freehold unless sold off by the government or native title holders. I often went for an early evening jog along the fenceline of other people’s backyards, up a ridge to a trig point with a 360-degree view of the town and the surrounding ranges. I thought of the area as the “wild west.”

My unit was in a section where mainly white, middle-class types lived. On the other side of the crossroad that ran from the highway up to my street was a bay of housing commission accommodation, largely inhabited by Aboriginal families. Things were definitely livelier and noisier across the road: kids rode their bikes until late, adults drank on porches and there were often sounds of fighting at night (admittedly, I heard the same while living in inner-city Melbourne).

When I later went house-hunting in Alice Springs, a financial adviser told me that although some land agreement deals had been done with local native title holders, it was unlikely that property would ever depreciate in value. Aboriginal people would get first dibs on the new land parcels, and once they moved in, no one else would want to buy land there, because all their relatives would come to visit. There were some Aboriginal people who were “like us” and wanted to live quietly among the rest of the population, but they had broken off ties with their relatives to do so. As for the suburb where I was living at the time – well, it was very beautiful, but it was never going to increase in value because of all the Aborigines there.

I often heard gripes from white and even black townies about Alice being too expensive: that “those Arrernte” should “free up some land and give us somewhere to live.” Within a couple of years, land use agreements were made, the town steadily spread, and local real estate encroached further into the Crown land out west. A more upmarket suburb was built beyond Larapinta, capitalising on the view of the ranges.

I ultimately bought a townhouse near the Gap on the south side of Alice Springs, five minutes’ drive from the town centre. The area was described to me by one real estate agent as the “Redfern” of Alice: “Young people like to move into these places and do them up, don’t they?” she said. I later discovered that my townhouse had been part of a housing commission zone ten years earlier. Ironically, its Aboriginal population was relocated out of sight to Larapinta when the Gap became a more sought-after residential area for those working at the nearby hospital and hotels.

ONCE I had moved in, I often sat on my balcony overlooking the Todd River of an evening, enjoying a drink and my view of the West MacDonnell Ranges. From my vantage point in the security of the gated complex, I watched community people drifting up and down the river, probably looking for somewhere to sleep. Sometimes shouts and cries from the riverbed woke me during the night.

Despite being so close to the local Aboriginal population, and working for organisations dedicated to them, I knew little about their daily realities. I often felt the presence of an “us” and “them” divide between the black and white populations, beyond frontier tensions; of a new layer of paternalism where Aboriginal people were positioned as the recipients of white aid. Genuine friendships between Aboriginal people and those working on Indigenous issues, including me, seemed few and far between: it was novel if an Aboriginal person, even your malpa, or co-worker, visited your house or met your children, at least among my contemporaries.

As an expatriate living in Alice, I knew I was inescapably part of an ongoing missionary impulse, of a secular order of nuns: it’s mainly women who come to “do good” in central Australia. I was aware my intentions were mixed. But I wanted to shuck off the policy framework in which I had been thinking and working, to write in a way that reflected the realities of living in the nation’s centre and to communicate experiences that had become familiar to me which I realised were unknown or not well understood outside central Australia.

Alice Springs is a place of extremes – of climate, of distance, of attitudes, of social privilege, of racial and gender divides – that are often highly conflicted. As a friend who lived there for several years commented, “There is a sense in Alice that you cannot hide from yourself. I think this is because you cannot fail to be part of the climate, the remoteness, the racial history, the connection with the country and the beauty of the ranges. The town by definition is an isolation, yet this is the very reason why there exists such a strong community. To live in it, in some ways, is to render yourself very much exposed.”

One of the features of central Australia is the bright, almost harsh light that is present all year round, except on the most overcast midwinter day. In writing my book, I wanted to move beyond the polarities of political debate and media perceptions and to throw light on the texture of the town’s everyday existence by describing a typical year in its life. •

The post A sense of possibility in Alice Springs appeared first on Inside Story.

FOR a while there, the new technologies seemed to be promising us that we could, if we chose, live full and thoroughly modern lives as much from a hamlet as a high-rise. We could move to the country and breathe clean air and drink clean water from a nearby aquifer and all the while have the city – its vibrancy and diversity and the opportunities it creates – piped in. Except that it isn’t quite working out that way. In Triumph of the City, the Harvard economist Edward Glaeser points to the ways in which “proximity has become ever more valuable as the cost of connecting across distances has fallen.” Hell may be other people, but we want to be near them all the same. In one of the many anomalies that characterise contemporary life, we are squashing up against one another at the very point in history when we could, without sacrificing too much of the way we live now, head for the hills.

By 2009, half of the world’s population was living in cities, and that proportion will only continue to rise. Urbanisation is on the march, and by and large we are feeling better about this fact than we used to. Coinages like “sea-change” and “tree-change,” with their implied characterisation of cities as places to get out of, are already acquiring an antique patina, and hardly a day goes past without news of a symposium or webinar on the future of our ever-expanding cities, and how to get the most out of them. Meanwhile, in countries where the vast majority of people do not have the luxury of lifestyle choices, the pull of the city is even stronger. “Rio’s slums,” says Glaeser with characteristic bluntness, “are densely packed because life in a favela beats stultifying rural poverty”; not only that, but life in a favela, unlike rural isolation, does provide at least the possibility of “pathways out of destitution.”

Perhaps, for a lucky few, it does. It may even be, as Glaeser contends, that cities that “fail to attract the least fortunate” are not performing their role effectively; in other words, are not vital and creative enough to serve as a magnet for the poor. But what, then, is the role of the slums in which so many of the new urban immigrants find themselves stuck? Are they embryonic versions of the cities to which they cling, incubators – as it has become fashionable to think – of entrepreneurialism and self-help, or are they essentially one step away from holding pens, where populations are “warehoused,” to use Mike Davis’s uncompromising term from his Planet of Slums (2005), after being moved on by bulldozers when the space is needed for other things? (Typing “favela + eviction + Olympics,” for example, into Google will return plenty of recent results.)

Slums are the stumbling block in the otherwise convincing argument that cities are good for us. Cities generate ideas and actions, the argument goes. They are at once reassuringly familiar and endlessly novel and they engender in their citizens great love and loyalty – even though the basis of that loyalty may remain a bit of a mystery to the visitor, who just happens to be passing through and who finds nothing special to write home about. And, what is more, the population density of cities makes them much better for the environment. It is this last point, even though it is now widely made and hardly qualifies as radical, that still strikes us as being deeply counterintuitive. In a culture that has come to see human intervention as inherently damaging, or at the very least entailing the loss of something irreplaceable, it is difficult to accept that the familiar grey-brown spectrum of the urban streetscape is, in truth, green. But it is. “It would be a lot better for the planet,” as Glaeser puts it, if more people lived “in dense cities built around the elevator rather than in sprawling areas built around the car.”

That word “areas” does slightly blur the point, for what do “areas” mean in this context but “suburbs,” and what are suburbs but a constituent part – often the major part – of cities? More cities “built around the elevator” would mean more tall cities like New York – or more specifically Manhattan – or Singapore or Hong Kong. It would also mean fewer like Mumbai, with its legacy of draconian height restrictions and chronic slums and seemingly unstoppable sprawl or, at the top end of those “liveability” scales that appear from time to time, Stockholm, where a normative limit of six or seven storeys makes it one of the most pleasant cities in the world simply to be in. Glaeser wants us to embrace the very, very tall; to re-envision the residential tower not only as fit for providing luxury accommodation for people who are never in, but also as the key to simpler, more manageable and more satisfying lives, where everything you need is within walking distance (walking distance plus, of course, a two-way trip in the elevator). We must “stop romanticising rural villages,” he warns us, but he also makes it clear that rural villages are not the real enemy of urban consolidation. For Glaeser, the real enemy is suburbia, and it lurks within the very gates of the city.

IN ADVOCATING greater urban density, Glaeser acknowledges his debt to the formidable Jane Jacobs, a debt shared with almost every other commentator on urban life, even those who, like Glaeser, disagree with much of what she said. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, first published in 1961, Jacobs speaks up for the virtues of close-knit, inner-city life, developed organically and built over time, metaphorically as well as literally from the ground up, and against – implacably against – the kind of postwar planning that assumed it knew best, and saw the wholesale remaking of the urban landscape and along with it the displacement of entire communities as essential in creating the city of the future. Jacobs’s hugely influential book, now reprinted by the Modern Library in a fiftieth anniversary edition, seems as fresh and important in its central thesis as, by all contemporary accounts, it did in 1961, even as parts of it evoke a world which is no longer quite recognisable.

Unlike Glaeser, who writes amusingly of his own “bout of insanity” that led him to move from the inner city to the suburbs – “to choose deer-ticks as neighbours instead of people” – the whole tenor of Jacobs’s Death and Life is to put such voluntary displacement beyond the bounds of comprehension, impossible to justify even by reason of insanity. Searching “for the salves of society’s ills in slow-moving rustic surroundings… is a waste of time,” she says forthrightly. A suburban-style development in Chicago with which she was familiar may, she concedes, be “endowed with greenery” but it is also “quiet enough to make one’s flesh creep.” And yet, to many a contemporary city-dweller, that flesh-creeping quiet, those precious intervals between bouts of neighbourly lawn-mowing and leaf-blowing, are a blessed relief from the cacophony of downtown, and one of suburbia’s greatest assets. For Jacobs, the hypothetical acquisition of “a ranch house and a barbecue” is made to seem, by implication alone, at best grotesque folly and at worst what ought to be a punishable crime. Instead of retreating to the suburbs or the countryside, we should stay and fight for the inherently life-enhancing qualities of the city. As for slums, rather than pulling them down only to replicate them somewhere else, “we need to discern, respect and build upon the forces of regeneration that exist in slums themselves, and that demonstrably work in real cities.”

Life attracts life, to repeat one of Jacobs’s many resonant phrases, a process best fostered not by suburban plots or indeed by towering residential high-rises but by something in between, by a mix of four- or six- or nine-storey buildings in which people live and work and go back and forth “on different schedules” and for “different purposes.” Street blocks must be short, and “the opportunities to turn corners must be frequent,” so that the day always presents the possibility of either familiarity or variety, of taking the usual route to work or, just for a change, going another way, and opening oneself up to surprise. Based on these deceptively simple conditions, Jacobs makes a fine-grained and inspiring case for the organic city of “exuberant diversity,” in which even from the top floor there is a sense of connectedness to the street, and where the sheer numbers of people in that street, going about their daily business or watching from their shopfronts, ensure a level of safety and security for all. Jacobs highlights the capacity of the mixed-use, densely populated but still human-scale city to provide, in a seamless combination of closeness and distance, the reassuring and stimulating presence of people who while not our nearest and dearest are not quite strangers either.

Out of the daily contacts with others that the city naturally provides – with the local shopkeeper or the regulars on the bus to work – comes “a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust.” In this age of individualism and celebrity watching, there is something heartening in Jacobs’s emphasis on the importance of shared public identity. There are very few individualised characters in The Death and Life of Great American Cities – and certainly no celebrities, unless you count Le Corbusier, who gets short shrift – and those individuals who do appear do so more as types than personalities. The same is true of buildings; through Jacobs’s eye they blur into one another in a kind of complementary difference, producing an effect “both serene and unselfconscious.” Jacobs has no patience with architectural “exhibitionism or other phoniness.” She would be unimpressed by our current fetish for iconic or statement buildings, or by the popularity of the so-called Bilbao strategy, by which civic councils and boards and corporations seek to replicate the way in which Frank Gehry’s Guggen­­heim Museum has helped to revitalise that city’s economy. And as for the extraordinary success of Kevin McCloud’s Grand Designs, the building-your-dream-home television series now in its tenth season, we can only speculate on what her reaction would be. For Jacobs a home was a means to an end, a component in a vast mosaic of interlocking urban variety. It wasn’t an end in itself.

Many things have changed since Jacobs wrote, and some of these changes have been for the worse. The eyes in the street, for example, on which she placed so much importance in ensuring public safety, are now just as likely to be electronic as human, hardly an encouraging development. On the other hand her fierce antagonism towards the faceless planners, hiding behind “the dishonest mask of pretended order,” now seems, to put it gently, to lack nuance. Not all purpose-built housing estates are social disasters, just as not all ambitious plans to knock down and rebuild end in tears. In a preface to the 1992 reissue of Death and Life, Jacobs was able to refer dismissively to London’s “grandiose but bankrupt Canary Wharf,” a huge makeover project that seemed at the time as if it was going nowhere. Twenty years on, things are looking much better; the buildings are up and the transport links are working and there are many people happy to live and work there, in much greater concentrations than they did in the past. As a development it may not exactly be loved, but who knows how time and familiarity might work their magic? Back in 1961, though, Jacobs was up against a powerful and unsubtle opponent, and this kind of philosophical nuance was not what was called for.

“This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.” That is how Death and Life in American Cities begins, and pretty much how it continues. Particularly in Jacobs’s sights was Robert Moses, the so-called “master builder” of New York who had presided over many urban regeneration projects both before and after the war, and whose proposal in the late 1950s for a Lower Manhattan Expressway would have cut right through the heart of a community that Jacobs loved. The active opposition of Jacobs and her fellow residents, together with the impact of her book and the way it helped to turn public opinion against runaway development, killed the proposal. It was a victory of uncredentialled amateurs over authorities and experts.

Most significantly of all, given the continuing impact of her book on the professions of architecture, planning and design, and on the entire expanded field of urban studies, Jacobs herself was first among the uncredentialled. That is not to say she was uninformed or lacked the necessary knowledge or experience; quite the reverse. But she spoke from a position outside the academies and the professional networks. Not being part of the system, she felt free to challenge it.

PERHAPS the balance has now shifted too much the other way, with the current default position, for those who take an interest in such things, being to advocate preservation and conservation and adaptive re-use, rather than just letting the professionals dive in and have a whole other go at it in the hope they’ll get it right this time. In Edward Glaeser’s view, this default position means that it is becoming harder and harder to change the urban landscape for the better. In New York, he laments, “zoning rules, air rights, height restrictions, and landmarks boards together form a web of regulation that has made it more and more difficult to build,” and many people would see this as equally true of other cities around the world. Yet the causes that Jane Jacobs fought for are still very much there, and they still require extraordinary individuals to speak for them. Nothing exemplifies this more than the story of New York’s High Line, and the way in which, in just over a decade, an elevated railway has been transformed from a neglected and resented relic of the industrial past into an object of admiration and urban love. And, once again, it has been the uncredentialled who have taken the lead.

In their entertaining and unfailingly interesting account of how it all came about, High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky, Joshua David and Robert Hammond take pains to play down their qualifications and experience for the tasks that lay ahead of them. Prior to becoming involved in the project that -would take him over, Hammond “worked for a variety of start-ups,” helping, for example, to launch an in-flight catalogue “selling nose-trimmers out of airplanes.” Joshua David had ambitions to be an architect, until the professor in his introductory course put a stop to that. “He brought us outside on the lawn to draw buildings and trees,” David recalls. “He said I would never be an architect because the leaves on my trees were so badly drawn.” David then spent some time writing for “fluffy magazines, looking for hot trends and stylish new ways for readers to spend money.”

Although there is something contrived about this determined self-deprecation, by the same token both men were indeed novices in the high-powered worlds of city politics and large-scale urban development. Novices who also happened to have skills, talent and connections. By the summer of 1999, when the High Line was about to assume centre-stage in his life, David had been engaged by an ambitious new company to set up its internet division. He was becoming, in every sense, a professional networker. In a revealing aside that says much about the complex relationship between public and private in the modern metropolis, he recalls this job as being “the first time in my life that I had my own office with a door to close, and so it was the first time that I could do things besides work at work.”

In a back-and-forth structure derived from interview transcripts, supported by lots of splendid photographs, Hammond and David explain how they got involved in the quest to save the High Line from demolition. At the time, they weren’t even entirely sure what it was, though of course they were aware of it as part of the backdrop to their daily lives. But each was intrigued enough by an article in the New York Times about possible futures for the High Line to attend a community forum to see what it was all about. The High Line had been built to ensure the smooth transport of freight through the city, uninterrupted by the distraction of continually running over pedestrians in the street below. It was opened in 1934, but by 1980 traffic had declined to the point where the freight line’s working life was over. There had already been a partial demolition, in 1960, at the very time that Jane Jacobs and her fellow residents were struggling against the prospect of another intrusive transport link – a freeway this time, rather than a railroad – being rammed through the living structure of the city. Whole city blocks and the way of life that went with them were being threatened with destruction in deference to the twin gods of planning and transportation, while only a short distance away stood an example of just such a ruthless intrusion, a railway line which had seemed like a good idea at the time but now, a quarter of a century later, was already past its use-by date. If the whole clunky structure were to disappear, who would miss it?

With the passage of time, the intruder of yesteryear can come to be seen as a welcome guest, and even as part of the family. But, as Hammond and David make clear, this is not a process that can rely on time and chance alone. There is an awful lot of work involved to make sure it turns out that way. The authors have fun chronicling some of the more vitriolic opposition to the High Line, and the determination, particularly from local property owners, to have it torn down. It takes someone with the vision – “wouldn’t it be cool,” thought Hammond when he first became interested in the possibilities of the High Line, “to walk around up there on this old, elevated thing, on this relic of another time, in this hidden place, up in the air?” – and the necessary energy and, in this case, a fortuitous meeting with someone who has been thinking similar thoughts, and who is also at the time of his life when he is ready for a big project.

Hammond and David both attended that first community board meeting where, David recalls, “I sat next to Robert because I thought he was cute.” David later notes that “gayness ultimately became an identifying characteristic” of the campaign to save the High Line, an observation that is not really followed up, other than by Hammond’s relating how, in the early days of the campaign, people who already knew something about the High Line would pretend that they first became aware of it during regular visits to the many contemporary art galleries in the area. Not so, says Hammond: “it was really when they were going to gay dance parties at Twilo, the Tunnel, or the Roxy.”

“We’re not close friends,” says Hammond of his relationship with David, as if to reinforce the point that it is successful working relationships and shared professional goals that really count, because they are what in the end rescued the High Line. They both understood from the beginning that what was needed was a plan, one that covered networking (both actual and virtual) and fundraising and lobbying and legal action and the garnering of high-profile support, the latter an essential ingredient of any modern conservation campaign. Celebrities may be absent from The Death and Life of American Cities, but they appear on almost every page of High Line. This might have grown tedious, but it doesn’t, because it all somehow contributes to the bigger picture. Hammond in particular is adept at contrasting his “who, me?” status with his increasingly regular brushes with fame, and at managing to convey, via a likeable line in faux-modesty, that it is not a question of his being initiated into the club of celebrities and powerbrokers, but of the celebrities and powerbrokers being initiated into his. We see up close the process by which the High Line acquired the cult status it enjoys today. “They got it,” says David of an influential couple he takes on an introductory tour. “She got it,” says Hammond of another potential supporter, equally well connected, after she too has been given the tour.

What these privileged visitors to the otherwise off-limits High Line “got” was the extraordinary capacity of this quirky structure, even in its dilapidated and neglected state, to be both in the city and out of it. The grasses and wildflowers that grew up there of their own accord – so brilliantly evoked by the Dutch landscape designer Piet Oudolf in his plantings for the final, reclaimed version of the High Line – somehow brought the country into the city, even as city life went on, audible and visible, all around. In one of the many striking echoes of Jane Jacobs (“I’d read Jane Jacobs right before we started,” says Joshua David), the High Line provides both connection and distance, and with that too comes the element of surprise, of a new perspective on the familiar, and of not quite knowing what will next catch your eye.

“A city cannot be a work of art,” said Jane Jacobs, in italics, by which she meant that it could not simply be designed, or made, from the top down. When Hammond observes of the completed sections of the park in the sky that “it’s not about the individual plants – it’s the overall effect,” it’s hard not to hear an echo of Jacobs and her emphasis on the organic complementarity of buildings, rather than on individual, self-consciously artistic stand-outs. But Jacobs did in fact see the city as a kind of artwork, famously characterising it as a ballet, not one created by a star choreographer so much as by a group effort made up of the changing configurations and contributions and perspectives of the people on the street. “The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.” The city is an artwork which we all participate in creating, using the props we have to hand. The High Line is a platform for watching the performance, and in the process for seeing new things and seeing things anew. •

The post Urban romance appeared first on Inside Story.

WHEN it rains, Australia’s big cities break. The traffic banks up. The air thickens. The stormwater drains, built decades ago and hardly thought of since, cease to drain. The work–life balance skews towards a space and time that is neither public nor private, a kind of nowhere time spent in traffic, on a railway platform or in a bus shelter. Sometimes it seems that any extra stress – a sharp downpour, a heatwave, a sporting fixture or a car accident – takes the city past the point where it works. For a few hours, sometimes as long as a day or a week, we glimpse a future in which living in an Australian city is no longer consistent with having a good life.

In 2008, the human race passed a significant milestone. Since then, most of the world’s population has lived in urban areas, with the shift driven mostly by rapid development and internal migration in China and India. With 90 per cent of the population already living in urban areas, Australia is ahead of the trend. Cities here generate 80 per cent of national wealth and 75 per cent of jobs. And as Australia’s population expands from today’s twenty-two million to a projected thirty-six million by 2050, most of the increase – if nothing is done to prevent it – will need to be accommodated in cities.

Who, if anyone, can control this growth? Eight state and territory governments and more than 155 local administrations are responsible for city planning. As we track our individual courses between the private and public spaces, the offices, the couches, the beds and the bars, the schools, the offices and the parks, we traverse all the complexities of the city system – the many owners, the many different authorities, all with their stake. These vested interests sprawl from the financial heart through to the pleasant middle suburbs, each with its own lobby group, and on to the greenfields developments on the edge.

Constitutionally and historically there is little natural role for the federal government in city planning. The Howard government shunned it. In fact, one of its first acts was to cancel the Building Better Cities program of the Hawke and Keating governments, with the Coalition’s transport and regional development minister, John Sharp, arguing that there was “no clear rationale or constitutional basis for Commonwealth involvement.” Sharp’s eventual successor, current infrastructure minister Anthony Albanese, has claimed that when it took power the Rudd government found “not a single urban planner in the entire Commonwealth Public Service – not one.”

But now, in what is surely one of the least-examined areas of public policy development since Labor came to power, the federal government is trying to get back into the game. This year’s federal budget included a statement by Albanese, “Our Cities, Our Future,” laying out a national urban policy. It hardly got a mention in the media. A few days later came the government’s population policy. It got plenty of coverage, but only because it didn’t nominate an overall target for population growth, instead discussing how to house population increases in the regions and what might be called the politics of place. “Population change is not only about the growth and overall size of our population,” according to the policy, “it is also about the needs and skills of our population, how we live, and importantly, where we live. Population change impacts different communities in different ways.”

In truth, the urban policy and population policy documents are a pair and don’t make sense if they aren’t viewed together. But perhaps the lack of serious media attention is understandable: these are documents rich in colour pictures and tangled syntax but short on the specifics of what the federal government intends to do, and how it intends to do it.

Yet there are strands of coherent policy, and signs of new ways of thinking. The National Broadband Network will overcome the disadvantages of isolation. The regions must be strong if cities are to be liveable. Communities must be sustainable if they are to be productive. Suburbs built when oil was cheap, women were in the home and the population was youthful are now increasingly unsustainable and obsolete. And in all this the federal government needs to be involved. The politics of place can’t be left to local government and the states.

TWO decades ago Brian Howe was the minister responsible for the Building Better Cities program, launched in 1991 by the Hawke government in cooperation with the states and territories. More than any other contemporary figure, Howe carries the legacy of Labor’s past intervention in the politics of space – and, as I found when I spoke to him recently, he is once again closely involved in the development of policy.

“The rate of population growth and the distribution of the population is largely shaped by the Commonwealth, through immigration policy and through the capital funds it provides to the states and territories,” Howe told me when we met at Melbourne University’s leafy Parkville campus, in the midst of Melbourne’s multilayered, public transport–rich inner suburbs. “And yet the federal government has generally kept out of planning and managing cities.” But Howe believes that the mounting urban challenges are “driving the Commonwealth to a greater awareness of the spatial implications of its policies and encouraging it to work more cooperatively with the states.”

Howe was first alerted to the renewed federal interest in better cities in 2008, when he was invited – along with about twenty others, including the former lord mayor of Sydney, Lucy Turnbull, economist Saul Eslake and other professional observers of urban policy – to dine at the Lodge with Kevin Rudd. Howe had dealt with Rudd years before, when Rudd was a bureaucrat in Wayne Goss’s government in Queensland and Howe was trying to steer through the Building Better Cities program. Queensland’s Labor government “got it” better than most. Brisbane’s inner suburbs were revived by Better Cities, thanks largely, says Howe, to the vision of the Goss government.

Now, with Rudd in Canberra, it seemed as though some of that vision might be revived. Ideas were tossed around, solutions proposed. Things began to move.

In March last year the federal government released the State of Australian Cities report, the first comprehensive attempt to provide an overview of the health and productivity of urban areas, and their likely futures. It concluded that although Australian cities are now among the most liveable in the world, the future could be bleak if nothing is done.

Already, road congestion costs an estimated 1 per cent of gross domestic product, or around $10 billion – and the cost is estimated to double by 2020 if nothing is done. Family lives are being worn thin by congestion fuelled by urban sprawl. The quality of the air, already responsible for more than 2 per cent of all deaths, according to one estimate, is deteriorating. Public transport systems are suffering from decades of underinvestment. The level of car dependency is rising faster than the rate of population growth, making us more vulnerable to rising petrol prices and less capable of adapting to the imperatives of climate change.

It sounds bleak, but among governments and town planners there is a great deal of unanimity about what needs to be done. Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra and the other mainland capitals all have plans to increase the density of the middle-ring suburbs by building higher-density housing along public transport routes and in designated activity areas. The aim, which has been shown to be realistic, is generally to build more than half of new homes in existing suburbs.

But the plans are falling far short of their aims. They have been frustrated by the sheer complexity of the organism of the modern city, the lack of good models for retrofitting existing suburbs, and the cheapness and ease with which new greenfields developments can be built, free of the local activism that complicates inner-city development.

Working with many levels of government is a slow and careful business, and these are the early days. The issue is whether a government grappling with so many other problems can hope to achieve its vision. How do we change the complex system of cities in Australia? And can it be done in time?

In December 2009, the Council of Australian Governments, or COAG, added urban planning to its agenda, revealing a consensus that city planning, far from being a matter solely for local and state governments, was an important issue of national policy, needing shared objectives. Brian Howe was appointed to chair an expert panel, whose members include his fellow diner at the Lodge, Lucy Turnbull, and a range of people from government, architecture, planning and the building industry. The panel was charged with devising agreed national criteria for urban planning, and reviewing capital city strategic plans against these criteria. The resulting report is due to go to COAG later this year.

It’s a significant development because all governments have agreed that the criteria will be used to guide federal infrastructure funding to the states. As Brian Howe says, “We have to understand how investment in infrastructure can be reflected in plans for particular spaces – and it’s all becoming more urgent because we are going to have massive population increases especially in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth.” To get federal money, the states will have to address agreed national targets for urban planning.

Meanwhile a small Major Cities Unit has been set up inside the Department of Infrastructure and Transport. In the lead-up to Albanese’s budget policy statement, it issued the State of Australian Cities 2010 report, followed by a discussion paper on urban policy. The resulting submissions demonstrated nicely the thicket of vested interests in city planning, and the impossibility of ever achieving consensus. Local authorities each argued their own cases. The Property Council of Australia wanted a streamlined planning process, with a single authority in charge of urban planning in all major cities. The Save Our Suburbs group insisted that most Australians still wanted single residential houses, and that higher-density development would harm mental health. The Greens argued that no additional money should be spent on roads until public transport targets were met. Qantas wanted open space preserved around airports, so that planes can come and go throughout the day and night.

When it finally arrived, the Albanese statement was hardly a big spender. It allocated $20 million for capital works to improve the quality of life in cities, and $100 million to help state and local governments plan employment precincts and multifunction developments in the suburbs, to cut down on travel time. Featuring in both the population plan and the urban plan was $61 million for “smart management motorways” using data collection sensors and control tools to reduce congestion and emissions on major roads.

None of the funding measures was large, and the policy was full of general statements of intent and short on specifics. (Albanese did not respond to requests to be interviewed for this article, and he has not expanded in detail on his plans in public.) Yet throughout the text was a persistent theme. This money – limited though it was – would be spent on “demonstration projects” that meet the guidelines being developed by COAG. These projects would “drive urban renewal” and “show how new investments in community facilities and better planning can help improve quality of life in our outer and growth suburbs.”

To outsiders, the processes of COAG and the federal government seem to fall a long way short of what is needed. Peter Newton, a specialist in sustainable cities at the Institute of Social Research at Swinburne University of Technology, describes the documents that have emerged so far from COAG and the federal government as curiously process-driven, seemingly devoid of any sense that the complex problems of the city come down, in the end, to the management of individual spaces.

Brian Howe acknowledges that he is involved in a convoluted process. This is the reality in a federal system of government, where the states have planning powers but the Commonwealth controls most of the money and governs population policy. It has been done before, though, with some success – and by the same method: demonstration projects that have prospects for replication.

ANTHONY Albanese began his career as a research officer for Tom Uren, the urban and regional development minister in the Whitlam government. It was Uren who first adopted the idea of a spatial approach to the causes and symptoms of disadvantage, tackling issues of urban planning with passion and energy. He promoted the restoration and reuse of derelict inner-city areas such as the Glebe Estate and Woolloomooloo in Sydney. But Uren’s wider agenda was frustrated by the antagonism the Whitlam government provoked in the states.

This was the legacy that Howe faced as a minister in the Bob Hawke and Paul Keating governments almost a decade later. The Australian economy was being reformed and opened up to international competition, and these vast changes had their impact in the suburbs and the cities. As Australia changed its economic policies, Howe was interested in the changes at street level – in the politics of space, not least the big areas of industrial land left vacant and unused as the country’s manufacturing industry was gutted.

The Building Better Cities program was first funded – to the tune of $816.4 million over five years – in the 1991–92 budget. Sensitive to the acrimony created by the Uren initiatives, the program moved slowly, kicked off by a special premiers’ conference and proceeding through new, and at the time groundbreaking, intergovernmental agreements under which funding was tied to agreed outcomes.

Spread across the country, the small amounts of money available would hardly have achieved much. Every state wanted its cut, and some state premiers wanted the dollars to flow to their pet projects. To get around these problems, the process selected particular projects and, through partnerships between federal and state governments and private developers, demonstrated how social justice and urban renewal might be achieved through the good management of space.

Federal money was used to remove the barriers to change and make it possible for the vacant industrial spaces of the inner cities to be rehabilitated and reused. Sites were decontaminated; flood mitigation works were carried out. Previously these had seemed like prohibitive barriers to private development.

The legacy of the Building Better Cities program is visible in developments such as the Honeysuckle area in Newcastle, which, as Howe puts it, allowed that city to reimagine its future in the wake of twin earthquakes: the natural disaster of 1989 and the recession of the early 1990s and closure of the steelworks.

In Sydney, old industrial sites in Pyrmont-Ultimo were transformed and the light rail link introduced. Building Better Cities was responsible for the revitalisation of the suburbs of inner Brisbane, the redevelopment of contaminated and disused industrial land in East Perth, the redevelopment of the Launceston railyards and the transformation of institutional land at Janefield in Melbourne into a new suburb.

By the time the Howard government cancelled the program, the demonstration effect had done its work. Private investment, along with some state contributions, was enough to maintain the development momentum. Today, Building Better Cities is credited with having kickstarted the redevelopment of Australia’s inner cities – and all with a surprisingly modest amount of federal money.

SO ARE we ready for another Building Better Cities program? Is this what the vague talk of federally funded “demonstration projects” is all about?

We live in different times, and the challenges are different too. Building Better Cities was about the inner suburbs, and largely about old industrial sites. Now, the emerging consensus is that the focus must shift to the middle suburbs – the spaces into which almost half of new homes must be accommodated if cities are to remain sustainable.

How might the federal government help there? Swinburne’s Peter Newton recently led a research team that set out to provide a model for the retrofitting and regeneration of existing Australian suburbs. Newton calls them the “greyfields” and he can get a glimpse of them each day from his office a few metres from the railway line that runs through the university’s Hawthorn campus. Brownfields, he says, are the industrial sites – docklands, old factories and warehouses – that were the main focus of the Building Better Cities program. Greenfields are the sprawling, easy-to-establish yet ecologically unsustainable developments on the edges of Australian cities.

In between are the greyfields: the middle suburbs lying within a radius of between five and twenty-five kilometres of city centres. Here, housing density is low – as few as eight homes to a hectare – and the houses, built after the war, are ageing as their occupants age. They fall a long way short of modern energy and water efficiency standards and yet, compared to the greenfields, they are rich in transport, services and access to jobs.

It is in the greyfields, Newton says, that we have the potential proving ground for a new logic of urban development. The problems, though, are immense. Planning codes are designed, as Newton puts it, to “manage impacts, rather than to deliver visionary outcomes” and every suburb has its action group resisting medium-density development.

Most development is piecemeal, presided over by local governments and carried out by small developers. So long as greenfields and brownfields sites are easily available, big developers will shun the complexities of development in the greyfields. What is needed, says Newton, is an equivalent of the Building Better Cities program to provide demonstration precinct designs that would involve new methods of cooperation between government and private developers and also new methods of community interaction.

Because the most efficient retrofitting of suburbs can be done at the precinct level, government might act as an honest broker, encouraging groups of owners – ageing couples looking to downsize, for example – to partner with builders. Several housing blocks could be combined into bigger townhouse and unit projects, with renewable energy generated on site, water efficiently used and reused, and buildings put up rapidly, thanks to modular construction. The original owners would share in the proceeds of the development and would have the option of living in the regenerated precinct.

The demonstration precincts would display the best of planning and building, showing that medium density need not mean lower living standards, and that a suburb can be both busier and better.

Newton advocates a single greyfields regeneration authority – equivalent to the existing greenfield growth-area authorities and brownfield redevelopment bodies in most states – which would transcend local government boundaries and have real political and financial clout. Instead of development being spurred only by the sale of land, spatial information would be shared to allow development opportunities to be spotted ahead of time.

Along public transport routes, developments might reach as high as eight storeys thanks to “as of right” planning codes. In the spaces between, precincts or infill might reach three to four storeys, and be mixed in style, characterised by good and ecologically sustainable design and interspersed with areas where heritage values or other factors make retrofitting inappropriate. Spaces that once carried one or two detached houses would instead have two to eight townhouses in mixed layouts.

If Australian cities are to get better as they get bigger, it is the greyfields that have to be transformed. Based on offerings to date from federal and state governments, Newton is not optimistic. So far he sees nothing in the documents put out by government that suggests attention is being paid to where and how such transformation might be achieved.

The research report that Newton’s team recently delivered to the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute warns that if nothing changes, “There is a prospect of system breakdown in key urban infrastructures over the next twenty years, especially for those cities facing rapid growth and operating within the context of late twentieth century ‘business as usual’ practice.”

The report notes the initiatives of the new government, but states that only “significant intervention” is likely to achieve change. “So far,” says Newton, “I have heard nothing that sounds to me like the equivalent of a Building Better Cities program.”

HOWE acknowledges that action co­ordinated between different levels of government is “crucial, but historically difficult to achieve... Australia’s system of government is not especially conducive to providing the kind of leadership that will deal successfully with resolving so vexed a problem as our future city development.” But the COAG process has placed an emphasis on transparency and national outcomes “in contrast with the more usual adversarial and inward looking discussions between jurisdictions.”

All of which makes him cautiously optimistic. The challenge for the future, he says, will be to make truly far-sighted infrastructure decisions, which will entail not only more effective governance, but also new partnerships between government, business and civil society.

An optimist would say that the vision is developing, that the process is under way. That these things take time. A pessimist sees only process, wordy documents and little action. Meanwhile, the city continues in its chaotic, complex fashion. And when something goes wrong, it breaks. •

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