CREATING A CITY WITH MOJO BUILDING BETTER COMMUNITIES ACCOMMODATING GROWTH
HERITAGE IN THE CITY A NEW PARADIGM TO DELIVER A CITY WITH VISION
PROPERTY COUNCIL OF AUSTRALIA – HERITAGE IN THE CITY: A NEW PARADIGM TO DELIVER A CITY WITH VISION
A NEW PARADIGM FOR OUR BUILT HERITAGE Our built heritage can contribute to the life, vibrancy and mojo of our city. It provides a link to our past and contributes to our future. We have an enormous challenge in managing our built heritage to ensure it is accesible for all South Australians, and it is a task that we are currently failing to deliver upon. We have a system that allows elected officials to significantly devalue an individual’s investment with no compensation. We have planning policy that stymies adaptive reuse of our built heritage, one that diminishes good development on adjacent properties, and we have little or no meaningful community education about the importance of the properties listed. It is time for a new debate on our built heritage and it is time to reform how we integrate heritage into our city.
WHAT DOES HERITAGE MEAN TO ADELAIDE? The importance of heritage
Growth is inevitable
The cost of inaction
South Australians value our built heritage as a link to our history and a crucial component of our city’s distinctive character. That is why we have developed a framework of objectives, policy and legislation to define and then protect aspects of our built environment, namely those we consider to be part of the inheritance of future generations.
As South Australia moves into an era of economic and population expansion, it is critical that our past paradigms do not hinder our future fortunes.
If South Australia continues on its current course, our ability to provide affordable and desirable accomodation for our growing population and work spaces for our strengthening economy will fail.
Alongside this protective administrative structure should also evolve a deeply-held passion about heritage. The community generally accepts our heritage as valuable part of Adelaide’s unique character but there are polarised viewpoints on what constitutes good heritage. This has led to a debate that is unique to Adelaide, a debate that flares and dims on a predictable cycle.
Adelaide City Council and the South Australian Government have set tough targets for residential and employment growth in the city. Approximately 50 per cent of our city is already locked away from development due to heritage constraints; to achieve any consistency of economic and employment policy we must shed our old ways of thinking on heritage and embrance new ones.
At the same time, it is critical that we protect an appropriate amount of our built heritage while providing the owners of those buildings with a financial and regulatory regime that promotes adaptive reuse while adding vibrancy and life to our streets and our city.
This requires a more robust approach to heritage, formed through a realistic framework of compromise between development and heritage conservation.
PROPERTY COUNCIL OF AUSTRALIA – HERITAGE IN THE CITY: A NEW PARADIGM TO DELIVER A CITY WITH VISION
WHY DO WE NEED A NEW APPROACH? Adelaide is world-renowned for its liveability and its rare combination of built and natural beauty. Often, however, Adelaidians debate the development of the city to the point where nothing happens. Our ‘debate’ on heritage is shallow and simplistic, fostering an adversarial approach to these critical decisions, and allowing emotion rather than rational arguments to influence them. We urgently require a system that encourages compromises to allow our city to grow while retaining agreed aspects of our cultural built heritage that make our city what it is. Subjective, sweeping decisions to list certain buildings of dubious heritage benefit confuse the general public and devalue buildings with real heritage value. Practices such as listing entire suites of buildings in one style, or listing a street because of its heritage character, dilute the heritage benefit of all those included. In most cases, preserving a single example of a building type more than meets the community’s needs.
Those responsible for heritage decisions should be held accountable for those decisions, so the rationale behind listing decisions must become more open and better explained to engage the community. The public has not had the reasons for current listings explained to them. The community is also entitled to be informed how listed buildings are maintained and the cost of doing so. A simple way of achieving the identification of heritage buildings is through a badging program that clearly marks, records and explains the rationale behind listing a heritage building and identifies its maintenance program. This should educate our community and increase their interest in, and appreciation of, our built heritage.
A modern facade treatment on a heritage building in France demonstrates how new and old design techniques can merge.
GETTING THE BALANCE RIGHT Heritage can, and should, add to a city’s vibrancy and its sense of place. Adaptive uses of heritage buildings can create a striking juxtaposition of new and old within a building that was previously threatened with irrelevance. By making those buildings appealing and functional, their lifespans are increased and the urban aesthetic is improved. Another benefit of adaptive reuse products flows to the people that create them. Adaptive reuse projects are technically complex, but they make for interesting work that engages the property professionals involved. South Australia’s young professionals need an ongoing source of enjoyable, challenging work that tests and expands their abilities to encourage them to remain in Adelaide and build their careers here. It is critical that our regulatory and legislative system is supportive of adaptive reuse of heritage buildings to ensure they continue to provide a sense of vitality to our streets and our city.
What will happen if we maintain the status quo on heritage:
+ Development investment will flow away from Adelaide, causing economic stagnation.
+ Heritage will become a dirty word among many in our society, belittling its positive elements;
+ The rate of young professionals leaving South Australia will continue to climb as opportunities for development and new-found vibrancy are closed.
+ A generational rift will emerge over the perceived differences in future visions for Adelaide.
+ Demolition orders on buildings with the vaguest hint of heritage value will increase as developers fear their hands being forced.
+ Creative approaches to new developments will be stymied and the urban environment will become drab and lifeless.
+ Existing heritage buildings will be rendered invisible to the community.
PROPERTY COUNCIL OF AUSTRALIA – HERITAGE IN THE CITY: A NEW PARADIGM TO DELIVER A CITY WITH VISION
Righting policy misalignment
Getting the balance right
Activating our city
The current listing system works against the aims and targets in the 30-Year Plan for Greater Adelaide. Local authorities enjoy extremely broad criteria within which they can make a ruling on a site. Those decisions impact not only the building subject to the decision but those on its boundaries. Considering the sheer number of buildings, either listed or proposed for listing, this makes it difficult to implement modern contemporary developments in the Adelaide CBD.
Blanket approaches to heritage are economically disastrous for the state.
To maintain the city’s vibrancy, increased density of residential and commercial precincts must be encouraged. Adelaide City Council has an admirable policy to enhance the central city’s residential population; this aligns with density goals of the 30-Year Plan for Greater Adelaide. To achieve this increased development potential, existing heritage sites will be affected and must be considered for redevelopment.
As the listing process currently stands – a highly subjective, politically coloured and closed process – there is real risk that heritage rulings emphasise quantity over quality, and there is little or no capacity for innovative heritage development. This approach can be seen in the divisive nature of Adelaide City Council’s current attempts to list many hundreds of properties in the commercial heart of Adelaide. Adelaide requires a vastly improved listing process that aligns with the key development goals of the 30-Year Plan for Greater Adelaide. This will balance the need for heritage with support for adaptable and developable built environments.
Heritage decisions can have immediate and potent impact on the development capacity of our city, denying Adelaide economic opportunity. Listed properties are in essence locked away from higher, better and contemporary uses. Existing processes and policy can also be misused by the pro-heritage lobby to enact ‘heritage by stealth’. This is achieved by ‘building envelope’ claims – imputing a heritage value on adjacent or proximate buildings to the listed building to prevent the character of the listed property from being diluted. This practice not only unfairly robs owners of unlisted properties of the investment return on their property but also acts as a massive disincentive to invest in Adelaide. The economic harm of ill-considered or mandated heritage decisions is exacerbated when buildings are listed and left without any capacity for genuine economic use. This renders them incapable of redevelopment or unviable for maintenance. In these cases, the ‘heritage envelope’ issue is exacerbated in that the value of properties surrounding the derelict, unsightly, unhygienic and uninhabitable heritage property are also adversely affected
Many of the buildings considered for refurbishment were built using primitive construction techniques and not designed to last forever. Many more still require substantial structural modifications to allow occupation under today’s building standards. On this basis, many developers cannot make their numbers stack up to compensate for this rework and this is why a number of heritage buildings around the city have become derelict, in the overzealous drive to list everything and anything that is old or somehow special. It must be accepted that not everything old is special. We do not need to store everything old in aspic. There are occasions when it is more appropriate that the buildings should be demolished to make way for new development.
If Councils determine that a building should be listed and an owner’s property rights are breached, the owner must have opportunities for fair compensation. Even in the case of voluntary listing, it must be acknowledged that the listing is done in the community interest, and therefore the community should financially support the process of maintaining these properties. Council rate exemptions and incentive funds should be provided to assist property owners to maintain their properties for the whole community.
THE BENEFITS OF ENCOURAGING NEW DEVELOPMENTS WITHIN THE CBD ARE NUMEROUS AND INCLUDE: + Lower cost residential developments, improving housing affordability. + Encouraging people to live and work within city boundaries. There are cultural benefits through increased social vibrancy and economic and community benefits from reduced infrastructure needs in outer suburbs. + Encouraging greater utilisation of our squares, parklands and community open spaces + The employment, investment and economic multiplier effects of major property investment, including the inflow of overseas and interstate capital that add to the prosperity of the state as a whole.
THE ACTION PLAN FOR A REVITALISED CITY 1
Full Review of existing list
All State Heritage listed buildings to have a plaque erected in a clearly visible position identifying the key aspects of the building and the importance of its listing by July 2012.
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Community education
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Ensure policy consistency
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Commission a full review of the list of 1808 properties currently on the Adelaide City Council Heritage List, to be undertaken in a publicly transparent and accountable manner.
Charge the State Architect with the responsibility of testing State and Local Heritage policy and individual listing decisions against the goals and targets of the 30-Year Plan for Greater Adelaide.
To offset the lost investment value of having a property listed, all State and Local Heritage listed properties must be exempted from Council Rate liability.
A fairer deal In addition, to ensure our built heritage is protected, maintained and able to contribute to the vibrancy of our city, establish a State/Local Government fund to assist in the maintenance of heritage-listed buildings.
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Better policy
Develop an overarching design policy that seeks to boost the development and residential carrying capacity of the central city by: • facilitating changes to Development Plans to promote contemporary building design next to listed properties, • implementation of a cut-down building code for listed properties, and • enabling greater flexibility in design requirements to promote innovative design outcomes for the adaptive reuse of listed properties.
PROPERTY COUNCIL OF AUSTRALIA – HERITAGE IN THE CITY: A NEW PARADIGM TO DELIVER A CITY WITH VISION
Property Council of Australia Limited ABN 13008 474 422 142 Gawler Place Adelaide SA 5000 Telephone: 08 8236 0900 Facsimile: 08 8223 6451 Email: sa@propertyoz.com.au Web: www.propertyoz.com.au
Copyright 2010
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