Farrelly asks the big questions about the health of Sydney’s soul

Elizabeth Farrelly’s Killing Sydney is a beautifully written book of heartfelt musings, serious analysis and stream-of -consciousness rants about a city that Farrelly loves and knows intimately but is also very concerned about. If you are familiar with Farrelly’s writings in the Sydney Morning Herald, her meandering style will delight you. Farrelly, who has a background in architecture and philosophy, is serious and poetic, philosophical and passionate, all at once. She can move quickly from a sharp and unforgiving analysis of the WestConnex and Light Rail debacles to more subtle articulations on the aesthetics and intricacies of urban design. For this reason, it’s an exhausting yet satisfying read. If however you’re not used to Farrelly’s style and tone, her foray into beautiful but distracting tangents can be disorienting, the connection between topics sometimes hard to discern. Either way, this is an important book for all who care about Sydney and who want to create a more likeable city before the developers and government makes a mess of it all. Farrelly says of her book: Killing Sydney exhorts all lovers of the city to reinvest in civic debate, reprioritise public space, re-emphasise nature’s critical role, reconceive our decision-making processes, revitalise our love of history and rebuild our confidence in the city’s future before it is too late. Throughout the book, Farrelly brings the reader back to the question: “What do we want from a city?” We need to answer this question, she explains, otherwise we will find ourselves living in a city that is flat, harsh, sterile, motivated by greed and altogether badly planned and designed. There are some gems in the book. For instance, Farrelly offers us some wonderful phrases and words that flesh out the characteristics of a good city. “Pokability” is the “quality of a city that encourages you to poke around in its nooks and crannies”. Then there’s “walkability”, drawing on 1960s urban activist Jane Jacobs. And the “fine grain” is the detail or texture of a place that makes a city desirable and interesting. These words help us get our heads around how Farrelly imagines a city that is desirable to live in, and also helps us think about what we value. Killing Sydney is a strong critique of the current government and developers who, she argues, have no vision and lack the political will to make a city beautiful, sustainable, interesting and desirable. Instead, says Farrelly, money is driving these two enemies of city planning and design. Farrelly often pits the modern, fast, efficient and minimalistic against the slow, textured and thoughtful. Because of this, the book can lack nuance. But Farrelly is not saying that all development is unnecessary or bad. The problem is not high-rise or high density, but when good planning and design, and the public interest, are sacrificed on the altar of greed. When apartments are designed “Not for anyone’s pleasure of habitation but for landlords to buy, negatively gear and rent out in an exploitative market”, they will become “the slums of the future”. Sydney-dwellers devastated by the current “revisioning” of the city by our state government would agree. In my own village of Surry Hills, which Farrelly talks about so lovingly, I’m constantly on edge about heritage-listed buildings being sold off, trees being chopped down and accelerating gentrification. It makes me anxious about Surry Hills losing its “fine grain”. Farrelly is at her best when she looks carefully at case studies such as WestConnex, the Light Rail and the Powerhouse Museum relocation. I found in her analysis of WestConnex a wonderful mix of fact, lament and good storytelling. She tells of Kate Cotis who had to put up with noise, dirt and pollution during the construction. Farrelly asks: Why was any of this ok? Do we seriously expect people to live inside their own houses with noisecancelling headphones, forever? To live with windows permanently closed, breathing machine-filters air? Aren’t we all entitled to sleep, cook, bathe or read a book in ordinary fresh air when we want to? These are good questions that we, as citizens of a city trying to balance development with the “softer” matters of people and place, need to ask. If we don’t, we risk compromising our humanity. More broadly, Farrelly asks: Do we really think a city is just a thing to move through, as easily and efficiently as possible? Is this a complete failure of selfrespect? Are we so soulless, so profoundly unromantic in our relations to ourselves and our habitat that we are more about efficiency than delight? Is getting there faster so important that we’re willing to destroy everything lovely about the city, and the planet, to achieve it? Is this really who we are? For Farrelly, an important part of keeping this sense of delight, of keeping our soul, is staying connected to our past in order to understand who we are today. Rather than selling off our assets and marginalising our heritage buildings, we need to be people of today who ask the difficult questions about what we must keep in order to retain our sense of identity. This is very important especially in a society that is fast-paced, forgetful of the past and in danger of repeating the same mistakes of yesterday. This is a timely book that forces us to ask the bigger questions. What kind of city do we want to live in? Who do we want to become? What forces are driving this city and are they for the good? In a society that seduces us into becoming consumers rather than active citizens, Killing Sydney inspires us to reflect more deeply on our culture and place, to challenge the forces that are shaping our city, for the good of our community. Can we, as Farrelly concludes, “with a little more listening and a little less shoving … create a city that encourages empathy and connection as well as competition and struggle?” We can only hope that those who are making the decisions will start to listen.

Killing Sydney: The Fight for a City’s Soul by Elizabeth Farrelly (Sydney: Macmillan, 2021) Book review by Karina Kreminski

Karina Kreminski is a neighbourhood enthusiast who, like Elizabeth Farrelly, hates leaf blowers. She lives in Surry Hills and is Co-Director of Neighbourhood Matters with her husband. Their website is

www.neighbourhoodmatters.com.au.