FUTURE WEST 04 Public Domain by UWA School of Design

[AUSTRALIAN URBANISM]

AU UR S T FU BA R A TU NI LI SM AN W R ES E T

ic n bl ai Pu om D

FUTURE WEST

Fu w tu ca ond re n e We bu rs s ild wh t to at ge w th e er . . t ow es h en W tes can op re a s e tu tig on or Fu ves uti e m in stit m in co be

Fu de tu in m re ci ves an We vi tm ds s c sp en mo t ac t i re es n .

FUTURE WEST

FUTURE

t es W the an re t rb n. tu s a f u tio Fu ok e o ra l o al ne sc ge re

Fu as tu pr ks re ar oc h W ch ur ow es it e to t ec qu tu a re lit . y

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

t . es e W th ain re es m tu or do Fu pl lic ex b pu

WEST

FUTURE WEST

PUBLIC DOMAIN

FUTURE

The twenty-first century has challenged our conception of public life, with transformations in the urban landscape being instigated by a multitude of actors (politicians, developers, activists, architects) and facilitated by a variety of technologies (smartphones, vision documents, autonomous vehicles, solar power). If there is no one organisation, rule of law or app that reigns supreme over the task of urban development, but instead there exists a tendency towards the involvement of multiple players, we might ask ourselves: What kinds of coalitions could create public

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

buildings and spaces? And also ask: What form does this public domain take? The fourth issue of Future West (Australian Urbanism) investigates buildings, spaces and infrastructure in Western Australia and beyond that support the public domain – the places and the things that we own collectively. It wonders: What and how can we build together? How does the public domain represent the values and goods that we share? And, if the public domain belongs to all of us, what can we do with it? 3

WEST

OPINIONS

6 THE PLAYERS Timothy Moore Who plays a role in the shaping of the public domain?

9 THE STATESMAN John Carey interviewed by Sally Farrah WA state politician John Carey describes how small changes in the urban environment can be transformative. 14 THE INVESTOR Matthew McNeilly interviewed by Alessio Fini Matthew McNeilly, managing director at Sirona Capital, speaks on why the company chooses to invest in the public domain. 20 THE OUTSIDER Fernando Jerez interviewed by Nic Brunsdon International architect Fernando Jerez highlights the power of the grand architecture competition. 26 THE INSIDER Geoff Warn interviewed by Jennie Officer The WA Government Architect discusses his strategic toolset to shape the public realm.

32 CHARTING PUBLIC BUILDINGS Felix Joensson The public buildings of Western Australia have changed in shape and purpose over time.

FUTURE

FUTURE WEST

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

PROJECTS

38 P ARKLET POWER Amelia Thorpe Citizens and businesses invest in parks for public good. 46 L OOKING BEYOND THE SANDSTONE Bree Trevena The university campus is turning itself outwards. 52 T HE SCALE OF THE MUSEUM Annika Kristensen What will the museum of the future look like? 62 F ROM URL TO IRL Sarah Barns Putting digital to work in shaping great places.

T ES

W 5

WEST

FUTURE

A Im la ag ne e: wa Di y i on n Ro Per be th so 's n ea st

FUTURE WEST

TH PL E AY ER S

W Ti in ho m ot pu th pl hy bl e s ays ic ha a M oo do p ro i re m ng le ai o n? f t he

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

FUTURE

It is easy to decry the dearth of new public buildings in our cities. It appears there is a lack of will, responsibility or ability on the part of the government to create new ones. (The City of Perth Library was the first public building delivered by local government in the Perth CBD in decades.) On the other hand, many much-loved landmarks have been transformed into commercial spaces. The former Perth GPO is now a fast-fashion emporium. The old State Buildings – once the Lands, Titles and Treasury buildings, and which at various times also housed a post office, a police cellblock and public offices, among other things, lay vacant for twenty-odd years, but are now a leisure complex of accommodation, dining and retail offers. In watching the conversion of public assets into private property, it’s also easy to set up binaries between the roles of public and private buildings, and the roles of government and private developers; in each binary, one actor has the public good at heart, and the other commercial interests. The experience in Western Australia demonstrates that there is not one player that alone takes the lead in shaping public places, and that each sector is multi-dimensional in its response. Privately led property development and commerce can contribute to the quality of a public condition. The government can also play a strong role in

FUTURE WEST

FUTURE

procurement, planning and strategic design. So, if many actors play some part in the construction of our cities, towns and regions, what are some positive roles and responsibilities that they can take on? What new networks can be formed between players to shepherd this process? And which one of them will defend the public good? Future West (Australian Urbanism) sits down with a politician, a developer, an architect and a government architect over the following pages to investigate the various players that shape the public domain. John Carey, Member for Perth, acknowledges that government needs to create greater opportunities to encourage and enable actions by citizens and businesses. This could be by making small changes, such as in licensing laws, that can be catalysts for larger transformations in the city. Matthew McNeilly, managing director of Sirona Capital, understands the big-picture role that property developers can play in urban renewal by investing in the public realm. This means that the business model must privilege the long-term value of contributing to great public places over short-term economic returns. Fernando Jerez from SMAR Architecture Studio sees the potential of architects to provide a reimagined vision of what the future may look like, and discusses how public architectural competitions provide an opportunity to stage these propositions. Our final interviewee, Geoff Warn from the WA Office of the Government Architect, highlights the change that architects on the inside of government can bring about by advocating for quality design through strategic advice. There’s no simple solution to the question of how we create the public domain, as it can be produced by a shifting constellation of players. Whatever the case, if it is public, if it is our domain, if it is all ours, we should all take good care of it.

TH St E ta ate ST ho lks p AT ur w to olit ES be ba sm Sa ici M tra n e all lly an AN ns nv ch Fa Joh fo iro an rra n rm nm ge h C at en s ab are iv t in ou y e. c th t an e

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

Sally Farrah: The new City of Perth Library, designed by Kerry Hill Architects, was the first civic building commissioned by the City of Perth since the Perth Concert Hall, which opened in 1973. What does Perth need more of in terms of public buildings and spaces?

John Carey: It is interesting, because we have had some major transformational projects in terms of public spaces with Elizabeth Quay and Perth City Link. In some ways, I’m torn on this issue, because I would love to see a major public building that recognises Indigenous heritage culture – and the original Elizabeth Quay plans did flag an incredible public building. The issue now is that we have a $30 billion state debt. Other than the extension to the Western Australian Museum, you are not going to see any more major buildings in the city. I do think in part, though, that we can be so obsessed with securing legacy buildings that we just forget about the public realm, and the everyday street experience. In terms of public buildings and spaces, you feel the outdoors is more important for Perth’s urbanism?

FUTURE

I really think we need to focus on public space, and we can over-complicate how we approach it. There are very simple things

FUTURE

FUTURE WEST

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

that can be done … I have to be frank – if I hear any more reports or research that is commissioned about how we create a livable city … By God! There is so much research already. We must focus on the doing. How do we have more action when the roots of problems today are so complex that they go beyond the capacity of government?

I feel that Perth is lacking a multi-sector approach to placemaking. I think that it is a new opportunity for Perth because it can be free from some of the bureaucracy, leverage the private and public dollar and be even more creative in its thinking. You organised the Perth City Summit in August to bring people together to rethink what Perth could be in terms of the public domain. What did citizens want to happen in Perth’s CBD?

There is clearly a sense of frustration; people want to see change, as there are completely dead parts of the city. We had over 360 people turning up on a Saturday morning, from small business and hotel owners to property developers and residents. The message of the summit was not to wait for bureaucracy. It wasn’t a surprise that – from about 1000 survey responses online, and through workshops – simple ideas were provided, such as a public swimming pool, more supermarkets, and the creation of recreational and family facilities. But the response from the summit I was most excited about was the question of how we set an ambitious population target for the city. Without people living in the city, it will never be vibrant. The summit had an opinion poll throughout the day to decide upon a ranking of the city’s needs. A popular opinion poll may result in people suggesting what they already know within their area of expertise, but it may not be exactly what is needed. How do you transform these ideas into something strategic? And how do you overcome the problem of delivering vision?

We have to set up a body that can help channel this energy. An example of this is the Beaufort Street Network I established as Town of Vincent mayor [2013–17] – it was the first placemaking precinct group of its kind in Perth. You had property owners, small businesses, residents or people who just loved the area. Empower local communities to drive and champion change. We are trying to develop that original Beaufort Street Network model within Perth CBD districts as well.

FUTURE

Left: The City of Perth Library and the old State Buildings shift the civic heart of Perth east. Image: Dion Robeson

FUTURE WEST

Perth City Summit, August 2017. Image: Matthew Rogers

How do small-scale solutions suggested at the summit – like parklets, bicycle lanes, or al fresco dining – parallel or work with big-picture problems, such as homelessness, climate change, traffic congestion or housing affordability?

What people forget is that small changes accumulate, and that is how you transform a city. So, if you were to insert one parklet, it creates a little bit of street activity in that area. Fifty of them in a city with trees and plants, coordinated and planned thoroughly, adds to vibrancy, reduces antisocial behaviour and creates pedestrian amenity. It could even address climate change or other strategic goals for the city. The problem is we have too much red tape. Sometimes a change of rules can transform a city. What loosening or shifting of laws, rules or regulations can impact upon the public realm in Perth or regional WA towns?

FUTURE

Government often underestimates the power of making a small change first. Start with laws impacting street activation for businesses in Perth, like al fresco and signage fees. I find it extraordinary that the City of Perth penalises or requires fees for someone to put a bench or a pot plant on the street, even if they are not a cafe. Clearly, we need a second tranche of liquor reforms to make it easier in the city in key entertainment districts. There are so many planning hurdles. The problem in Perth is that we are afraid of taking some risks. Perhaps not everything we do will work. That’s OK.

FUTURE

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

TH M E di att IN Pe rec he VE Fi rth to w M ST ch ni a , s r at c O pu oo bo pe Si Ne R bl se ut ak ron illy ic s w s ,m a do to hy wi C a m inv th th ap na ai e e Al ita gi n. st c es l ng in om si in th pa o e ny

FUTURE WEST

Alessio Fini: Sirona Capital is a funds manager with over $250 million of equity and about $2.4 billion of value in the pipeline. Why, when there are so many sectors to invest in, does Sirona invest in property, and as a consequence, the public domain?

Matthew McNeilly: Sirona’s skill set is built in finance, so it’s all about understanding capital structures and how equity and debt can be put to work. But what draws us to the real estate market is the opportunity to be creative and to be part of creating things that last, such as buildings and places that leave a legacy. It’s also much more interesting and rewarding.

FUTURE

A typical development model would be to design off square-metre rates – how much can we fit in there? – and the price you can yield by value-managing the process, then selling off the asset.

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

FUTURE

Top: An aerial view of the new Kings Square development in Fremantle. Bottom: The new City of Fremantle civic building, designed by Kerry Hill Architects.

FUTURE WEST

FUTURE

Top: Aerial view of Kings Square in the 1970s. Image courtesy of Fremantle History Centre Bottom: The view down High Street towards Kings Square, 1960s. Image courtesy of Fremantle History Centre

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

You’re ultimately driven by a project’s feasibility, but you also have to be prepared to give away some profit. You can’t base it solely on the bottom line and the margin it delivers; you ask what additional value you can bring. Contrast that with a developer who sells things. If you hold on to the asset and manage it, you are more likely to invest in the public benefit. This will ultimately bear up in the valuation. It will be more highly valued in the long term. Sirona is currently working on a $270 million urban regeneration project at Kings Square in Fremantle, which features a renewed public square, council offices, library, and retail and commercial premises. Urban regeneration is the minestrone of urbanism: you put everything in the pot, it’s complex. How do you assess the risk of urban renewal when it is so complicated? You could have just built a shopping mall and some offices.

Sometimes I ask myself that question. [Laughs.] Ultimately the end result is the reward. Solving a puzzle is far more rewarding than just developing something that’s kind of OK but a bit soulless, that lacks that really complex urban environment that makes cities and makes us want to live in them. The last thing that Perth needs is any more ‘kind of OK’. In a way, Fremantle should have been the place we all wanted to live – it has great urban form, it’s close to the beach and has the right density. Mount Lawley happened instead of Fremantle. What opportunity did you see in Fremantle?

We looked at Fremantle alongside other Perth metropolitan centres such as Joondalup and Midland. We formed a view that Fremantle had everything you needed; it just needed a bit more love. We assessed the opportunity and bought the Myer building before the department store ceased trading, knowing there was the potential to work with the City of Fremantle on something more broadly, as adjacent landholders. But there was no guarantee. We acquired real estate from the City and combined it with our real estate, and we’ve also been granted the rights to develop a significant civic precinct on behalf of the city. It’s got enough scale to make a huge difference for Fremantle. How did the mechanism between local council and yourself work in terms of the scope of the project?

FUTURE

Initially the City of Fremantle drafted design guidelines for the square [with CODA, which has since merged with Cox Architecture]. That gave us insight into what council was prepared to allow to be

FUTURE WEST

developed. There was also some change via a planning scheme amendment, which allowed for additional height. The City also had to go through a process of preparing a business plan, which ultimately went out for public assessment. Within that business plan was the idea of a public-private partnership between the City of Fremantle and Sirona Capital. That was widely endorsed by the community and then the council. Then there were long dated contractual arrangements predicated on us securing a state government anchor tenant for the development; 1500 government employees in that precinct would be an outstanding outcome for Fremantle. The process was fairly protracted, and in 2016 we secured an agreement to relocate a selection of government agencies into 20,000 metres of office space. Having a government tenant to underwrite the development, in a sense giving us latitude to try to do something different in terms of the retail spaces on the ground plane, has been a terrific advantage to the overall project. Developers are increasingly being called upon to deliver the public realm, often through public-private partnerships. We’ve had a shrinking of government over the last thirty years, with a degree of austerity politics. What’s your take on this? Is the private sector best placed to deliver or is it simply filling a gap?

We have come to rely on governments to deliver, but the excuse over the last thirty years in Australia has often been about tight budgets. That doesn’t resonate with me. The idea of investing in the public realm has just been ignored. Fremantle is a case in point: it’s been allowed to decay. That’s where the public sector should have been investing. There are going to be budgetary pressures for the next decade or two in WA, so the private sector will have to be prepared to invest in the public realm. But if you do, you must demonstrate its return. It may not be the bottom line of your project but you’ll see it in other ways, like the turnover of your retail tenants or the fact it acts a catalyst for the residential market, or even your own next project. Then there’s a range of social and community benefits to consider, too. You are delivering on behalf of the government. What are the rules, guidelines or relationships that shape the design of that public realm? What targets do you have to hit?

FUTURE

In Kings Square, we think the City of Fremantle is best positioned to tap into what its community wants. For example, the City has reached out to local schools around what play equipment should be installed, what we should incorporate as a play space. There are different layers

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

to how they are forming their opinions about what works in the public realm. We have several stakeholders: state and local government, the Anglican diocese, us as developer and a very engaged and interested community. All these stakeholders have their input, but it starts and finishes with the people at the grassroots level. We’re even talking to the local hairdresser about their views. These folks understand what we are trying to do, and they buy into it and help shape our vision.

The new civic building lobby.

How did you commission the architecture?

FUTURE

With the commercial precinct we selected the architects. We’ve done our own thing. For the civic precinct, the City of Fremantle ran an international design competition, which was ultimately won by Fremantle-based Kerry Hill Architects. I’d like to see competitions used more so we achieve better design outcomes and attract architects prepared to take a risk, and so we attract more architects from across the world that can add to the fabric of Perth. If you don’t get the built form right, it can punish a city for several generations.

TH Sp E Fe an OU w rn is T th ith an h a SID ar e p Nic do rch E ch ow B Je it R ite e ru re ec ct r o ns z s t ur f t d p e he on ea co g a k m ra bo s pe nd u t t it io n.

FUTURE WEST

Nic Brunsdon: How are you finding Perth? Is it OK?

Fernando Jerez: It’s a different place. It’s a remote place.

I’m not from Perth either. I’m from Melbourne, and lived there for twenty-four years (and in the Middle East, for two years). When I came back from the Middle East I was living between Melbourne and Perth. I picked Perth because it has opportunity, a real willingness to look outside itself. It’s in a formative stage.

Do you have the same thoughts after living here for ten years?

I’m totally excited about Perth. The isolation is its strength. We can be our own place without feeling pressure or influence. You moved to Perth just over three years ago, but you haven’t built here.

FUTURE

As a small practice we don’t find many opportunities to work on large-scale projects in Western Australia without demonstrated local capability. As a local practice it’s difficult to have a tower here in Elizabeth Quay or a piece of Yagan Square. But just because we haven’t built in Perth before doesn’t mean we can’t do it. One of the few ways we get the chance to design great public works is through competitions, particularly international, open design competitions, as there are not many in Australia.

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

In architecture, we talk about contextual relevance, specificity and local culture. Is there a conceit about international competitions, that you can be here in Perth and enter design competitions in Helsinki, or for Science Island in Lithuania (which your firm SMAR Architecture Studio won)?

SMAR’s proposal for Guggenheim Helsinki includes an interior street programmed by the demands and desires of citizens.

Being away gives you a fresh view of the local condition; it enables you to understand it better. If you are in the place, you are so constrained by your experience, your daily life, that you don’t have the freedom to design as bravely as if you were a foreigner. There is a freedom as a foreigner to tackle a local response. But even as a foreigner, you need a good interlocutor for decision-making. This is evident on competition juries. You need more architects or urban thinkers than bureaucrats on the juries in order to establish a dialogue about architecture and public space. When I went to Kaunas in Lithuania I discovered the city has a city architect who works closely with the mayor. He’s the key person in the transformation of the city, and tries to change public space through competitions. As architects, some of us have to be in decision-making roles while others need to work on the periphery.

FUTURE

Following pages: SMAR’s winning scheme for the National Science and Innovation Centre of Lithuania in Kaunas, known as Science Island.

FUTURE

FUTURE WEST

FUTURE

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

FUTURE WEST

FUTURE

Open Wi-Fi attracts people to the Apple Store at Madrid’s Puerta del Sol. Image: Flickr/Alvaro Ibanez CC BY 2.0

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

Through the process of entering these competitions, do you now see commonalities between your schemes? Are there similarities in their public interfaces, programs, buildings?

A commonality is that the building program itself needs a public condition, such as being mixed-use, to attract people. If the building program is totally private, like offices, it won’t work. You see it even in Perth, where you have a collection of privately owned buildings that don’t generate public space, and then the institutions. This is an approach that is common but wrong. They try to define programs for public space – they create, for example, a kind of amusement park (with fountains and water). This is not a public space. The building program needs a public condition. Another aspect of public space is connectivity; that is, a space that allows people to connect. At Puerta del Sol in Madrid the historic gathering condition changed when an Apple Store opened in the square, so now people go to the square to congregate near the free Wi-Fi. Public space is now really about the hotspot.

FUTURE

[Laughs.] How do you design the hotspot? I think architects may not have all the answers as to what the public domain is, but we can ask the right questions. In open public competitions, you are not just responding to a brief, you are asking questions of people who hold power in the city. In the case of Perth, what I would be asking is: Why is Perth invisible right now in our region? How can Perth look to other cities north and west (and not east)? And could truly open and international competitions be part of creating new public attention on Perth and its civic spaces?

TH G E O eof IN Ar ffic f W SI O ch e o ar DE w ffic ite f t n o R ca ork er ct s he f t n ing ab pe Go he cr o ea for ut aks ver WA te g ho w nm ch ove w ith en an rn arc Je t ge m hi nn . en tec ie t ts

FUTURE WEST

Jennie Officer: What is the role of the state government, or public, architect?

Geoff Warn: The role is to provide leadership and independent strategic advice to government to improve the design of public buildings and spaces, and enhance the quality of the built environment. That’s the job definition, and we follow that line. We provide strategic advice to the highest levels of government, such as the premier, the Minister for Planning and the Department of Finance, Building Management and Works. Ideally this advice is delivered at the early stages of projects. How should projects be conceived and briefed? How might pitfalls be avoided? We also contribute to developing policy, such as the Design WA planning framework, and we have prepared several design standards for public buildings. The Office of the Government Architect (OGA) also has an advocacy role. We do not undertake hands-on design work. That is the role of practising architects.

FUTURE

Those in the role of Western Australia’s principal architect previously designed many important public buildings in WA: the old State Buildings, Dumas House and Perth Technical School (later renamed Perth Technical College). Why has this role shifted over time? Why does government now outsource the design responsibility?

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

FUTURE

Dumas House upon completion in 1966. Image: Fritz Kos. Sourced from the collections of the State Library of Western Australia and reproduced with the permission of the Library Board of Western Australia.

FUTURE WEST

There’s been a change in the relations between government and the private sector. Government is careful not to be in direct competition with private enterprise or to duplicate what commercial businesses can offer. The Public Works Department closed [in 1985] and transformed into the Building Management Authority (BMA). The BMA, on behalf of government, commissioned projects through private enterprise and assumed a management role to look after the state’s interests. With this change government ceased designing public housing, schools, courts, hospitals, train stations, fire stations, prisons, power stations, and so forth, and through the Department of Finance, Building Management and Works (BMW) is now focused on procuring and project-managing these works. You could read the foundation for this change as economic or ideological; they are closely aligned. Government is focused on core service delivery now rather than running a design office, with the benefits being improved transparency, increased competition and improved value for money. Being a small office of five people, how do you intervene and be influential?

FUTURE

We do not have the authority to ‘intervene’ but we can ‘influence’ by being persuasive, by providing thoughtful, well-considered advice. Where available, evidence-based advice can be very effective within government. A good example of the OGA’s impact is the new Perth Stadium project. We were involved in the briefing process and I was then invited onto the selection panel. Since then, we have been consistently involved in the progress of the project, and our advice is sought whenever project objectives and design aspirations diverge. It’s the same story with the new Western Australian Museum. We benchmarked and defined what were considered to be good responses to parts of the brief – like internal and external spaces, circulation zones, reception foyers – using agreed exemplar projects. The OGA collected good examples nationally and from around the world, and specifically identified what was successful about the reference project and for what reasons. We played an important role in the negotiation process, particularly with respect to the architectural and design aspects of the shortlisted museum proposals. We continue to assist in evaluating the numerous iterations that are inevitable as the initial concept progresses towards a completed building. At a different scale we work with agencies like LandCorp, for example, reviewing master plans, design guidelines, and commercial proposals for apartments and mixed-use developments. It is through design review that we can suggest where proposals can be improved.

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

That can be helpful both to the architects and the client representatives who are procuring the work; we offer support if the project is good, or advise how it could be improved. The strategic and independent nature of our advice can be most effective in helping the parties involved to arrive at a mutually beneficial balance between a project’s commercial and public interests. Elizabeth Quay is an obvious example of such a relationship. Government successfully initiated the project to link the city and the river, and procured the inlet and the surrounding public realm. Private enterprise will deliver the major buildings – hotels, apartments, office towers – and the OGA helps maintain a consistent standard of design. That’s where there is a clear benefit in the role of the government architect as independent strategic advisor focused on delivery processes and design quality. How do you maintain the authority of your role?

The government architect can be effective when government calls on us to help. Our contribution is most valuable when we are at the table at the right time and have the opportunity to be heard. Our role has gravitas when the highest level of government gives clear and unambiguous support to the position. Then we can be helpful and effective. Does that work beyond election cycles?

FUTURE

Yes. Impact and effectiveness don’t change in terms of the role, which is fixed, but it does in terms of the relationships. The [former] Barnett government was in office long enough to understand what the government architect does, and to see the benefits of the government architect’s contributions. Now we have a new team of ministers so we must start afresh – it will take time to establish new relationships, and build up understanding and confidence. Government is very familiar with policy, so our built environment policy Better Places and Spaces is an effective tool – it’s there to explain the benefits of good design. We’re currently working with the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage on a major overhaul of the R-Codes. As part of the Design WA reforms, we’ve helped develop a statutory policy on design quality in the built environment to guide better private-sector-developed outcomes. The new State Planning Policy includes ten design principles that define good design – addressing landscape, sustainability, amenity, functionality, build quality and several other elements. Aesthetics, or architectural expression, is one of those principles. The principles help guide qualitative judgments, unify opinions and define design elements

FUTURE WEST

that can be more objectively assessed. The next stages of Design WA will see the development of several other documents to supplement the Apartment Design guide, which will address precinct design, neighbourhood design and single house design. Government creates a lot of policy documents, guidelines and frameworks. Is there a future for the government in creating public buildings?

I don’t have an easy or simple answer to this question. Of course there will always be public buildings; however, the way in which those buildings are procured and managed may change over time. Current international trends have government disposing of assets and gradually relinquishing its responsibility for the delivery of public buildings, favouring a much greater involvement from private enterprise. The commercialisation of public infrastructure, amenity and services is synonymous with globalisation and its flows of capital. Cities across the globe are seeing the positive and negative effects of this new condition; mass urbanisation and inequality being two obvious consequences. In this climate it may be that government-owned or government-funded buildings and public places will become less common. The private sector may eventually provide a large portion of our infrastructure – hospitals, prisons, schools, sporting venues, public transport, water, power, healthcare and so forth. There is much debate on this topic, about the effects on cities and the subsequent changes to our profession, the ways that projects are delivered, and the role of architects in creating the built environment. For example, design-centric practices and critical discourse seem to be waning and there are more large multidisciplinary firms operating across several jurisdictions, geared to address today’s large and complex projects. Processes are increasingly regulatory and managerial, which demands considerably more effort. Greater demands result in an increasing number of specialist consultants providing services that used to be part of the architect’s commission. But this movement is possibly cyclical; I expect it can and will change. There appears to be a growing number of people exploring different approaches and new models that are simpler and more effective. In the meantime, while new directions are being explored, let’s not forget that government has the capacity, and is well placed, to look after aspects and qualities of life that are not necessarily improved through commercialisation. Government leadership can also be very good at effecting positive change.

FUTURE

How might these changes affect our understanding of public space?

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

The Twilight Hawkers Markets at Forrest Place. Image courtesy of Tourism Western Australia © Stephen Nicholls

FUTURE

This is where the government architect role is important – as the defender of the value of well-designed public buildings and spaces. Public access to places and spaces in the city is what helps define us as citizens and helps form active and engaged communities. An increasingly commodified society will tend to construct its constituents as consumers. It’s critical to have a voice that advocates the public benefit of good design, and which helps to support government’s responsibilities to the community. Otherwise we hand ourselves over to market forces. Given that we’ve seen repeated failures from the market with regard to quality and amenity offered – housing is an obvious example – we might want to adopt an open but diligent approach to finding the most beneficial roles from the partnering of private and public sectors. There needs to be a broader championing of good design so the community can engage in the conversation and so that good design is understood to bring public benefit. Continued dialogue with a community around design is necessary if we want more people to appreciate the lasting value of public building and spaces. Government architects can add much to this debate.

FUTURE

ha r t rts im e.

H AR P U TI Th Au e N B p B sh st u G U b r a A p al lic L I i d th ia e a a h b LD IC Fe ei g n a uil r d ra d ve d lix i m p ng ev I Jo c u N h o r s el v p a e ns op er os ng of G W l s m ea e ed e on S en f ov i s t c e n te

C FUTURE WEST

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

FUTURE

Britain’s first civic impositions onto the Western Australian landscape were the usual colonial institutions. The courthouses, jails, government offices, general post offices, churches and schools in this early period controlled the newly founded colonies, as well as the Indigenous peoples. Following the definition in Ian Molyneux’s seminal text Looking Around Perth (1981), from which the entries in this diagram until 1979 are taken, these kinds of buildings are easily identified as ‘public’ in nature. Definition, however, becomes ambiguous as we approach the twenty-first century. Cultural and administrative buildings, which were predominantly designed by the Public Works Department (PWD), were constructed in line with Western Australia’s boom/bust narratives. So were commercial precincts like Fremantle’s West End, where Victorian-era facades provide the backdrop against which public life unfolds. Preserved with assistance from Catholic educational institutions, the West End has become one of Australia’s most celebrated, if not largely ossified, heritage precincts. After the dissolution of the PWD in 1985, the production of the civic realm was opened up to a wide array of private authors, in tune with the 1980s spirit of market deregulation. It wasn’t until 1991 that local journal The Architect sought some clarification of authorship, introducing the new category of Public/Institutional into its yearly awards. At this time architects were questioning the increasing appropriation of civic space by commercial interests, with Geoffrey London describing the redevelopment of Forrest Chase as a “well-marketed simulation of a civic heart” in a 1990 issue of The Architect. As London wrote that article there was talk of repurposing the Perth GPO, a plan that last year came to fruition, with Swedish fashion juggernaut H&M now wearing the Hillson Beasley-designed Beaux-Arts facade as a billboard. George Temple Poole’s much celebrated Titles Office has also been reimagined, with the insertion of exclusive new commercial tenancies into its intensely urban structure. Recent moves in Perth tend towards urban regeneration schemes like the Perth City Link and the foreshore redevelopment, which provide the convergence point for a wide array of interests. Elizabeth Quay is the iridescence tableau – although currently rather empty – that shows this ambiguity most acutely. Here, a large piece of infrastructure intersects a public square, providing the foundation for large-scale private investment. The trajectory of public buildings in Western Australia over time parallels the peaks and troughs of its mining economy. The diagram overleaf tracks this cyclical course, but what will follow the current economic downturn?

FUTURE WEST

colonisation convicts

1890 e m aj

s hi

W A

commercial

fre

museums libraries theaters art galleries stadiums campuses

m us

s rg e’ ge o st

cultural

government hospitals jails post offices education military

pe rth

tit

fic

us nd ho ro u e th

administrative

population influx prosperity federation expansion

1850

1829

population growth labour boom public works expansion land sales

aspirations deprivations labour shortages land grants

gold

m rth

gold strike

religious

y’

banks hotels precincts shopping centres plazas

planning schemes percentage of mining value added to national GDP relative scale of projects

FUTURE

significant projects

ol ga co

ra rth pe

roads bridges dams stations harbours

ilw

y hw ny al ba

infrastructure

pi pe

lin

churches chapels mosques convents

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

wars

the modern era

deregulation

depression railways agricultural boom instability

slow post war recovery mineral processing boom oil, copper, nickel suburban expansion

RIP PWD LNG exports market diversification

today GFC chinese foreign investment mining downturn

le an st ex

de r

pe rth

lib ra ry

l al er th nc

l te

tre

rth

lin

jo o

tra

ar m s ck ro o tw

rro

in g

lin

lia

’s

lth

er si

y’

m pu s

tre

lib ra ry

fio

pe rth

2020

2000

1980

1940

1919

FUTURE

corridor plan

stephenson hepburn

metroplan

network city

directions 2031

FUTURE WEST

Public ← FUTURE

FUTURE

Open and shared by everyone.

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

Domain WEST �

WEST

A territory governed by someone.

FUTURE WEST

el Am

pe or

LE K

R PA

WEST

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

n Sa r/ 0 a, ck 2. eg li C ri F N No e: BY g in Ima CC t s le o. re rk sc tu pa ci Fu A an n Fr ree G

in d. st oo d ve c g an s in bli ns se pu ze s r ti ne fo Ci si s b u rk pa

WEST

FUTURE WEST

As councils across Australia strive to enhance their livability, sustainability and competitiveness, parklets are proving popular. A poll of the 300-plus citizens gathered for the inaugural Perth City Summit in August found that parklets are the street activation people would most like to see. Why are parklets so desirable? San Francisco is central to the parklet story. In 2005, the design collective Rebar turned a parking space into a ‘park’ for two hours as a comment on the use and control of public space in the city. This was followed in 2006 by the installation of more than 40 temporary ‘parks’ for PARK(ing) Day, now an annual, international event. By 2010, San Francisco had introduced a policy to facilitate the installation of parklets, and this has been an important precedent for parklet policies in Australia and internationally.

Rebar’s temporary parklet in 2005.

There are more than 50 parklets across San Francisco. According to the City and County of San Francisco’s Pavements to Parks program, they have “appeared … under the sponsorship of nonprofits, small businesses, neighborhood groups, and others”. There is a strong sense of democracy and accessibility in this account: anyone can install a parklet in their city and, apparently, many do. The Deepistan National Parklet (aka ‘the Deeplet’), the parklet installed by Deep Jawa outside his home in the Mission District, is a celebrated example. 40

WEST

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

The Deepistan parklet. Image: Flickr/Steve Rhodes CC BY NC-ND 2.0

WEST

FUTURE WEST

The City of San Francisco’s Parklet Manual gives detailed instructions on how to construct a parklet with respect to planning laws.

WEST

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

We hear much less about the businesses behind parklets. Cafes, bakeries, bars and pizza shops have installed almost all of the 50-plus parklets in San Francisco. Deepistan is exceptional not merely for its topiary dinosaur, but for its non-commercial nature. This is not surprising, since the proponent pays for installation and maintenance, and the costs are significant (typically well over $20,000). While the term ‘parklet’ was coined in San Francisco (by City planner Andres Power, as a catchier name for the ‘walklet’ proposed by Rebar), there are many other precedents – most obviously, perhaps, given the strong connection between parklets and cafes, the longstanding use by restaurants of footpaths and roadways as dining areas. The parklet outside Vans cafe in Cottesloe, for example, was approved under an Alfresco Dining Licence. Converting a parking space into a sitting space is hardly revolutionary. Yet advocates of parklets rarely make this connection. The story of parklets as new and novel, stemming from Rebar’s DIY park, is far more appealing, suggesting a bottom-up, creative and democratic remaking of the public realm. The link to one of the world’s most innovation-rich cities doesn’t hurt, either. The reluctance to connect parklets to business by planners and policymakers reflects concerns about the commercialisation and commodification of the city. The problems of privately owned public spaces (‘POPOs’ – provided by large developers in exchange for variations to planning rules) are well documented, particularly the issues around high levels of management and surveillance. Parklets, however, are not POPOs. Parklets are installed on public land, they are temporary and they cannot be controlled by the business that installed them. Each bears a sign proclaiming the public nature of the space. Parklets can be used by anyone, regardless of whether they purchase anything. One might critique parklets for their scale, their distribution or their use. They are tiny, and do very little to address important needs for play, exercise or engagement with nature. Some appear a little neglected; many are located in areas that are already leafy. In San Francisco, where consultation processes prior to the approval of parklets are extensive, parklets have been rejected for fear they will contribute not to community empowerment but to gentrification. 43

WEST

FUTURE WEST

Top: N orth Perth’s Angove Street Off-cut Parklet, designed by NOMA*. Bottom: T he Wray Avenue Solar Parklet by Seedesign Studio. Image: Jean-Paul Horré

WEST

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

So how can we explain the popularity of the parklet? Perhaps because parklets support, and build off, the kinds of places people like – and these aren’t just green spaces. As US urban activist and writer Jane Jacobs explained so powerfully, cities need more than parks and plazas: commercial activity is a crucial component of public life. Cafes are increasingly important sites for community interaction as other places for local exchange continue to disappear, including banks, post offices, corner delis and newsagents, on top of the local hardware, haberdashery and other specialist shops that have failed in competition against larger retailers and the digital marketplace. Parklets present some hope for walkable, local commerce. Or, perhaps it has more to do with the lack of options for public participation in shaping the city. Parklets may be led by businesses, but they are local businesses, sometimes supported with public or crowdsourced funds, and parklet policies mean that the spaces cannot be private. Opportunities for participation are often much greater than for the larger-scale public spaces created by professionals. They also vividly show how much space we waste on private cars. After parklets, the second most desired street activation, according to the Perth City Summit poll, was ‘creative installations’, then street events, then murals. Compared to these, parklets present a more tangible and accessible option. Clearly, we can’t rely on businesses alone to provide adequate and appropriate public spaces – there remains an important role for local and state governments to provide a high-quality public realm. But parklets show that businesses are not all seeking to play the system. As we think about public life, might parklets provide a useful typology on which to build?

WEST

FUTURE WEST

ng ty i si rn . er tu ds iv is ar un s w e pu ut Th m f o ca sel it

ee Br

ev Tr

E N O D ST E N D TH N a SA en

O G Y IN K BE O LO

WEST

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

Curtin University recently announced a redevelopment plan across 114 hectares. Its vision, as stated in the university’s Mobility at Curtin briefing paper, is to provide an “urban context that supports constant exchange between education, research, industry and government … where knowledge and innovation extend beyond buildings”. The vision focuses on the public realm, with a particular emphasis on the contemporary urban planning orthodoxies of porous boundaries and programmed public spaces combined with statement architecture. Curtin is not the only academic institution with these aims. The University of Western Australia is heading towards the tail end of its decade-long Campus Plan 2010, which continues to shape the institution’s ambitions of creating a “university in a town” that cultivates a distinct sense of place while knitting itself into the local community. The project hinges on flexible and adaptable spaces that promote social contact. In Victoria, RMIT University has embarked on the $220 million New Academic Street project, inspired by Melbourne’s laneway culture and the idea of the 24-hour city. The Australian National University’s $220 million revitalisation of Union Court has kicked off with a pop-up village, with student accommodation, a student services hub, new learning spaces and an events centre to come.

RMIT’s New Academic Street. Image: Tess Kelly

WEST

FUTURE WEST

Where is this passion for transformation coming from? Historically, ‘sandstone’ Australian university campuses have been shaped by European ideas of the campus as a place apart, shielded from the unruly city. Postwar planning continued the separation of the campus from the city by cordoning it off in the suburbs. However, in an increasingly deregulated global market, universities must change tack, become more inclusive. There is more competition to attract the best and brightest students and researchers. Universities are vying for influential industry and social partnerships, research grants and a seat at the policy table. Study habits have also transformed as a result of the digital revolution. In this climate, the ability to create an engaging experience on a real-world campus can set an institution apart, potentially offering social and educational benefits that can’t be had online or on other universities’ campuses. With its growing emphasis on public programming, mixed-use planning and the insertion of small-to-medium enterprises from the private sector, campus design strategy has begun to mirror many Australian urban regeneration strategies. So what could this look like? Campus-centred public programming might involve inviting the ‘neighbours’ over not only for public lectures, but for summer day parties and winter footy matches. The private-sector tenants might include farmers’ markets and lifestyle retail, making the quad more like a local high street. We can already see an ‘urbanisation’ of traditional campus building typologies: in particular, student accommodation is more and more resembling share houses, boutique hostels or luxury condos. At the same time as universities are bringing urban design principles onto campus, they are also doing the reverse, dispersing different schools, research clusters and faculties into the city. Curtin University’s law school is nestled in Perth’s downtown legal district, exposing students to the cut and thrust of the judicial world. Similarly, Newcastle University has recently relocated its Faculty of Business and Law from the main Callaghan campus to its $95 million NeW Space CBD campus. These satellite campuses in city centres are also developing a civic sensibility, just as their associated main campuses are opening themselves up to the community. A key international example can be found in the United States. In 2016, Arizona State University’s Beus Center for Law and Society (BCLS), the new 48

WEST

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

home of the university’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, opened in downtown Phoenix, adjacent to the legal and government precincts. (The main university campus is in suburban Tempe.) The mission of the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law is to “raise the bar” through ethical legal practices, and to help the local community – many of whom are struggling with poverty and a lack of citizenship documentation – understand their rights and how the law shapes society. The college invites the neighbourhood into a space that, for most, is intimidating and sometimes downright threatening. Intentionally hazy lines between campus and city are drawn through the form and function of spaces, programming and public-facing services. The campus houses small- to medium-sized social enterprises, including the Arizona Justice Project, which reviews and assists in cases of innocent or wrongly imprisoned individuals. The college also encourages its students to engage with the community, with more than 90 per cent of them participating in pro bono activities and public service; some are part of the review teams at the Arizona Justice Project. In a climate of challenging economic, social and environmental problems, universities are well positioned to take on this kind of public leadership role. Reorienting a networked research culture, such as is found in universities, towards the broader community can place universities in a position where they become a catalyst for social development. Another way in which universities can double down on their chance to make an impact is by physically clustering together students, researchers, social-impact businesses and start-ups. The Melbourne Innovation Districts initiative, announced in August 2017 and jointly established by the University of Melbourne, RMIT University and the City of Melbourne, seeks to drive investment in the knowledge economy through leveraging the knowledge in the northern section of Melbourne’s CBD. The district is already home to 21 per cent of all knowledge-sector jobs in Melbourne, and includes the two universities’ major campuses. Plus, according to the Mapping Victoria’s Startup Ecosystem report commissioned by LaunchVic and released in August 2017, Victoria is home to most of the start-ups in Australia with a value of more than $1 billion; however, only 34 per cent of these local start-ups currently partner with universities or research institutions. There is an explicit ambition by 49

WEST

FUTURE WEST

Melbourne Innovation Districts to attract more small businesses, start-ups and social enterprises to further build the talent pool that feeds innovation. Public spaces and resources designed with civic participation in mind – cycling networks, free Wi-Fi and smart-sensor technologies – are all part of the plan. The Melbourne Innovation Districts project displays how universities might employ innovative processes to create innovative places. Universities only need to look in their own backyards for the expertise that could assist them in designing new campuses. Importantly, procurement processes could better reflect the aspirations of the diverse neighbourhoods and innovation districts universities seek to emulate; the focus should be on the value of emergent and smaller players in driving change. Australia’s design sector is largely made up of small- to medium-sized businesses, but risk-averse procurement processes mean they are rarely involved in campus planning in a meaningful way. Campus procurement could build in mechanisms to help smaller, younger and newer practices to scale up. Redefining risk to include these smaller practices in funded competitions and merit-based tender selection would help to support a local industry while capturing new ideas. A culture in which large offices are partnered with smaller offices, combined with active engagement with alumni, could also reshape how universities understand risk. Innovation in procurement would help to reshape universities not only as open platforms for shared discovery, but as unique local places textured with character. Western Australia has an opportunity to plan memorable, distinctive campuses: the state already has a strong support for experimental building typologies and inclusive public spaces. By championing procurement approaches that broaden the field of play, new and emerging practices could connect to capital and inject new ideas. This would place Western Australia at the forefront of procurement innovation while creating space to develop and retain local talent.

Top right: The Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law’s new home in the Beus Center for Law and Society, in downtown Phoenix. Image: Arizona State University Bottom right: Students walk through the courtyard of the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, Beus Center for Law and Society, in downtown Phoenix. Image: Arizona State University

WEST

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

WEST

FUTURE WEST

lcu of al sy on su te lo vi ur ow r co K fo ge est y um ma W it se I nd or mu g. a th w on on Au ne K ur t e ng Me ic th Ho de tr s is in & Di M+ ure zog al t r ur He ult C

WEST

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

E M AL m EU useulike? SC S m ok E U he lo M will tture en TH u F t ns te O E Wha the f is of Kr TH ka

WEST

FUTURE WEST

Over ten years ago, while an undergraduate at UWA, I attended a talk at the Subiaco Arts Centre by the late Richard Neville. With his days as a counterculture warrior behind him, Neville had, in his later years, cast his mind to the future. “Sustainability will be the next revolution!” he emphatically exclaimed, referring to the economic, social and environmental responsibility we must take for our own survival. I took this to include responsibility for the cultural centre in which I was standing. I remember this line because ‘revolution’ wasn’t a word that I heard often – at least in relation to the contemporary – while growing up in Perth. Recently, I had reason to recall this thought as a visitor to this year’s Venice Art Biennale, a gargantuan contemporary art event that takes over the ancient watery city every two years. Comprising 118 islands linked together by 400 bridges, Venice, while undoubtedly beautiful, is a complicated city to navigate. In recent years, it has faced substantial challenges, including financial difficulties, erosion, pollution, subsidence and relentless crowds of tourists. Here, in a crumbling palazzo, flanked on both sides by narrow canals, I found myself wondering about the logistical, financial and ecological costs involved in the production of the Biennale and other temporary art fairs and museum exhibitions. I also pondered how the local audience benefited from biennials and art fairs. Of course the Biennale is an important income-generator for Venice, as contemporary culture is now for many destinations. Over the past ten to twenty years, a number of ambitious building projects have taken place, with star architects employed to design vast, contemporary temples for the collection and display of art and artefacts. The Tate Modern is a pioneering example of this: a new extension to it by architects Herzog & de Meuron recently opened. In the US, much attention has been made of Renzo Piano’s redesign of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, and of Snøhetta’s extension for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). In the Middle East, Jean Nouvel’s ambitious Louvre Abu Dhabi project is nearing completion; in Hong Kong, construction has commenced on the Herzog & de Meuron-designed museum M+; and in China, a country that, in 1950, had only 25 museums (many of which were subsequently destroyed during the Cultural Revolution), 451 new museums opened in 2013 alone. Australia – if a little late to the party – is of course not exempt from building these mega-museums. Tasmanian 54

WEST

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

The construction site of Sea World Culture and Arts Center, designed by Maki and Associates, which opens in Shekou, Shenzhen, in December 2017. It will incorporate Design Society, a design centre that includes an outpost of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Image courtesy of Design Society

WEST

FUTURE WEST

The new extension to the WA Museum, designed by Hassell and OMA. Image courtesy of WA Museum and Multiplex

WEST

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

millionaire David Walsh’s MONA (described by him as a “subversive adult Disneyland”) opened in Hobart in 2011, and can be credited with single-handedly transforming Tasmanian tourism. Just a few months ago, the NSW Government announced its contribution of $244 million towards the Sydney Modern project, an expansion of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, while in Perth, audiences wait for the 2020 opening of the New Museum for Western Australia, a $428.3 million project that has been designed, according to architects Hassell and OMA, as a civic space to “promote engagement and collaboration”. Is yet another monolithic public building what people really need? Is it responsible to continue to roll out this museum model, as we head into a future of potential economic, environmental and social precariousness? Maintaining, programming, staffing and evolving such institutions have very real financial and human costs. The optimism around the boom of museums in China, for example, is already giving way to a reality of impossible overheads, not enough art to fill the architecture and not enough visitors. Meanwhile, in Western Australia, a state of over 2.6 million people – 33 per cent of whom live outside of the extended metropolitan area – whose geographic isolation prevents it from experiencing the domestic and international visitation that other Australian states enjoy, we could ask ourselves who the intended public for the museum is and how they might they engage with a museum of this scale. There may be some clues in the question of what makes a museum a civic building, and an institution that contributes to the public good. The concept of the museum as a civic building has a long history. The Musaeum (or Mouseion at Alexandria), from which the word ‘museum’ derives, was founded in the third century BCE as a centre for music, poetry, philosophy and literature, and was home to the famous Library of Alexandria. The Musaeum held no art collection, but instead functioned as a prototypical university, in which – around a central, communal table – scholars were invited to congregate and share ideas. Much more recently, in the article “What is the museum of the future?”, published in the Autumn 2015 edition of Tate Etc, British architect Stephen Witherford suggested that, in the future, “a museum will shift from typically being one in which a building embodies authority … and broadcasts information to us, to one which has a more direct and casual relationship to its urban environment and engages people in a reflexive way”. And so history continues to repeat itself. 57

WEST

FUTURE WEST

WEST

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

WEST

FUTURE WEST

In attempting to construct a civic space it pays to acknowledge how people come together in various contexts. Community is formed in parks and squares, in bars and cafes, in places of learning or work. A museum of a large scale could factor these spaces into their operations (as with ACMI X in Melbourne, a co-working space initiated by Australian Centre for the Moving Image, located in the Melbourne Arts Precinct and available to the public), or alternatively, an institution might offer programming in existing community spaces. The artist Dayanita Singh, for example, suggested in an article of 4 January 2017, published on her website, that the museum of the future might be a suitcase on wheels: agile, economical and capable of reaching a wide cross section of people without being reliant on audiences visiting it. These suitcases might affiliate themselves with large collecting institutions, or alternatively be standalone operations, as with her ongoing art project Museum Bhavan. Perhaps the question is not what the future is of the museum but of the many: many operations, which might work together in networked, collaborative, evolving, responsive and considered ways across geographies. As well as enjoying lower operating costs, thus allowing public funding to be spread further between them, smaller organisations can be more nimble and responsive to local issues. They can allow for more face-to-face engagement between programmers and the public, encourage repeat visits and further opportunities for discourse and exchange, and illustrate that the most interesting ideas can happen at the intersection of different disciplines and through combined knowledge. Could current, temporary, offsite WA Museum activities become permanent? Could the network of the WA Museum extend beyond its satellites in Albany, Fremantle, Geraldton and Kalgoorlie? There is a role for all scales and types of museums. Perth and Western Australia as a whole offer opportunities to explore this, with ample outdoor space, temporarily empty retail buildings, strong communities of artists and other creatives, and a demonstrated thirst for culture (Perth’s Fringe World Festival is now the third largest Fringe in the world). Western Australia has the isolation and freedom to explore what constitutes a museum of the future, to consider its scale in relation to economic, environmental and social sustainability. Perhaps we might see a revolution here after all.

WEST

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

Top: The WA Maritime Museum in Fremantle. Image courtesy of Western Australian Museum Bottom: Museum of the Goldfields in Kalgoorlie. Image courtesy of Western Australian Museum

WEST

FUTURE WEST

o lt ta g gi in di ap g sh es. c in tt in la Pu ork t p w ea gr

M R O U

TO IR

h ra s Sa rn Ba

WEST

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

Picture the scene. You’re on your daily commute, catching the train from Fremantle into the city, head bowed, peering at your phone. A cavalcade of news stories, friends’ holiday snaps and random promoted images of trending slippers proceed down your social media feed, which you idly push along in search of something fresh. You look up. Most of the people around you are doing something similar. Connecting intensely with their smartphones, and not with anyone near them. It’s a scene repeated across Australian cities every weekday morning, as more and more of our daily lives – how we work, how we navigate, how we learn and how we entertain ourselves – take place through the interface of glowing rectangular screens. There is societal concern about what smartphone addiction is doing to our attention spans, our capacity for random human interactions and our levels of self-esteem. But what does the age of the smartphone mean for our cities, and for the way we design our public spaces? It's a question that has intrigued tech futurists for decades. Bill Mitchell was an Australian-born architect who trained a generation of digital urbanists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to imagine and plan for the coming ‘city of bits’. Writing in 1995, in his book City of Bits, Mitchell likened the impact of the infobahn to that of Haussmann’s nineteenth-century Parisian boulevards, in their capacity to radically reshape the city. Unlike Haussmann’s network of avenues, parks and water infrastructure, the ‘invisible city’ of the twenty-first century would, Mitchell argued, be shaped more by the logic of networked data. He believed places would be “constructed virtually by software instead of physically from stones and timbers”. Architects and planners would need a whole new sensibility and new training to support this coming city. Mitchell wasn’t the only one who believed our digital future would dramatically reshape our cities’ futures. Media futurist Marshall McLuhan speculated in 1964 that the coming ‘global village’ would inevitably mean that the city “as a form of major dimensions must inevitably dissolve like the fading shot in a movie”. Our need for spatial proximities and population densities, he believed, would become redundant as more and more of our connections would occur virtually. Left: The lighting up of the Waterloo public housing tower in Sydney Image: Tom Wholohan

WEST

FUTURE WEST

Of course, the future didn't quite turn out that way. Vibrant, productive places still matter, and architects and designers are still building places of “stones and timbers”. Smartphoneequipped citizens need not be tethered to their desks to surf the infobahn. The internet of things (IoT) entails more and more of our urban services and infrastructure being connected via tiny distributed sensors, allowing the virtual space of the internet to become increasingly connected with our urban fabric. The city of bits has become the city of data. The millions of interactions and transactions that take place in cities on any given day – volumes of energy used; movements of people, traffic, water and waste; social media interactions; emails; financial and retail transactions; and multi-modal transport flows – are now generating huge volumes of ‘data exhaust’. This data is increasingly being put to work in an attempt to better manage the pressures and challenges faced by our cities. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many hope this age of big data will lead to smarter, more responsive cities. Australian cities have begun trialling the use of smart technologies – parking apps, smart lighting trials, public Wi-Fi – to improve a number of basic city services. The Australian Government's $50 million Smart Cities and Suburbs Program will help scale up these investments to allow for more ambitious technology trials, and no doubt Perth will be a beneficiary of it. Many smart-city technologies are designed to help local governments better monitor the performance of their own services in areas like waste collection and roads maintenance. The city of Joondalup, for example, is partnering with Telstra to test the potential applications of IoT technologies to better monitor a range of environmental factors like temperature, humidity, pollution, and light and noise levels in real time. The recently released Smarter Planning Perth (SPP) map is another initiative that allows government agencies and utilities involved in infrastructure works to better collaborate, share costs and coordinate timetables. Ultimately, this is a platform designed to minimise works congestion and cut project time frames, allowing the city's road networks to run more efficiently. But what kinds of places will these smart technologies and services actually create? With a focus on data analytics, efficiency and automation, there is no guarantee that the latest data-driven technologies will necessarily help our public places thrive. 64

WEST

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

Telstra and the City of Joondalup have joined forces in a trial of 'smart park' applications at Tom Simpson Park.

As the tech pundit Rick Robinson observed in his 2016 article “Why Smart Cities still aren’t working for us after 20 years. And how we can fix them”, commercial agendas for smart cities are “just as likely to reduce our life expectancy and social engagement by making it easier to order high-fat, high-sugar takeaway food on our smartphones to be delivered to our couches by drones whilst we immerse ourselves in multiplayer virtual reality games”. In other words, new data-driven technologies may make cities work more efficiently, but that may not always be what we want from our places. One of the great lessons of the past two decades is that, despite our growing dependence on digital platforms of communication, spaces that enable us to connect and mingle in 65

WEST

FUTURE WEST

real life still matter. Our enduring connection to places of “stones and timbers” surely reflects our all-too-human desire not only for seamless interfaces and swipe-able apps, but also for places of disturbance, delight, random noises and chance encounters. As the US urbanist and writer Jane Jacobs observed many decades ago, good places are nourished by diversity and difference, not uniformity and efficiency. We need, therefore, to ensure the newfound insights generated by all of our cities’ data works in the service of good places. How can this be done? In the first instance, putting data to use may in fact lead to a very analogue solution. For example, more fine-grained urban data that alerts us to temperature anomalies in different places should be used not only to monitor, but also to cool. This means more trees, not just more sensors. Many cities have begun to design bus stops equipped with heat-responsive water misters and blinds, so that they act as places of respite and shelter for weary travellers. This approach uses digital technologies to artificially ‘switch on’ natural services like water-cooling and shade in public environments that have, as a consequence of the use of materials like bitumen and concrete, become urban heat islands, exposing some of our most vulnerable to conditions of extreme heat. Digital technologies can also help us navigate and experience our places through the events and characters that have shaped their unique identities, allowing for different, perhaps more intimate, interactions between people and places. Through digital overlays, soundscapes and augmented media we can now interact with the past ‘lives’ of spaces, creating experiential interactions between the built environments of today and recorded spaces of the past. Crucially, these augmented experiences of the history of a place can help us recover that which has been lost through decades of urban transformation. Digital technologies can also be used to disrupt the official narratives of place. At Sydney’s Waterloo public housing tower, slated for demolition as part of a new phase of urban renewal, community artists collaborated with public housing tenants to create a large-scale artwork that expresses the residents’ emotional connections to their homes. Light strips were installed on apartment windows to highlight that residents should not be forgotten in the renewal process. Embedded digital technologies 66

WEST

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

were used here to subvert the usual mechanistic processes of community consultation managed by development agencies to create a spectacular piece of digital art. It’s clear that the possibilities of digital technologies can be used to confound and enlarge our experiences of and connections to place. As McLuhan and Mitchell would no doubt have realised by now, the rise of digital technologies has seen our public spaces become more, not less, important to the experience of cities. As we design the digital interfaces and data-driven services to support our places and spaces, it’s certain that the evolving possibilities of place and digital publics will, no doubt, continue to surprise.

Resident Fiona in her Waterloo tower apartment. Image: Nic Walker Following pages: (left) The lighting up of the Waterloo public housing tower. Image: Jessica Hromas; (right) Resident Felix in his Waterloo tower apartment. Image: Nic Walker

WEST

FUTURE

FUTURE WEST

FUTURE

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

FUTURE WEST

BIOGRAPHIES SIMON ANDERSON is an architect, educator and author, and a professor at the School of Design at the University of Western Australia. He has received several national awards for his architecture practice. SARAH BARNS is a research fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, and co-director of Esem Projects. NIC BRUNSDON is the director of POST- Architecture. He is also director of Spacemarket, an initiative that pairs disused spaces with useful people in Perth. SALLY FARRAH is a doctoral student and sessional tutor at UWA. ALESSIO FINI is a Melbournebased, Perth-raised designer. He previously worked at Casper Mueller Kneer Architects and Universal Design Studio in London, and at Fieldwork Projects in Melbourne.

FUTURE

FELIX JOENSSON is a graduate of architecture from UWA. He currently teaches and researches in its School of Design.

ANNIKA KRISTENSEN is a curator at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) in Melbourne. GEOFFREY LONDON is a professor of architecture at UWA. He is a former government architect of Victoria and Western Australia, and a past dean and head of architecture at UWA. TIMOTHY MOORE is the editor of Future West (Australian Urbanism) and director of architecture practice Sibling Architecture. He has worked as an editor of Volume and Architecture Australia magazines. JENNIE OFFICER is the director of architecture practice Officer Woods. She is also a senior lecturer at UWA. AMELIA THORPE is a senior lecturer in law at UNSW where she teaches and researches on urban governance. Her first degree was in architecture, at UWA. BREE TREVENA is part of the Arup Foresight team at Arup. She is also undertaking research on innovation and creative precincts at the University of Melbourne.

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

DISTRIBUTION Future West (Australian Urbanism) is distributed by the School of Design at the University of Western Australia. To obtain a copy, navigate to www.alva.uwa.edu.au/ community/futurewest

Future West (Australian Urbanism) is a biannual publication that looks towards the future of urbanism, taking Perth and Western Australia as its reference point. EDITORIAL BOARD Simon Anderson Alessio Fini Geoffrey London Jennie Officer

Future West (Australian Urbanism) has been made possible with a generous private donation.

EDITOR Timothy Moore

SUBEDITOR Rowena Robertson PUBLICATION DESIGN Stuart Geddes PRINTING Printgraphics, Melbourne PUBLISHER Future West (Australian Urbanism) is published by the School of Design at the University of Western Australia.

Correction: In the last issue, it was stated that Yagan Square is designed by Lyons Architecture and Aspect Studios. The design team should have included Iredale Pedersen Hook Architects.

FRONT COVER IMAGE Dion Robeson

WEST

FUTURE

co ore ab m a ou ou pe rch tc t b titio ite om e n ct es tter s w ura . de ill l si bri gn n g

ns e to io th in at te d is vi oo . an in rh gs rg ld u in O ou hbo ild sh ig bu ne eir th

In fo stit pr cu uti in oc s o on no ur n s va em inn mu tiv e ov st e nt at pl to iv ac a e es ch . iev e

FUTURE WEST

D un on th d ’t m e ere ch ak po st an in we im ge g a r o at . sm f e al l or ct m se er e -t at g iv lon m the pr e ro e se s f in m. Th ill rn ng al w tu sti re re ve lic in b

ca ne sm n w bu a co in ild lle mp sti in r, d ri tut gs is se io . pe se n rs ve ed ra l

AUSTRALIAN URBANISM

WEST

[AUSTRALIAN URBANISM]

AU UR S T FU BA R A TU NI LI SM AN W R ES E T 4

ic n bl ai Pu om D

FUTURE WEST