LAA#117: Housing The Landscape

Firstly a welcome to all of you, my goal with these columns is to match the depth and quality of insight that was delivered by my predecessor, Mark Fuller. Time will tell. If I do not match Mark’s level, I hope at least to stimulate debate. I would be delighted to field responses!

Appropriately constructed and affordable housing will be the focus of the next few parliamentary terms in Australia. Inseparable from housing is land, and landscapes. Smaller housing blocks sizes put more emphasis on the public realm. The public realm will assume greater prominence in the debate on liveability and social cohesion.

Landscape Architects have a great role to play in the delivery of new housing landscapes to suit our changing climate,population dynamic, and lifestyles. I recently read a report on the Landscape Institute conference (Britain) by an Australian attendee, Martin Rowland, Senior Associate, Hassell Perth. Martin writes… Hilary Benn MP and Secretary of State for International Development opened the conference. In his address, he declared “If I may say so,you (landscape architects) bring together the skills, knowledge and passion that we need for the 21st Century in the way that Engineering shaped the 19th Century. We need you in the fight to tackle climate change.”

Was it this year or last year that 50% of the earth’s population was urbanised?

Here is a new town and an old town storey:

The Old Town:

McMahons Point in North Sydney survived its new town proposal: In response to a 1957 proposal to rezone the area as waterfront industrial, a group of architects,led by Harry Seidler, but also including Harry Howard amongst others, argued for a residential vision of point tower blocks on the ridges, with successively lower blocks on mid slopes, and a series of smaller apartments along the waters edge. 29 apartment blocks were proposed over the peninsula, a wholesale demolition and rebuild except for the spine road – Blues Point Road,on the ridge running down to the harbour.

Blues Point Tower was the prototype for the point blocks, and 50 years later, it is the only one of the 29 that has been built. Most of the team recanted fairly early on, as they came to habit the lower north shore,and enjoyed the low-scale village ambience. ‘Oh the urbanity’ the villagers sigh!

Of course time has shown the enormous change to the organisation of cities over the last 50 years - the rezoning proposal made sense when viewed with the degraded quality of housing and the predominant harbourside land use west of the bridge – small scale shipyards, naval depots,oil depots, gas works and light manufacturing. All that industry has now moved on. The new land uses of apartments and parks have proved a handy job generator for many landscape architects, and even a few awards. Similar cases abound throughout inner city areas worldwide of course. Even inland Canberra is having a resurgence of inner city + apartment construction, in a city core barely 50 years old.

The New Town:

I read in the October Issue of Landscape – The Journal of the Landscape Institute (Britain),that Milton Keynes is turning 40. It was the last of a series of post war developments, and the biggest. It was built very close to my grandparents town of Buckingham, northwest of London. My Grandmother’s family had until the late 1980’s continuously rented the same parcel of land and house – Church Farm, Sheringham, Bucks, for more than 300 years. She was lucky enough to be taken from such a fate at only the 240th year of occupation, on her marriage to my grandfather, and ended up a few miles away in Buckingham. Milton Keynes must have seemed an alien development indeed to a village girl, but it has weathered the years, changing administration, maintenance highs and lows, and ongoing development, and all the while the substantial tree plantings have matured, ‘a spectacular achievement that makes driving through Milton Keynes an almost entirely non-urban experience’.

Place and home are the critical cores of our beings. Are our experiences different if our ‘place’ has grown organically from generations of market forces and personal history, or if our ‘place’ has been designed and built in a handful of years? Several years ago I read Andrew O’Hagan’s searing ‘Our Fathers’, set in the 1950’s tower blocks in Glasgow,telling of the extraordinary social dislocation experienced by the new residents, and the internal struggle by the planning official responsible for the housing scheme to accept that the vision was fatally flawed. Many will also have read Irvine Welsh, with his ‘schemie’ inspired novels set in and around Edinburgh such as Trainspotting, Filth, and Glue. Are we as a society still quiescent in the roll-out of such poor quality housing?

Is it better in Australia? It can be, if some of the recent Docklands experiences in Melbourne continue to be borne out. Maybe Gen Y can handle the changes better than Gen X and the Boomers, given the personal technological skills that Gen Y’s possess.

But is it income related? What about Macquarie Fields, in western Sydney. Here Gen Y appears to be short-changed in social services, and the anger is valid. What is a liveable landscape for the longer term? What form of climate- responsible social landscape can landscape architects deliver?

Landscape architects need to know about the successes, and the innovations. There are gems all around us: I stumbled upon Findhorn, on the northeast Scottish coast, a few months ago. From my very limited research, green housing developments appear far more advanced in Europe than Australia. It is time that landscape architects respond to the challenge – to no longer accept inadequate planning, or compromised outcomes.

PS. The Sydney Morning Herald, 28/11/07 had a front page piece “”A Climate Change for Developers”, written by Sunanda Creagh…

…..The Land and Environment Court has overturned a decision by the Planning Minister, Frank Sartor, to allow the property developer, Stockland to build up to 285 homes and an aged-care facility at beach side Sandon Point, 14 kilometres north of Wollongong. Justice Biscoe found Mr Sartor failed to consider”whether changed weather patterns would lead to an increased flood risk in connection with the proposed development in circumstances where flooding was identified as a major constraint on development of the site”.