How Sydney CBD became a capital of luxury urbanity
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- John Muscat / The New City
With a lot of success, urban development elites have been able to sustain the illusion that Central Business Districts or downtowns are still the functional metropolitan centres they were five decades ago. In The New City’s new feature report, Rise of Luxury Urbanity as a System: Sydney CBD, we set out to explain how the truth is different. Opinion leaders seem content for people to assume CBDs have changed in only cosmetic ways, essentially the same but with taller skylines. But since at least the 1980s, they have drifted far from the standard functional definition proposed by geographer Raymond Murphy in 1971: a region “draw[ing] its business from the whole urban area and from all ... classes of people.”
The mid-twentieth century was a time of tensions between booming suburban peripheries, driven by mass motorisation, and stagnating post-industrial inner-cities. After the 1980s, however, these former industrial-mercantile junctions or ‘classic’ CBDs were fitted up as global high-amenity enclaves. Some call this a “shift from the city as a site of production to one of consumption.” Over recent decades Sydney CBD has evolved in a more exclusive and upscale direction, hosting around a tenth of metropolitan jobs compared to nearly half in the 1950s. The pandemic forced some belated acknowledgement of this reality but notions of natural centrality persist.
In today’s post-material economy, the CBD’s status comes from a disproportionate share of public infrastructure rather than any inherent productivity advantage. Where the spatial order of the old industrial-mercantile CBD was arranged around functions, the contemporary ‘centre’ is laid out for amenities. Called ‘luxurification’ by some scholars, the new urban logic takes form as an upward spiral of amenity enhancements feeding off surging land values, gentrification and ‘sustainable urbanism’. Scaled up amenities make premium grade development more feasible as they amplify the capital that developers can substitute for land on high-priced sites. Luxurification is thus sweeping through most features of the CBD landscape, including all types of building stock and the streetscapes in between.
Using concepts proposed by urban geographers, at least five internal trends have been converging to make Sydney’s ‘post-CBD’:
1. Breakdown of the unipolar ‘core-frame’ structure made up of service and industrial functions arranged in concentric rings, and rise of multipolar high-amenity precincts, each resembling a walkable resort-style campus.
2. Spread of the upmarket ‘primary retail core’ as a general feature beyond the ‘Peak Land Value Intersection’ into other functional zones.
3. Decline of the downmarket ‘secondary retail zone’ in conjunction with gradual restrictions on motor vehicle access and confinement of entry to passenger rail corridors and bicycle paths.
4. Reshuffling of workspace across emerging precincts, inside and outside the traditional office core, offering amenities like harbour views, landscaped foreshores, green-rated buildings and revamped streetscapes around transit-hubs.
5. Penetration of residential development into the CBD, even the former retail and office cores, from the peripheral ‘zone of transition’.
The classic CBD was functionally and socio-economically diverse
In the wake of advancing post-war suburbanisation, there was a surge of interest in the CBD amongst American geographers during the 1950s. Based on their field work in nine mid-sized US cities, researchers Raymond Murphy and James Vance conceived the Land Value Method of delimiting outer CBD boundaries. They pinpointed the district’s Peak Land Value Intersection (PLVI) and traced the values of lots or blocks spreading outwards in concentric circles until values declined to five percent of PLVI value. In most cases the PLVI was “located within a few hundred feet of the [district’s] geographic center”, and from there “land values decrease rapidly at first as one leaves the peak intersection.” A city’s “maximum pedestrian concentration and … greatest vehicular congestion” were typically found at the PLVI.
Murphy and Vance felt this technique failed to discriminate amongst land uses, however, so they also developed a Land Use Method. “Typical central business uses” were defined as “retailing of goods and services for a profit and the performing of various office functions.” Even though these activities were located all over the city, “their area of maximum concentration [was in] the CBD.” This was the premise for a Central Business Index Method measuring the intensity of ‘central business uses’ in blocks surrounding the PLVI according to a threefold classification of uses: retail, financial-and-office, and non-central (like manufacturing and wholesaling).
Four concentric “walking-distance zones” were then used to study the arrangement of land uses. Zone 1 encompassed 100 yards from the PLVI while Zones 2, 3 and 4 encompass 100-200 yards, 200-300 yards and 300-400 yards from the PLVI respectively (100 yards equates to 92 metres).
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Retail uses predominated in Zone 1, occupying more than half the space, followed by the service-financial-office group. This pattern was to be expected “since the location gives access to the maximum number of customers.” Non-central business uses occupied only twelve percent of the space. Department stores occupied the most space in Zone 1 followed by clothing stores “to share the customers attracted by the larger stores.” But each department store was “likely to have its coterie of smaller stores − clothing stores, drug stores, five-and-ten cent stores – located close at hand.” In contrast, types of retail that did “not justify the high costs of the central zone” like automotive and household goods were poorly represented. No residences, factories or wholesale establishments were found in the zone.
Murphy and Vance reported that “the service-financial-office group reaches a maximum in Zone 2” and yet still occupied more space in Zone 4 than in Zone 1. Retail uses declined from 55.5 percent in Zone 1 to 33 percent in Zone 2 and 25 percent in Zone 4. Non-central business uses like wholesale and residential increased from 12 percent in Zone 1 to 23.5 percent in Zone 4.
CBD development, they claimed, also showed a dynamic tendency to advance and retreat, forming “zones of assimilation” and “zones of discard”. The zone of discard hosted “low-grade establishments” like “pawn shops, family clothing stores, bars, low-grade restaurants, bus stations, cheap movies; and credit jewellery, clothing and furniture stores.” Related to these zones, geographer Richard Preston used Murphy and Vance techniques in 1963 to elaborate a concept of the peripheral ‘transition zone’, “characterized by mixed … land uses, which are … intensive and decidedly variable in quality”, and which “often form cushions between the CBD and heavy industrial districts or large railroad yards.”
Since these various layers of activity revolved around the all-important peak intersection, the PLVI system is a reasonable shorthand label for the classic CBD as conceived by Murphy and Vance. Under this system, land values and rent-paying capacity assigned a place to multiple grades of activity around the most accessible point inside the CBD for people entering from far-flung parts of the whole metropolitan region.
After Murphy and Vance, the most well-known American CBD researchers were Edgar Horwood and Ronald Boyce, famous for their Core-Frame Model (1959). They thought the Murphy and Vance Land Value Method had some merits but the necessary data was not always available. Preferring a “functional classification” approach, Horwood and Boyce analysed a range of historical and other contemporary research, surveys and studies identifying ‘core’ and peripheral or ‘frame’ sub-regions in the make-up of central business areas. They delimited these areas by distilling their characteristics or ‘properties’ and presented them in comparison tables. Despite the differences of approach, many of these CBD properties display points of similarity with the findings of Murphy and Vance.
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The core was generally comparable to walking-distance Zones 1 and 2. It was “the area of highest buildings,” with “horizontal dimensions limited by walking distance scale.” Further, it was the “location of highest concentration of foot traffic” and “land use is characterized by offices, retail sales, consumer services, hotels.” There was an “absence of permanent residential population” and Horwood and Boyce refer to “zones of assimilation and discard limited to a few blocks.” Characteristics of the frame seem, moreover, roughly comparable to walking-distance Zones 3 and 4. These included the “area of most intensive non-retail land use outside the CBD core” and a “horizontal scale geared to accommodation of motor vehicles and to handling goods.” The most typical uses were “wholesaling with stocks, warehousing, off-street parking, automobile sales and services, multifamily dwellings, intercity transportation terminals and facilities, light manufacturing, and some institutional uses.” A few of these uses were described as “linkages to the CBD core” and “complementary functions” performed for the core; despite their different properties, core and frame “are really one unit.”
Also influential in the 1950s was geographer John Rannells, who thought the key lay in drilling down to the level of how an individual business establishment “tends to locate where the forces of its expected linkages will be in equilibrium.” Rannells developed a technique combining city block survey data with a fine-grid map of the CBD area. He found that “activities which require contact with people tend to cluster in areas which have the best mass transit facilities or where there is heavy pedestrian traffic, while activities characterized by handling of goods in bulk tend to locate where they have access to heavy transportation facilities.” Non-goods-handling or “persons-assembling” activities are retailing (R), business services (B) and consumer services (C) whereas the goods-handling activities are manufacturing (M) and wholesaling (W). In the “goods area” the M-W combination is by far the most numerous followed by M-R and W-R. The C-R combination is strongest in the “non-goods area” followed by C-B and B-R. But Rannells also hints at something like an integrated core-frame idea, writing that “the [CBD] area should certainly not be limited to the main concentration of high-rent commercial buildings.”
Despite their different methods, these researchers arrived at a comparable CBD structure. They identified a dense concentration of blocks at the centre, distinguished by upscale retail interspersed with related service businesses, operating side-by-side with surrounding blocks which were generally less intense and more downscale in character. The latter hosted some of the maritime and land transportation terminals and storage facilities which connected the dominant centre with the broader metropolitan region. Each of these components formed part of an integrated functional division of labour. CBD functions catered to workers and shoppers of diverse occupational and social backgrounds, using all modes of mass transport.
Sydney’s functionally diverse CBD of the 1950s and 1960s
In 1959 Geographer Peter Scott published his findings on the structure of Australian capital city centres “applying the Central Business Index Method advanced by Murphy and Vance.” Scott explains that Sydney CBD’s topography is “fairly rigidly circumscribed by barriers to outward expansion.” As town planner R T M Whipple wrote, “its growth is constrained horizontally by Sydney Cove to the North, Darling Harbour to the West, Hyde Park and the Botanical Gardens along the whole of its eastern boundary and central railway and goods yard to its South ... It is a very compact area.”
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Also influential in the 1950s was geographer John Rannells, who thought the key lay in drilling down to the level of how an individual business establishment “tends to locate where the forces of its expected linkages will be in equilibrium.” Rannells developed a technique combining city block survey data with a fine-grid map of the CBD area. He found that “activities which require contact with people tend to cluster in areas which have the best mass transit facilities or where there is heavy pedestrian traffic, while activities characterized by handling of goods in bulk tend to locate where they have access to heavy transportation facilities.” Non-goods-handling or “persons-assembling” activities are retailing (R), business services (B) and consumer services (C) whereas the goods-handling activities are manufacturing (M) and wholesaling (W). In the “goods area” the M-W combination is by far the most numerous followed by M-R and W-R. The C-R combination is strongest in the “non-goods area” followed by C-B and B-R. But Rannells also hints at something like an integrated core-frame idea, writing that “the [CBD] area should certainly not be limited to the main concentration of high-rent commercial buildings.”
Despite their different methods, these researchers arrived at a comparable CBD structure. They identified a dense concentration of blocks at the centre, distinguished by upscale retail interspersed with related service businesses, operating side-by-side with surrounding blocks which were generally less intense and more downscale in character. The latter hosted some of the maritime and land transportation terminals and storage facilities which connected the dominant centre with the broader metropolitan region. Each of these components formed part of an integrated functional division of labour. CBD functions catered to workers and shoppers of diverse occupational and social backgrounds, using all modes of mass transport.
Sydney’s functionally diverse CBD of the 1950s and 1960s
In 1959 Geographer Peter Scott published his findings on the structure of Australian capital city centres “applying the Central Business Index Method advanced by Murphy and Vance.” Scott explains that Sydney CBD’s topography is “fairly rigidly circumscribed by barriers to outward expansion.” As town planner R T M Whipple wrote, “its growth is constrained horizontally by Sydney Cove to the North, Darling Harbour to the West, Hyde Park and the Botanical Gardens along the whole of its eastern boundary and central railway and goods yard to its South ... It is a very compact area.”
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Shaped by their own topography, finds Scott, each Australian CBD “has a distinctive zonal structure comprising not only separate retail and office districts but also inner and outer retail zones.” He produces a map of Sydney’s CBD which appears to show an “inner retail zone” bounded by Martin Place (north), Elizabeth Street (east), York Street (west) and Park Street (south). North of Martin Place there is a minor “outer retail zone” enclosed by Hunter, George and Elizabeth Streets. Surrounding this is the “office zone” stretching eastward to Macquarie Street, westward to upper Clarence Street and northward to Circular Quay/Sydney Cove. As in the United States, Australian inner retail zones tended to be compact and occupied by stores “demanding a central location.” Typically, they were a “strongly nucleated group of department, variety, and women’s clothing stores.” Moreover, “both Sydney and Adelaide have secondary inner zones, mostly of low-grade stores.”
In another map illustrating his discussion of the inner retail zone, Scott locates Sydney’s PLVI at the intersection of Pitt (north-south) and Market (east-west) Streets. In the twentieth century the PLVI’s status was reinforced by Pyrmont Bridge, over Darling Harbour (1902), a major traffic thoroughfare from the west leading into Market Street, “emptying travellers from the western suburbs” into the CBD, and stations of the City Circle underground rail loop. William Street, a major traffic thoroughfare from the eastern suburbs, enters the CBD a block south. Scott’s term for the department store nucleus of the inner retail zone is “the retail node.” Department stores generally catered to “the middle and higher income classes or the popular middle classes” and occupied central sites. By comparison, Sydney’s “lower income level stores … lie some distance south of the hub [PLVI].” These included a group of nineteenth century stores oriented to Central Station which, which according to historian Howard Wolfers, “were so located as to take trade from people in the factories and such inner city [working class] residential areas as Woolloomooloo, Surry Hills, Paddington, Glebe, Darlington and Redfern”, while “stores in the central city area close to the financial district [office zone] attracted a greater proportion of white collar workers and high income earners.”
Of inner retail zone stores in general, Scott writes there were “three main clusters distinguishable by their quality.” Major concentrations of “medium-grade stores” were found near the node or PLVI, a secondary cluster of “high-grade stores” was oriented to professional offices or the office zone, and “low-grade stores” operated amongst the department stores “serving the popular trade.” Scott describes the above as “primary inner retail elements.” By element he appears to mean a store type. In contrast, “the major secondary elements of the inner retail zone, in sequence outward from the node, were jewellers, florists, chemists, food stores, coffee lounges, men’s clothiers, and gift stores.” Minor secondary elements included camera stores, outlets for dress materials, beauty parlours, photo studios, wine saloons, and art and music stores.
The “outer retail zone” also had primary and secondary elements, and each of these had major and minor components. There were three major primary elements, activities which required substantial floor space like furniture and hardware stores and automobile showrooms. Furniture stores “benefit from clustering … In Sydney the main cluster lies south of the node, well within the CBD.” Major secondary elements of the outer retail zone “follow the outward sequence of shoe repair depots, milk bars, outlets for electrical goods, cafés, and stationers.” In this connection Scott refers to “inclusion within the CBD of the southern zone of discard.” Finally, Scott also identified “dispersed elements” found across all CBD zones like “hotels, booksellers, restaurants, tobacconists, tailors, receiving depots for dry cleaning, and barbers”, as well as public houses or pubs.
As for the office zone, minor elements including “headquarter offices, stock and station agents, airline offices, stock and share brokers, and accountants” were intermixed with major elements like “insurance companies, shipping firms, and the professions.”
Perhaps because Murphy and Vance marginalised Zone 4 ‘non-central uses’, Scott’s work did not encompass the wharf, warehousing, wholesaling, goods railway yard and light-manufacturing precincts around the western and southern reaches of the CBD, Darling Harbour, Walsh Bay and Central Station. But in 1966 geographer Peter Simons used Murphy and Vance techniques to delimit a wholesale district with its eastern boundary, generally, along York Street on a north-south axis, from Margaret Street down to Druitt Street, and further south along Sussex Street on a north-south axis from Bathurst Street down to Hay Street, and with its western boundary along the docks of Darling Harbour down to the Goods Yard. Within these limits he identified various sub-districts including softgoods, mostly apparel, in York Street and Rawson Place; electrical goods in Clarence Street; metals, machinery and hardware in Kent Street; jewellery and glassware in York and Clarence Streets; and perishables such as poultry, fish, meat and milk at the city markets [Hay Street].
The “outer retail zone” also had primary and secondary elements, and each of these had major and minor components. There were three major primary elements, activities which required substantial floor space like furniture and hardware stores and automobile showrooms. Furniture stores “benefit from clustering … In Sydney the main cluster lies south of the node, well within the CBD.” Major secondary elements of the outer retail zone “follow the outward sequence of shoe repair depots, milk bars, outlets for electrical goods, cafés, and stationers.” In this connection Scott refers to “inclusion within the CBD of the southern zone of discard.” Finally, Scott also identified “dispersed elements” found across all CBD zones like “hotels, booksellers, restaurants, tobacconists, tailors, receiving depots for dry cleaning, and barbers”, as well as public houses or pubs.
As for the office zone, minor elements including “headquarter offices, stock and station agents, airline offices, stock and share brokers, and accountants” were intermixed with major elements like “insurance companies, shipping firms, and the professions.”
Perhaps because Murphy and Vance marginalised Zone 4 ‘non-central uses’, Scott’s work did not encompass the wharf, warehousing, wholesaling, goods railway yard and light-manufacturing precincts around the western and southern reaches of the CBD, Darling Harbour, Walsh Bay and Central Station. But in 1966 geographer Peter Simons used Murphy and Vance techniques to delimit a wholesale district with its eastern boundary, generally, along York Street on a north-south axis, from Margaret Street down to Druitt Street, and further south along Sussex Street on a north-south axis from Bathurst Street down to Hay Street, and with its western boundary along the docks of Darling Harbour down to the Goods Yard. Within these limits he identified various sub-districts including softgoods, mostly apparel, in York Street and Rawson Place; electrical goods in Clarence Street; metals, machinery and hardware in Kent Street; jewellery and glassware in York and Clarence Streets; and perishables such as poultry, fish, meat and milk at the city markets [Hay Street].
In 1995, R T M Whipple published his own application of the American delimitation research to Sydney CBD. He preferred the Murphy and Vance “5 per cent of the peak valued lot contour” Land Value Method to their Central Business Index Method, together with the type of functional classification approach developed by John Rannells. Whipple presents three land value contour maps of Sydney CBD for the data years 1956, 1962 and 1968, and locates the PLVI at the same point as Scott. He finds that the “5 per cent line” rule does not hold true in Sydney’s case. The boundary line should exclude Zone 4 non-central uses but in Sydney it embraces industrial uses on the western side associated with the waterfronts and railway goods yard of Darling Harbour, and overshoots the CBD on the eastern side where Hyde Park-Botanical Gardens constrains expansion.
Sydney CBD land value contours, 1956, 1962 and 1967
Sydney CBD land value contours, 1956, 1962 and 1967
Whipple had more success with John Rannells’ linked-establishments approach. The largest functions classified in the survey were administration, retailing and financial which took up 19, 15 and 13 percent of the CBD’s floor area respectively. These together accounted for almost half the floor area. Of the remaining functions, professional services occupied 6 per cent, wholesaling without stocks 5 per cent, and ‘group welfare’ 5 per cent. Following were communications, manufacturing (including building and construction), residential and parking with 3-4 per cent each. “Goods-handling functions occupy about one quarter of the total space,” he found. Despite the dominance of certain activities, Sydney CBD showed a notable degree of functional diversity. As in the United States, “buildings housing goods-handling functions (except retailing) are associated with the lowest location quality” − furthest from the PLVI − and “the higher the position of a function in the hierarchy, the higher is the land value of the buildings within which it is housed.”
Whipple’s general conclusion is that “associations in the central district are split into three components devoted to persons movement, goods handling by day and the business community.” Although he does not use these terms himself, this sounds like a retail core, an industrial frame, and an office core. As predicted by the functional classification approach, “underlying the disposition of functions among themselves” were “fundamentally different movement requirements: persons moving as individuals, persons moving to places of mass gathering, goods movement and non-persons-non-goods movements.” There are resonances of an integrated core-frame structure in Whipple’s account of two general types of functional linkages. Non-goods handling uses needed central locations with high volume pedestrian access, and more scattered goods handling uses depended on traffic and freight infrastructure.
Lost functional diversity: Sydney CBD’s office booms of 1957 to 1974
A series of developments happened to converge around 1957 which unleashed a massive, one-off expansion of CBD office space and a land value revolution which is felt to this day. R T M Whipple and real estate economist R W Archer presented much-cited papers in 1967 about boom’s first phase, from 1957 to 1966. As it turned out, this was just an opening phase of “the greatest building boom in any city in Australia’s history.”
Archer points out that the scale of the pre-1966 boom is apparent from the value of new buildings completed, rising from $2.9 million in 1956 to $50.7 million in 1964. Close to 90 percent of the $195 million spent on new building between 1956 and 1966 in the CBD was for offices. According to Whipple, between 1950 and 1963 the grose building area north of Goulburn Street increased by 7.9 million square feet or 19.19 per cent. The precinct bounded by Circular Quay and George, Macquarie and King Streets, with 40.81 percent of total CBD floor space by 1963, accounted for 69.80 per cent of the increase. Of the twenty largest private buildings completed in the CBD from 1956 to 1966, Archer finds that all but two replaced the floor space of the previous building many times over.
The initial burst of activity, writes Archer, was by owner-occupier firms facing a bulging post-war backlog. The timing can be traced to easing of wartime restrictions. By 1956 building materials like structural steel became freely available and in 1957 rent controls on new commercial premises were lifted. This was reinforced by high general growth in the metropolitan, state, and national economies, and increases in office employment. Another factor noted by Archer was “the acceptance of more generous space and building standards for office workers.” But the most far-reaching event of this time, acknowledged by Archer and most historians of Sydney, was probably the NSW Government’s 1957 decision to lift the 150-foot building height limit which had been in force since 1912. This will be considered again later.
An additional change was the NSW State Government’s 1956 land tax on unimproved capital value. Archer explained how this affected CBD land owners surrounded by a raging development boom:
The prospect of a more intensive use of land such as a large modern office building replacing small obsolete one or an office replacing a warehouse will generate an increase in land values. A successful redevelopment project along these lines will generate a number of imitations and there will be a general increase in the site value of all the surrounding land with this potential use … when the site values are reassessed for rating and tax purposes … increases in cash outgoings can be large enough to markedly lower the profit and net income from the current use of the property and encourage the owner to develop the site or to sell it for redevelopment to the more intensive use.
As in the United States, metropolitan trends loomed large over the CBD, curbing opportunities for investment in other types of buildings. “The general post-war suburbanization of population and employment was the main factor limiting new building for retail, wholesale and entertainment activities in the [CBD],” writes Archer. For example, the CBD’s share of metropolitan retail sales or turnover declined from 43.8 per cent in 1953 to 13.6 per cent in 1974.
Brought on by a series of chance events, the boom propped up a CBD in relative decline as a metropolitan centre.
The changing CBD landscape extended development further afield. Opening of a new City Circle Station at Circular Quay in 1956 “precipitated the emergence of a new office development sector” and completion of the Cahill Expressway in 1958 “made Circular Quay the second most accessible point in the city,” presumably after the Market-Pitt intersection.
AMP Building
Whipple’s general conclusion is that “associations in the central district are split into three components devoted to persons movement, goods handling by day and the business community.” Although he does not use these terms himself, this sounds like a retail core, an industrial frame, and an office core. As predicted by the functional classification approach, “underlying the disposition of functions among themselves” were “fundamentally different movement requirements: persons moving as individuals, persons moving to places of mass gathering, goods movement and non-persons-non-goods movements.” There are resonances of an integrated core-frame structure in Whipple’s account of two general types of functional linkages. Non-goods handling uses needed central locations with high volume pedestrian access, and more scattered goods handling uses depended on traffic and freight infrastructure.
Lost functional diversity: Sydney CBD’s office booms of 1957 to 1974
A series of developments happened to converge around 1957 which unleashed a massive, one-off expansion of CBD office space and a land value revolution which is felt to this day. R T M Whipple and real estate economist R W Archer presented much-cited papers in 1967 about boom’s first phase, from 1957 to 1966. As it turned out, this was just an opening phase of “the greatest building boom in any city in Australia’s history.”
Archer points out that the scale of the pre-1966 boom is apparent from the value of new buildings completed, rising from $2.9 million in 1956 to $50.7 million in 1964. Close to 90 percent of the $195 million spent on new building between 1956 and 1966 in the CBD was for offices. According to Whipple, between 1950 and 1963 the grose building area north of Goulburn Street increased by 7.9 million square feet or 19.19 per cent. The precinct bounded by Circular Quay and George, Macquarie and King Streets, with 40.81 percent of total CBD floor space by 1963, accounted for 69.80 per cent of the increase. Of the twenty largest private buildings completed in the CBD from 1956 to 1966, Archer finds that all but two replaced the floor space of the previous building many times over.
The initial burst of activity, writes Archer, was by owner-occupier firms facing a bulging post-war backlog. The timing can be traced to easing of wartime restrictions. By 1956 building materials like structural steel became freely available and in 1957 rent controls on new commercial premises were lifted. This was reinforced by high general growth in the metropolitan, state, and national economies, and increases in office employment. Another factor noted by Archer was “the acceptance of more generous space and building standards for office workers.” But the most far-reaching event of this time, acknowledged by Archer and most historians of Sydney, was probably the NSW Government’s 1957 decision to lift the 150-foot building height limit which had been in force since 1912. This will be considered again later.
An additional change was the NSW State Government’s 1956 land tax on unimproved capital value. Archer explained how this affected CBD land owners surrounded by a raging development boom:
The prospect of a more intensive use of land such as a large modern office building replacing small obsolete one or an office replacing a warehouse will generate an increase in land values. A successful redevelopment project along these lines will generate a number of imitations and there will be a general increase in the site value of all the surrounding land with this potential use … when the site values are reassessed for rating and tax purposes … increases in cash outgoings can be large enough to markedly lower the profit and net income from the current use of the property and encourage the owner to develop the site or to sell it for redevelopment to the more intensive use.
As in the United States, metropolitan trends loomed large over the CBD, curbing opportunities for investment in other types of buildings. “The general post-war suburbanization of population and employment was the main factor limiting new building for retail, wholesale and entertainment activities in the [CBD],” writes Archer. For example, the CBD’s share of metropolitan retail sales or turnover declined from 43.8 per cent in 1953 to 13.6 per cent in 1974.
Brought on by a series of chance events, the boom propped up a CBD in relative decline as a metropolitan centre.
The changing CBD landscape extended development further afield. Opening of a new City Circle Station at Circular Quay in 1956 “precipitated the emergence of a new office development sector” and completion of the Cahill Expressway in 1958 “made Circular Quay the second most accessible point in the city,” presumably after the Market-Pitt intersection.
AMP Building
These developments combined had a dramatic impact on land values, signalling a prospective shift away from land price contours of the PLVI system. The spread of elevated land values northwards from the PLVI area, for instance, is visible on the land contour maps in Whipple’s 1995 article. Archer reports that between 1952 and 1962 land prices in the CBD’s northern sector spiked by no less than 100 per cent. Over the ten years to completion of Sydney’s first skyscraper in 1962, the AMP Building at Circular Quay, the assessed value of the adjacent Customs House site rose from $220,000 to $1,140,000. On the overall distribution of new construction across the CBD, Whipple observed that “there have been 43 buildings … under construction outside the office space core area since 1954 … this is compared with 74 buildings erected or under construction within the core itself ...”
A land value surge of this magnitude could not but change the way real estate was owned and financed. Archer reports that “the property development firms … only emerged over the last ten years and will probably further expand their operations … they are also facilitating and complementing the expansion of insurance company equity investment in real estate.” Developers were not property investors themselves. They conceived, executed, and sold projects leased from the land owners, while earning profits at the building and sale stages. As for the owners, of the twenty largest private buildings that Archer researched, only five buildings were used as insurance company offices but in eleven cases the owners were insurance companies. The decline of owner-occupiers was another important factor accelerating redevelopment in the CBD. As Archer explains, some life insurance companies had started to switch from mortgage loan financing to a leaseback arrangement with a substantial business firm and retaining freehold title to the appreciating site. In this way the seven largest life insurers operating in Australia “increased their real property assets from $71 million in 1957 to $399 million at 1965 and the relative importance of these property assets as a proportion of their total assets rose from 4.0 per cent to 9.3 per cent over the same period.”
Developments in real estate finance were a focus of Maurice Daly’s classic account of the boom’s later phase from 1968 to 1974, Sydney boom, Sydney bust (1982). He confirms that Sydney CBD was in decline relative to suburban growth when the boom broke out: “In 1966 Sydney’s central business district employed 292,344 people – only 18 per cent of Sydney’s total workforce of 1,145,287 people; by 1971, the CBD employment figure had fallen to 191,000, just 15 per cent of the workforce.” Daly traces the boom’s origins to another boom, Australia’s mining expansion of the 1960s, which raised the country’s profile across international business circles. Deficit financing of the Vietnam War transferred a large pool of American dollars to transnational banks operating mostly out of London. “Directly through development companies, or indirectly through finance companies,” writes Daly, “a critical proportion of the foreign capital which flowed into Australia between 1969 and 1972 was invested in the Sydney property market.”
While CBD lots could be purchased in the late 1950s for $322 to $645 per square metre, by 1968 the record site-price had reached $2,193 per square metre, moving up to $3,042 in 1969 and in 1970 a site was sold for $4,053 per square metre. Over the three years from 1970 to 1973 the price of some sites escalated from the vicinity of $5,863 to a record of $8,063 per square metre. The influx of capital produced larger buildings and, despite expanded supply, more expensive rents. One building taller than 20 floors was built between 1957 and 1961 but seven were completed in the following four years. Over 1962 to 1966, “nine office blocks of 16 and 20 storeys were built compared to four in the previous four-year period.” Daly found that “rent for office space rose (from $46 a square metre in 1957, to $64 per square metre in 1967, to $81 per square metre in 1971); premium sites fetched from $107 to $129.” Overall, an incredible 210 buildings were erected in Sydney CBD from 1958 to 1976 and 84 of them after 1971.
However, the Sydney CBD office market had well and truly crashed by 1976, when 18 per cent of the floor area was vacant including 13.6 per cent of total office space. “Vacancies were highest in the core area of the CBD,” writes Daly, “where 31 per cent of all offices were vacant, and if the secondary areas of Kent and Sussex Streets were added, the proportion rose to 51 per cent … Buildings built between 1970 and 1976 made up 31 per cent of office space in the CBD, but accounted for 44 per cent of vacancies.” After all, the booms were driven by transient causes. Real business demand for a CBD location was not the dominant factor. As Daly puts it: “investment patterns began to become divorced from the realities of demand.” The PLVI system, however, could not but have been permanently disrupted by such a scale of redevelopment. Confirming that the groundwork was laid for a long-term shift in the CBD’s morphology, urban planner James Fitzpatrick found that 50 per cent of the office projects approved in 1970-1971 (but not necessarily commenced) were sited south of King Street, beyond the office core, compared to just 18.6 per cent over the previous 13 years.
State policy propped up the CBD’s primacy as an office centre, 1950s-1970s
Approaches to metropolitan planning were guided, in theory, by the County of Cumberland Planning Scheme, passed into law by the NSW Parliament in 1951. Among key problems, the plan nominated “over-centralisation and congestion of industry; congested and confused traffic; slum housing.” Under the plan, people and jobs were to be distributed between a central zone and some twenty dispersed urban districts. “Much of the over-centralisation and congestion in the inner areas of the County”, said the Scheme’s 1948 report, “are due to [the] radial pattern” of the existing transport system. “An important consideration in the County Scheme,” wrote prominent town planner Denis Winston, “is that the proposals follow broadly a natural trend … that is to say, the general trend towards decentralization … planned dispersal is therefore merely strengthening a natural and useful trend …” Winston’s views on CBD development followed accordingly: “The only really effective means for improving traffic conditions is the limitation of floor space … accompanied by a real decentralization movement … the problem [is] too many people and too many goods trying to get in and out of a restricted area.” Sydney CBD’s physical barriers to expansion exacerbated the problem. This was the standard view of professionals like town planners, city engineers and urban geographers at the time.
But the NSW Government walked away from features of the County of Cumberland Scheme culminating in abolition of its administrative apparatus in 1963. Many urban planners and writers who rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s became critical of the course Sydney took following landmark events of the 1950s. Hugh Stretton, author of the classic Ideas for Australian Cities (1971), argued “the state concentrates its own offices in the city centre, and does nothing effective to deter others from doing the same.” The Cumberland Scheme’s ambitions were generally frustrated, resulting in continuing growth of the CBD. “Most of its land is dearer and its living and productive costs are probably higher than ever”, observed Stretton. Little was done to reorient the city’s transport system beyond radial CBD-centric routes. “The New South Wales government so far concentrates jobs and customers’ traffic into the single old centre more resolutely than any other Australian or American state government does.” In 1966 Whipple found that 40 per cent of office space in privately owned buildings was occupied by government agencies. Since “nothing new [was] proposed to beat the old centre’s gravity”, explained Stretton, Sydney could “merely expect pressures, congestions, rocketing land prices.” For town planner and author Leonie Sandercock, “the failure of efforts to decentralize and to control land prices” was a major failure. While residents, retail and industry dispersed, offices remained stubbornly centralised. In Sydney, she pointed out, “the old city centre continued to grow without limit, increasing traffic problems and land prices.”
Present-day urbanists maintain that action to decentralise office work would have been futile in any event. They argue it is in the nature of office-based occupations to concentrate in the CBD, invoking what may be called ‘the CBD agglomeration myth’. As demographer Simon Kuestenmacher put it recently, “a knowledge job benefits from being co-located with other knowledge jobs.” In contrast, geographers have traced the origins of CBD locations to landforms, physical features and associated convergence points in the era of fixed-route maritime and railway transportation. George Hartman’s classic formulation of 1950 referred to “a junction of overland trade routes, along a navigable stream or water body, at some other inland break-of-bulk or change-of-ownership transportation site.” This was certainly true of the harbour city of Sydney. “As the major port in the State”, writes Maurice Daly, “Sydney provided the transport, storage, financial, and commercial systems whereby the products of the interior could be delivered to the world, and the conjunction of the port with the central business district implied a tight clustering of such activities in the CBD.” But things changed, as Daly explains, when “better transport systems removed the need to be adjacent to the port for warehousing and wholesaling [and] the motor vehicle took population, manufacturing and retailing into the suburbs.”
One flaw of the CBD agglomeration myth is that the location of office supply is superficially equated with the location of office demand. Another of the prominent urban planners, Ian Alexander, explained that “in Sydney, the central area accounted for more than 75 per cent of the value of new office buildings over the 1960-75 period.” However, his survey research ranking location factors found that “availability of premises” ranked highest for CBD offices, well above “access to associated business” and “access to business services”, which ranked eighth and ninth respectively. Alexander comments that “[t]his points to the process of office supply leading demand rather than simply responding to it.” Offices weren’t necessarily built where firms wanted to locate but firms necessarily located where offices were built. Max Neutze agreed that “central city office redevelopment has frequently been initiated by investors and developers.” This was a particular problem in the case of “Sydney [which] stands at one extreme in the urban pattern because … its city centre is far from the geographical centre of the urban [metropolitan] area.”
Alexander maintained that “there is evidence to suggest that the pattern of relocation to inner centres may be as much a product of office space availability and imperfect market knowledge as of any real inability to function in outer centres.” In his book Office Location and Public Policy (1979), he acknowledged that “the classic explanation for the clustering of office activities in city centres” has been “need for direct personal contact in transacting business.” But “there is now considerable evidence to show that, given information flows are an important locational consideration for office activities, they are by no means an absolute constraint upon location.” He cites a wave of research from Sweden and Britain on “developments in communications technology that allow the replacement of face-to-face meetings by other means” and the classification of business contacts as routine “programmed” contacts or more complex “orientation” contacts. The former could be transacted as easily from a decentralised location while the latter “form only a small proportion of a typical office firm’s contact patterns” and “involve a minority of office personnel.” Orientation contacts could also be conducted from a non-central base even if extra travel is involved.
Stretton was in no doubt that Sydney’s office centralisation was an orchestrated phenomenon: “… rising rates of destruction and renewal are made profitable by the land values of overbuilt office centres. Nor are such policies adapting democratically to ‘the peoples’ locational decisions: they work in favour of the interests of tiny minorities of central investors and developers … Plenty of Sydney people – planners, politicians and others – like to regard their centralized over-growth as natural, unavoidable, an international phenomenon. It is nothing of the sort.” After discussing features of the 1970s office over-supply, later examined in more detail by Daly, Stretton concluded that “the celebrated office boom at Sydney Cove was not a response to strong office demand from people who needed to do business there. It was a calculated risk by the office builders, gambling on inflation and rising building costs and especially on the extreme centralist policy which was visible in the government’s own office activity … [emphasis added].” Political choices made central office development highly profitable for the property-finance industry. Hoisted on fabricated props, the CBD would come to need an ongoing program of such choices to hold onto its artificial status.
Modernist architects transformed the CBD into an upscale office district, 1950s-1970s
Politicians, of all major parties, promoted such lucrative conditions for CBD office developers because, as architect and planner Darrel Conybeare explained, “Sydney’s urban image and identity is inextricably linked to the natural setting of this centre on the visually spectacular foreshores of Sydney Harbour.” The city’s leaders sought to capitalise on this asset after Melbourne stole a march with the 1956 Olympic Games. Inevitably, the harbourside CBD became their focus of attention. “Such height limits as the city had”, writes Stretton, “were suspended at the first suggestion that one skyscraper might go to Melbourne instead.” Sydney was primed to embrace a series of glittering visions offered by the architecture profession over decades starting around this time. According to one account, the “move to skyscrapers may have been American-influenced but was, to a large extent, architect-led, with the Royal Australian Institute of Architects [RAIA] acting as prime mover in bringing skyscrapers to Sydney …”
Architects had some powerful symbols at their disposal. Historian Jennifer Taylor wrote that the “glazed building had particular appeal as it symbolised American prosperity … [there was] an imagery of modern efficiency that these buildings were seen to represent.” Lever House, New York, 1951, “provided an accessible model for a tall, freestanding curtain-wall building.” While town planners and traffic engineers highlighted congestion and land values to promote decentralisation, architects deployed aesthetics for centralisation. Large-scale modern structures were only viable in high rent zones like CBDs. One emerging advocate of modernist architecture was Harry Seidler, a member of the RAIA’s Acts and Regulations Committee, who invited his mentor and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius to address the RAIA’s 1954 convention in Sydney. Linked to the convention, Gropius delivered a speech to the ABC and along with Seidler contributed an article to the Sydney Morning Herald. Subjects like the economics of office location or agglomeration economies did not feature in their arguments for modernist architecture, which focused on culture and aesthetics. The Herald became a forum for architects and other agitators against Sydney’s building restrictions, particularly the 150-foot height limit. Jennifer Taylor maintained “there [was] little doubt that the introduction of the glazed office building to Australia resulted from aesthetic preference rather than economic advantage.”
While City of Sydney Council’s political leadership opposed the height restriction, officers like City Engineer R D Stevenson and his predecessor A H Garnsey supported the County of Cumberland Scheme program of decentralisation and a restrictive Floor Space Index to block CBD skyscrapers. Nevertheless, in 1956 the state government decided to lift the limit. Premier Joe Cahill singled out the role played by “architects and others [who] complained about it.” By this time the County of Cumberland Scheme had already stalled and Sydney’s over-centralisation persisted. In those conditions Cahill’s decision catalysed other factors behind the CBD office boom documented by Archer, Whipple and Daly. The new Height of Buildings Advisory Committee (HOBAC), says writer Geoffrey Moorhouse, manipulated floor-space ratios “so generously from the norm that Sydney’s ratios ever since have been about twice what is permitted in European cities.”
In another book, Ian Alexander drew extensively on the work of urban geographer Larry Bourne, who identified a “process of intensification of land use through redevelopment” in the form of “space-intensive activities [that] were constantly replacing space-extensive activities, since it is ‘generally uneconomic’ to replace an existing structure ‘with anything but a more intensive use’.” This “phenomenon can be attributed to the high prices that most central-area sites command: non-intensive uses become an increasingly poor investment.” Amongst “activities high in the rent-paying hierarchy”, office development was the most intensive. Archer’s and Daly’s accounts of Sydney’s office booms are consistent with this process. For urban policy academic Pauline McGuirk, they were “fuelled by the CBD’s transition from a general-purpose city centre to a specialist financial and business centre.” While proponents of modernist design claimed it was more functional − “form follows function” − the effect on urban environments like CBDs was to narrow the range of functions.
Under the PLVI system, built forms and street lines were conditioned by their functional zone, commonly “limit-height budget blocks that pushed out to the building line, presenting a planar wall to the street.” After the booms, however, finance-driven towers made their own surroundings. Architects and designers Francesca Morrison and Krystyna Luzcak wrote about “the superimposition of a new physical and spatial concept … [b]ased on the idea of elements sitting freely in space… street walls of buildings began to give way to single towers set in plazas or on low podiums.” For Jennifer Taylor, the freestanding, glazed building “was conceptually and physically distinct from its setting … context was inconsequential.” But as Morrison and Luczak explain, “Sydney’s street pattern and block size did not accommodate them as easily as Manhattan’s grid,” so large-scale lot amalgamation was usually a precondition for projects. In the case of the AMP Building at Circular Quay, “55 percent coverage of the large site [was] made up of consolidated lots.”
How to make use of the residual spaces between unattached towers emerged as a perennial CBD problem. Taylor writes that within the typical FSR envelope, “the cost of building to a greater height was offset by the greater prestige of office space on the upper floors hence, there was an economic incentive to build high which, as a by-product, resulted in larger areas of public space to be landscaped at ground level.” Inevitably, though, simple attention to visual amenity was not enough to activate urban spaces without ample provision for pedestrian usage. Since freestanding towers now had the status of financial assets, the often-vexing problem of residual space could potentially detract from their value. So drab made-over passageways were eventually succeeded by distinct leisure destinations.
Australia Square
A land value surge of this magnitude could not but change the way real estate was owned and financed. Archer reports that “the property development firms … only emerged over the last ten years and will probably further expand their operations … they are also facilitating and complementing the expansion of insurance company equity investment in real estate.” Developers were not property investors themselves. They conceived, executed, and sold projects leased from the land owners, while earning profits at the building and sale stages. As for the owners, of the twenty largest private buildings that Archer researched, only five buildings were used as insurance company offices but in eleven cases the owners were insurance companies. The decline of owner-occupiers was another important factor accelerating redevelopment in the CBD. As Archer explains, some life insurance companies had started to switch from mortgage loan financing to a leaseback arrangement with a substantial business firm and retaining freehold title to the appreciating site. In this way the seven largest life insurers operating in Australia “increased their real property assets from $71 million in 1957 to $399 million at 1965 and the relative importance of these property assets as a proportion of their total assets rose from 4.0 per cent to 9.3 per cent over the same period.”
Developments in real estate finance were a focus of Maurice Daly’s classic account of the boom’s later phase from 1968 to 1974, Sydney boom, Sydney bust (1982). He confirms that Sydney CBD was in decline relative to suburban growth when the boom broke out: “In 1966 Sydney’s central business district employed 292,344 people – only 18 per cent of Sydney’s total workforce of 1,145,287 people; by 1971, the CBD employment figure had fallen to 191,000, just 15 per cent of the workforce.” Daly traces the boom’s origins to another boom, Australia’s mining expansion of the 1960s, which raised the country’s profile across international business circles. Deficit financing of the Vietnam War transferred a large pool of American dollars to transnational banks operating mostly out of London. “Directly through development companies, or indirectly through finance companies,” writes Daly, “a critical proportion of the foreign capital which flowed into Australia between 1969 and 1972 was invested in the Sydney property market.”
While CBD lots could be purchased in the late 1950s for $322 to $645 per square metre, by 1968 the record site-price had reached $2,193 per square metre, moving up to $3,042 in 1969 and in 1970 a site was sold for $4,053 per square metre. Over the three years from 1970 to 1973 the price of some sites escalated from the vicinity of $5,863 to a record of $8,063 per square metre. The influx of capital produced larger buildings and, despite expanded supply, more expensive rents. One building taller than 20 floors was built between 1957 and 1961 but seven were completed in the following four years. Over 1962 to 1966, “nine office blocks of 16 and 20 storeys were built compared to four in the previous four-year period.” Daly found that “rent for office space rose (from $46 a square metre in 1957, to $64 per square metre in 1967, to $81 per square metre in 1971); premium sites fetched from $107 to $129.” Overall, an incredible 210 buildings were erected in Sydney CBD from 1958 to 1976 and 84 of them after 1971.
However, the Sydney CBD office market had well and truly crashed by 1976, when 18 per cent of the floor area was vacant including 13.6 per cent of total office space. “Vacancies were highest in the core area of the CBD,” writes Daly, “where 31 per cent of all offices were vacant, and if the secondary areas of Kent and Sussex Streets were added, the proportion rose to 51 per cent … Buildings built between 1970 and 1976 made up 31 per cent of office space in the CBD, but accounted for 44 per cent of vacancies.” After all, the booms were driven by transient causes. Real business demand for a CBD location was not the dominant factor. As Daly puts it: “investment patterns began to become divorced from the realities of demand.” The PLVI system, however, could not but have been permanently disrupted by such a scale of redevelopment. Confirming that the groundwork was laid for a long-term shift in the CBD’s morphology, urban planner James Fitzpatrick found that 50 per cent of the office projects approved in 1970-1971 (but not necessarily commenced) were sited south of King Street, beyond the office core, compared to just 18.6 per cent over the previous 13 years.
State policy propped up the CBD’s primacy as an office centre, 1950s-1970s
Approaches to metropolitan planning were guided, in theory, by the County of Cumberland Planning Scheme, passed into law by the NSW Parliament in 1951. Among key problems, the plan nominated “over-centralisation and congestion of industry; congested and confused traffic; slum housing.” Under the plan, people and jobs were to be distributed between a central zone and some twenty dispersed urban districts. “Much of the over-centralisation and congestion in the inner areas of the County”, said the Scheme’s 1948 report, “are due to [the] radial pattern” of the existing transport system. “An important consideration in the County Scheme,” wrote prominent town planner Denis Winston, “is that the proposals follow broadly a natural trend … that is to say, the general trend towards decentralization … planned dispersal is therefore merely strengthening a natural and useful trend …” Winston’s views on CBD development followed accordingly: “The only really effective means for improving traffic conditions is the limitation of floor space … accompanied by a real decentralization movement … the problem [is] too many people and too many goods trying to get in and out of a restricted area.” Sydney CBD’s physical barriers to expansion exacerbated the problem. This was the standard view of professionals like town planners, city engineers and urban geographers at the time.
But the NSW Government walked away from features of the County of Cumberland Scheme culminating in abolition of its administrative apparatus in 1963. Many urban planners and writers who rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s became critical of the course Sydney took following landmark events of the 1950s. Hugh Stretton, author of the classic Ideas for Australian Cities (1971), argued “the state concentrates its own offices in the city centre, and does nothing effective to deter others from doing the same.” The Cumberland Scheme’s ambitions were generally frustrated, resulting in continuing growth of the CBD. “Most of its land is dearer and its living and productive costs are probably higher than ever”, observed Stretton. Little was done to reorient the city’s transport system beyond radial CBD-centric routes. “The New South Wales government so far concentrates jobs and customers’ traffic into the single old centre more resolutely than any other Australian or American state government does.” In 1966 Whipple found that 40 per cent of office space in privately owned buildings was occupied by government agencies. Since “nothing new [was] proposed to beat the old centre’s gravity”, explained Stretton, Sydney could “merely expect pressures, congestions, rocketing land prices.” For town planner and author Leonie Sandercock, “the failure of efforts to decentralize and to control land prices” was a major failure. While residents, retail and industry dispersed, offices remained stubbornly centralised. In Sydney, she pointed out, “the old city centre continued to grow without limit, increasing traffic problems and land prices.”
Present-day urbanists maintain that action to decentralise office work would have been futile in any event. They argue it is in the nature of office-based occupations to concentrate in the CBD, invoking what may be called ‘the CBD agglomeration myth’. As demographer Simon Kuestenmacher put it recently, “a knowledge job benefits from being co-located with other knowledge jobs.” In contrast, geographers have traced the origins of CBD locations to landforms, physical features and associated convergence points in the era of fixed-route maritime and railway transportation. George Hartman’s classic formulation of 1950 referred to “a junction of overland trade routes, along a navigable stream or water body, at some other inland break-of-bulk or change-of-ownership transportation site.” This was certainly true of the harbour city of Sydney. “As the major port in the State”, writes Maurice Daly, “Sydney provided the transport, storage, financial, and commercial systems whereby the products of the interior could be delivered to the world, and the conjunction of the port with the central business district implied a tight clustering of such activities in the CBD.” But things changed, as Daly explains, when “better transport systems removed the need to be adjacent to the port for warehousing and wholesaling [and] the motor vehicle took population, manufacturing and retailing into the suburbs.”
One flaw of the CBD agglomeration myth is that the location of office supply is superficially equated with the location of office demand. Another of the prominent urban planners, Ian Alexander, explained that “in Sydney, the central area accounted for more than 75 per cent of the value of new office buildings over the 1960-75 period.” However, his survey research ranking location factors found that “availability of premises” ranked highest for CBD offices, well above “access to associated business” and “access to business services”, which ranked eighth and ninth respectively. Alexander comments that “[t]his points to the process of office supply leading demand rather than simply responding to it.” Offices weren’t necessarily built where firms wanted to locate but firms necessarily located where offices were built. Max Neutze agreed that “central city office redevelopment has frequently been initiated by investors and developers.” This was a particular problem in the case of “Sydney [which] stands at one extreme in the urban pattern because … its city centre is far from the geographical centre of the urban [metropolitan] area.”
Alexander maintained that “there is evidence to suggest that the pattern of relocation to inner centres may be as much a product of office space availability and imperfect market knowledge as of any real inability to function in outer centres.” In his book Office Location and Public Policy (1979), he acknowledged that “the classic explanation for the clustering of office activities in city centres” has been “need for direct personal contact in transacting business.” But “there is now considerable evidence to show that, given information flows are an important locational consideration for office activities, they are by no means an absolute constraint upon location.” He cites a wave of research from Sweden and Britain on “developments in communications technology that allow the replacement of face-to-face meetings by other means” and the classification of business contacts as routine “programmed” contacts or more complex “orientation” contacts. The former could be transacted as easily from a decentralised location while the latter “form only a small proportion of a typical office firm’s contact patterns” and “involve a minority of office personnel.” Orientation contacts could also be conducted from a non-central base even if extra travel is involved.
Stretton was in no doubt that Sydney’s office centralisation was an orchestrated phenomenon: “… rising rates of destruction and renewal are made profitable by the land values of overbuilt office centres. Nor are such policies adapting democratically to ‘the peoples’ locational decisions: they work in favour of the interests of tiny minorities of central investors and developers … Plenty of Sydney people – planners, politicians and others – like to regard their centralized over-growth as natural, unavoidable, an international phenomenon. It is nothing of the sort.” After discussing features of the 1970s office over-supply, later examined in more detail by Daly, Stretton concluded that “the celebrated office boom at Sydney Cove was not a response to strong office demand from people who needed to do business there. It was a calculated risk by the office builders, gambling on inflation and rising building costs and especially on the extreme centralist policy which was visible in the government’s own office activity … [emphasis added].” Political choices made central office development highly profitable for the property-finance industry. Hoisted on fabricated props, the CBD would come to need an ongoing program of such choices to hold onto its artificial status.
Modernist architects transformed the CBD into an upscale office district, 1950s-1970s
Politicians, of all major parties, promoted such lucrative conditions for CBD office developers because, as architect and planner Darrel Conybeare explained, “Sydney’s urban image and identity is inextricably linked to the natural setting of this centre on the visually spectacular foreshores of Sydney Harbour.” The city’s leaders sought to capitalise on this asset after Melbourne stole a march with the 1956 Olympic Games. Inevitably, the harbourside CBD became their focus of attention. “Such height limits as the city had”, writes Stretton, “were suspended at the first suggestion that one skyscraper might go to Melbourne instead.” Sydney was primed to embrace a series of glittering visions offered by the architecture profession over decades starting around this time. According to one account, the “move to skyscrapers may have been American-influenced but was, to a large extent, architect-led, with the Royal Australian Institute of Architects [RAIA] acting as prime mover in bringing skyscrapers to Sydney …”
Architects had some powerful symbols at their disposal. Historian Jennifer Taylor wrote that the “glazed building had particular appeal as it symbolised American prosperity … [there was] an imagery of modern efficiency that these buildings were seen to represent.” Lever House, New York, 1951, “provided an accessible model for a tall, freestanding curtain-wall building.” While town planners and traffic engineers highlighted congestion and land values to promote decentralisation, architects deployed aesthetics for centralisation. Large-scale modern structures were only viable in high rent zones like CBDs. One emerging advocate of modernist architecture was Harry Seidler, a member of the RAIA’s Acts and Regulations Committee, who invited his mentor and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius to address the RAIA’s 1954 convention in Sydney. Linked to the convention, Gropius delivered a speech to the ABC and along with Seidler contributed an article to the Sydney Morning Herald. Subjects like the economics of office location or agglomeration economies did not feature in their arguments for modernist architecture, which focused on culture and aesthetics. The Herald became a forum for architects and other agitators against Sydney’s building restrictions, particularly the 150-foot height limit. Jennifer Taylor maintained “there [was] little doubt that the introduction of the glazed office building to Australia resulted from aesthetic preference rather than economic advantage.”
While City of Sydney Council’s political leadership opposed the height restriction, officers like City Engineer R D Stevenson and his predecessor A H Garnsey supported the County of Cumberland Scheme program of decentralisation and a restrictive Floor Space Index to block CBD skyscrapers. Nevertheless, in 1956 the state government decided to lift the limit. Premier Joe Cahill singled out the role played by “architects and others [who] complained about it.” By this time the County of Cumberland Scheme had already stalled and Sydney’s over-centralisation persisted. In those conditions Cahill’s decision catalysed other factors behind the CBD office boom documented by Archer, Whipple and Daly. The new Height of Buildings Advisory Committee (HOBAC), says writer Geoffrey Moorhouse, manipulated floor-space ratios “so generously from the norm that Sydney’s ratios ever since have been about twice what is permitted in European cities.”
In another book, Ian Alexander drew extensively on the work of urban geographer Larry Bourne, who identified a “process of intensification of land use through redevelopment” in the form of “space-intensive activities [that] were constantly replacing space-extensive activities, since it is ‘generally uneconomic’ to replace an existing structure ‘with anything but a more intensive use’.” This “phenomenon can be attributed to the high prices that most central-area sites command: non-intensive uses become an increasingly poor investment.” Amongst “activities high in the rent-paying hierarchy”, office development was the most intensive. Archer’s and Daly’s accounts of Sydney’s office booms are consistent with this process. For urban policy academic Pauline McGuirk, they were “fuelled by the CBD’s transition from a general-purpose city centre to a specialist financial and business centre.” While proponents of modernist design claimed it was more functional − “form follows function” − the effect on urban environments like CBDs was to narrow the range of functions.
Under the PLVI system, built forms and street lines were conditioned by their functional zone, commonly “limit-height budget blocks that pushed out to the building line, presenting a planar wall to the street.” After the booms, however, finance-driven towers made their own surroundings. Architects and designers Francesca Morrison and Krystyna Luzcak wrote about “the superimposition of a new physical and spatial concept … [b]ased on the idea of elements sitting freely in space… street walls of buildings began to give way to single towers set in plazas or on low podiums.” For Jennifer Taylor, the freestanding, glazed building “was conceptually and physically distinct from its setting … context was inconsequential.” But as Morrison and Luczak explain, “Sydney’s street pattern and block size did not accommodate them as easily as Manhattan’s grid,” so large-scale lot amalgamation was usually a precondition for projects. In the case of the AMP Building at Circular Quay, “55 percent coverage of the large site [was] made up of consolidated lots.”
How to make use of the residual spaces between unattached towers emerged as a perennial CBD problem. Taylor writes that within the typical FSR envelope, “the cost of building to a greater height was offset by the greater prestige of office space on the upper floors hence, there was an economic incentive to build high which, as a by-product, resulted in larger areas of public space to be landscaped at ground level.” Inevitably, though, simple attention to visual amenity was not enough to activate urban spaces without ample provision for pedestrian usage. Since freestanding towers now had the status of financial assets, the often-vexing problem of residual space could potentially detract from their value. So drab made-over passageways were eventually succeeded by distinct leisure destinations.
Australia Square
The ultimate solution was achieved by Harry Seidler’s Australia Square project, which, according to architecture writer Henry Margalit, “became a key precedent for the departure from the street-enclosing building.” Historian John Freeland felt “the urban vision was Seidler’s, founded on his contention that Sydney’s historic street network played little role in fostering a mixed urbanity of work and leisure.” The dual office tower and plaza project was designed for tenants in the corporate, finance and professional sectors. An impressive array of amenities was essential to overcome an unfavourable location in the CBD’s traditional PLVI morphology. A slender “circular tower of fifty storeys” located on George Street was the standout feature, providing most of the office space, “with the remainder taken up in an elevated thirteen-storey linear block enclosing the plaza to the east”, fronting Pitt Street. The plaza’s shopping arcade has been described as “the ‘gourmet circle’, a ring of better than usual take-away food and beverage facilities” opening out to “a scattering of tables, chairs and sun umbrellas.” According to Taylor
… the successful sociability of the plaza spaces come from the locational geography of the site. It is, in effect, a broad pathway connecting two concentrated population zones of the central business district. So Australia Square is a desirable route. It is also a resting place for the high-rise denizens, when they emerge to feed and socialise. So Australia Square is a desirable destination.
Taylor refers to “Seidler’s wish to avoid vehicular conduits with their snarling traffic racket rebounding off the channel-defining walls.” Over time structural segregation of pedestrians and motor traffic became a prized objective of CBD developers and architects. To enhance the ground plane around their futuristic skyscrapers, insurance companies and architects engineered a new urban logic, entrenching a distinction between walking-for-purpose and walking-for-leisure. This early transitional period saw the inception of a contest for space between the CBD’s traditional daytime population and office tower developers, now cultivating a generation of white-collar amblers. Emerging inter-spatial leisure destinations were naturally geared for the tastes of upscale professionals.
Developments based on the tower-and-plaza template emerged across various zones of the CBD. This disruption of the PLVI system’s gradation of functions led Stretton to complain that the district “just gets more offices; and inside them, not much further diversification of activity, but more and more of the same activities, and people not more but less diversified than before.”
The CBD’s character changed dramatically as Bourne’s process of intensification and succession began to encroach on the industrial-wholesale corridor west and south-west of York Street. Industrial geographer Robert Fagan observes that after the 1950s “intense competition from other land uses such as … office development forced up rents and land prices in the central area.” Between 1954 and 1971, say geographers Peter Murphy and Sophie Watson, “the inner areas had lost some 60,000 manufacturing workers, a third of the 1945 total.” The Sydney CBD Survey (1976) reported that industrial floor space fell by as much as 45 percent between 1971 and 1976. Peter Simons and colleagues found that “change in the physical appearance and economic function of the CBD associated with the growth of office based activities” also had a drastic effect on the wholesale district. “Overall, wholesalers were located further away from the inner city by 1977, 59 per cent of the new firms which survived were located outside the City of Sydney.” And the office boom’s destructive impact on industrial jobs extended to the CBD’s working-class leisure venues. Sydney historian Peter Spearritt lamented, for instance, that “the heaviest concentrations [of pubs] were around Circular Quay, the wharf and warehouse area to the west of George Street and around the Haymarket … Many of these hotels were demolished in the office boom of the 1960s and 1970s.”
By the early 1970s, state and city politicians confronted a new problem which has come to preoccupy CBD planning ever since. How to reconcile two conflicting imperatives. First, to safeguard the CBD’s contrived raison d’etre as the dominant site for office supply – as opposed to office demand – and second, to mitigate the loss of amenity from over-development in such a confined area. In desperation they reached for a series of municipal ‘strategic plans’ to arrest the decline in shoppers and visitors coming to the CBD.
Sydney Council embraced tower-and-plaza as pleasure ground, 1952-1971
Over a large part of HOBAC’s reign, City of Sydney Council retained a nominal power to process development applications but it lacked legislative status. Back in 1952 the Council had come up with a Planning Scheme, as envisioned by the decentralising County of Cumberland Scheme, which ruled out skyscrapers by means of restrictive floor-space ratios. But it never saw the light of day due to opposition from business interests and the state government, which, as legislating authority, cherished Sydney’s image as the shimmering gateway to Australia.
But binding the council’s hands on building approvals was far from being the state’s trump card. On 13 September 1967 the newly elected Liberal-Country Party state government exercised its constitutional power to sack the council and appoint three Commissioners. “The Commissioners were rushed with development applications which were all passed”, writes historian Paul Ashton. The new government proceeded to adjust council boundaries, excising working-class neighbourhoods, and scheduled a city election for 1969. The “anti-Labor but progressive” Civic Reform Association (CRA) came out ahead of Labor for the first time in 17 years. Ashton writes that the CRA’s “primary constituency was the City’s financial, manufacturing and retailing interests”, some of which were under pressure from the office booms.
Andrew Briger, a successful CRA candidate, thought “the high rent structure in many areas of new redevelopment had squeezed out those functions with a low profit margin and this, in turn, had led to the deadening of the city.” By way of illustration, Richard Carew and Peter Simons note that “the City of Sydney’s share of metropolitan retail sales fell from 52.2 to 29.3 per cent between 1949 to 1962 and … from 18.8 to 13.6 per cent between 1969 and 1974.” Before the election the CRA had commissioned a report from eminent town planner James Colman, who proposed that “walking in the city should be a physical, emotional and intellectual pleasure.” Hence the CRA’s 1968 Annual Report stated that “there is a need … for a new overall design which … will result in the emergence of whole areas designed not only for utility, but also as more pleasant places in which to live, play and work.” Since the organic PLVI-system had been disrupted, reconstructing functional diversity was considered to depend, ironically, on better amenities for ‘pleasure’, ‘play’ and other non-functional experiences.
From 1965 CRA leaders had come under the spell of the internationally trained George Clarke, charismatic principal of an influential Sydney town planning consultancy. In the 1950s Clarke travelled to the US and studied city planning under Lewis Mumford at MIT. Briger considered him an “avant-garde town planner.” By the 1970s, Clarke’s career was interwoven with inner Sydney’s ascendant “professional white-collar residents” and their search for “a more cosmopolitan ambience”. Between 1966 and 1981 this demographic rose from 12.5 percent of the City of Sydney area workforce to 22.6 percent while “working class” residents declined from 45.1 per cent to 15.9 per cent over the same period.
Clarke thought Australian urban planning “specialised either in suburban ‘subdivision’ of ‘estates’, or in the broad scale, broad brush planning to do with suburbs, metropolitan areas or regions, road and rail networks, and all that sort of thing”. This contrasted with his own “specific interest in high density city planning and urban design and the management of urban change in city centres.” He approached metropolitan planning and city-centre planning as distinct and almost mutually-exclusive spheres, complaining that under the Cumberland Scheme the inner-city was just a “blob”. Clarke claimed to be one of the few who understood the spatial order of the CBD, and over the 1960s wrote extensively about it for various town planning journals. But he seemed blasé about the first office boom and displayed no inkling or concern about the more intense and wide-ranging phase that was about to take off.
Clarke’s campaigns against CBD decline were potentially of interest to a struggling CRA constituency, the retail sector. According to Kelly Gregg of Toronto University, in North America “post-war suburban centres … linked retail success to the pedestrian shopping experience … [and] … this link propelled the then un-tested assumption that planning downtowns to mimic suburban shopping centres by pedestrianizing main streets would revitalize downtown retail districts.” This became a point of collaboration between the CRA and Clarke. Acquiescence in the full scope of Sydney’s office boom may have raised questions about his interest in protecting retail and other non-office or low margin activities. But he was a fervent advocate for the tower-and-plaza model as the nearest thing to a panacea.
Clarke cited examples like Chase Manhattan Bank’s skyscraper project in New York, “bigger than usual for such buildings; it amalgamates several smaller parcels”, with “this extra space being put to good use … at the foot of the great tower is an open plaza where pedestrians and pigeons enjoy one another’s company.” From his perspective, “it is always difficult to create such pedestrian spaces where land is costly and in private ownership, but it can be done if private developers and local government get together to work out a balanced design.” Clarke was interested in tall freestanding towers because, under suitable floor-space ratios, they underwrote the creation of residual space for upgraded white-collar pedestrian amenity. There is nothing to suggest he thought much about businesses needing a CBD location to exploit agglomeration economies.
On a district level, Clarke believed that “comprehensively designing large pieces of a city to a co-ordinated plan” was the only option. One project for downtown Baltimore was held up for praise: “only five existing buildings are to be kept, the remainder will be replaced with eight new office buildings … Most of the existing streets will be closed and discarded. The area will be divided into several pedestrian precincts, with parks and malls.” At this time, the Australia Square project, built over 1962-67, typified many of Clarke’s ideals, but on a moderate scale. Before the 1969 council election, his firm and the CRA collaborated on a more ambitious plan to pedestrianise the section of Martin Place between George and Pitt Streets. Rejected by the Commissioners, it had to wait until after the poll.
The CRA’s first order of business on achieving office was to commission a comprehensive plan of the kind recommended by James Colman. Following a bidding process, the contract was awarded to a consortium under the direction of Clarke, who proceeded to draft the City of Sydney Strategic Plan (CSSP) with input from other members of the group. Sydney Council formally adopted the CSSP as policy on 2 August 1971. Despite having no legal status, the CSSP had long lasting effects on Sydney CBD as a series of guidelines. Briger summarised its achievements as follows:
... a new Floor Space Ratio Code and a Parking Code were approved and the long-term process of implementing the integrated city-wide pedestrian network commenced following the closure of the first section of Martin Place to vehicular traffic. This led to numerous streetscape improvements in what was referred to as the “greening” of the city. Most notable amongst these were Sydney Square, the Circular Quay and Dixon Street (Chinatown) malls, Railway Square, Wynyard Place …
And yet it did not achieve the original purpose for which City of Sydney submitted a draft planning scheme. There was no reversal of over-centralisation in metropolitan Sydney. The CSSP and subsequent strategic plans sought to resolve the over-development versus amenity dilemma, not by controlling building volumes, but by sacrificing the CBD as an open district and gradually raising barriers to vehicle access. Leonie Sandercock thought the CSSP just reinforced “all those inequalities mentioned earlier that result from over-concentration in the centre of a large metropolis … the diversity of the [CBD] itself is reduced by increasing rents, contrary to the rhetoric of the plan.” Ian Alexander found that floor space “ratios under the 1971 Code are in fact up to 20 per cent higher than their equivalents under the preceding arrangements.”
Deconcentrating office construction was never a priority for Clarke, since tall freestanding office towers were an essential component of his model for urban renewal. As he reminisced later, “Sydney’s pre-dominant ‘image’ is its concentrated north-south lineal cluster of tall buildings sharply defined by the CSSP, along its eastern and western sides, dramatically visible from all directions.” This explains why the state government grew generally tolerant of the CSSP. Apparently, the long history of tussles over Sydney’s image had finally drawn to a close. Now both the state and the city council converged on the same glittering vista of skyscrapers-on-the-harbour.
The full report Rise of Luxury Urbanity as a System: Sydney CBD covers the story in more depth. It is Part 1 of a two-part series, following events up to the 1970s. Part 2 will deal with developments from the 1980s to the present time. Sources for quotations in the above article are footnoted in the full report.
… the successful sociability of the plaza spaces come from the locational geography of the site. It is, in effect, a broad pathway connecting two concentrated population zones of the central business district. So Australia Square is a desirable route. It is also a resting place for the high-rise denizens, when they emerge to feed and socialise. So Australia Square is a desirable destination.
Taylor refers to “Seidler’s wish to avoid vehicular conduits with their snarling traffic racket rebounding off the channel-defining walls.” Over time structural segregation of pedestrians and motor traffic became a prized objective of CBD developers and architects. To enhance the ground plane around their futuristic skyscrapers, insurance companies and architects engineered a new urban logic, entrenching a distinction between walking-for-purpose and walking-for-leisure. This early transitional period saw the inception of a contest for space between the CBD’s traditional daytime population and office tower developers, now cultivating a generation of white-collar amblers. Emerging inter-spatial leisure destinations were naturally geared for the tastes of upscale professionals.
Developments based on the tower-and-plaza template emerged across various zones of the CBD. This disruption of the PLVI system’s gradation of functions led Stretton to complain that the district “just gets more offices; and inside them, not much further diversification of activity, but more and more of the same activities, and people not more but less diversified than before.”
The CBD’s character changed dramatically as Bourne’s process of intensification and succession began to encroach on the industrial-wholesale corridor west and south-west of York Street. Industrial geographer Robert Fagan observes that after the 1950s “intense competition from other land uses such as … office development forced up rents and land prices in the central area.” Between 1954 and 1971, say geographers Peter Murphy and Sophie Watson, “the inner areas had lost some 60,000 manufacturing workers, a third of the 1945 total.” The Sydney CBD Survey (1976) reported that industrial floor space fell by as much as 45 percent between 1971 and 1976. Peter Simons and colleagues found that “change in the physical appearance and economic function of the CBD associated with the growth of office based activities” also had a drastic effect on the wholesale district. “Overall, wholesalers were located further away from the inner city by 1977, 59 per cent of the new firms which survived were located outside the City of Sydney.” And the office boom’s destructive impact on industrial jobs extended to the CBD’s working-class leisure venues. Sydney historian Peter Spearritt lamented, for instance, that “the heaviest concentrations [of pubs] were around Circular Quay, the wharf and warehouse area to the west of George Street and around the Haymarket … Many of these hotels were demolished in the office boom of the 1960s and 1970s.”
By the early 1970s, state and city politicians confronted a new problem which has come to preoccupy CBD planning ever since. How to reconcile two conflicting imperatives. First, to safeguard the CBD’s contrived raison d’etre as the dominant site for office supply – as opposed to office demand – and second, to mitigate the loss of amenity from over-development in such a confined area. In desperation they reached for a series of municipal ‘strategic plans’ to arrest the decline in shoppers and visitors coming to the CBD.
Sydney Council embraced tower-and-plaza as pleasure ground, 1952-1971
Over a large part of HOBAC’s reign, City of Sydney Council retained a nominal power to process development applications but it lacked legislative status. Back in 1952 the Council had come up with a Planning Scheme, as envisioned by the decentralising County of Cumberland Scheme, which ruled out skyscrapers by means of restrictive floor-space ratios. But it never saw the light of day due to opposition from business interests and the state government, which, as legislating authority, cherished Sydney’s image as the shimmering gateway to Australia.
But binding the council’s hands on building approvals was far from being the state’s trump card. On 13 September 1967 the newly elected Liberal-Country Party state government exercised its constitutional power to sack the council and appoint three Commissioners. “The Commissioners were rushed with development applications which were all passed”, writes historian Paul Ashton. The new government proceeded to adjust council boundaries, excising working-class neighbourhoods, and scheduled a city election for 1969. The “anti-Labor but progressive” Civic Reform Association (CRA) came out ahead of Labor for the first time in 17 years. Ashton writes that the CRA’s “primary constituency was the City’s financial, manufacturing and retailing interests”, some of which were under pressure from the office booms.
Andrew Briger, a successful CRA candidate, thought “the high rent structure in many areas of new redevelopment had squeezed out those functions with a low profit margin and this, in turn, had led to the deadening of the city.” By way of illustration, Richard Carew and Peter Simons note that “the City of Sydney’s share of metropolitan retail sales fell from 52.2 to 29.3 per cent between 1949 to 1962 and … from 18.8 to 13.6 per cent between 1969 and 1974.” Before the election the CRA had commissioned a report from eminent town planner James Colman, who proposed that “walking in the city should be a physical, emotional and intellectual pleasure.” Hence the CRA’s 1968 Annual Report stated that “there is a need … for a new overall design which … will result in the emergence of whole areas designed not only for utility, but also as more pleasant places in which to live, play and work.” Since the organic PLVI-system had been disrupted, reconstructing functional diversity was considered to depend, ironically, on better amenities for ‘pleasure’, ‘play’ and other non-functional experiences.
From 1965 CRA leaders had come under the spell of the internationally trained George Clarke, charismatic principal of an influential Sydney town planning consultancy. In the 1950s Clarke travelled to the US and studied city planning under Lewis Mumford at MIT. Briger considered him an “avant-garde town planner.” By the 1970s, Clarke’s career was interwoven with inner Sydney’s ascendant “professional white-collar residents” and their search for “a more cosmopolitan ambience”. Between 1966 and 1981 this demographic rose from 12.5 percent of the City of Sydney area workforce to 22.6 percent while “working class” residents declined from 45.1 per cent to 15.9 per cent over the same period.
Clarke thought Australian urban planning “specialised either in suburban ‘subdivision’ of ‘estates’, or in the broad scale, broad brush planning to do with suburbs, metropolitan areas or regions, road and rail networks, and all that sort of thing”. This contrasted with his own “specific interest in high density city planning and urban design and the management of urban change in city centres.” He approached metropolitan planning and city-centre planning as distinct and almost mutually-exclusive spheres, complaining that under the Cumberland Scheme the inner-city was just a “blob”. Clarke claimed to be one of the few who understood the spatial order of the CBD, and over the 1960s wrote extensively about it for various town planning journals. But he seemed blasé about the first office boom and displayed no inkling or concern about the more intense and wide-ranging phase that was about to take off.
Clarke’s campaigns against CBD decline were potentially of interest to a struggling CRA constituency, the retail sector. According to Kelly Gregg of Toronto University, in North America “post-war suburban centres … linked retail success to the pedestrian shopping experience … [and] … this link propelled the then un-tested assumption that planning downtowns to mimic suburban shopping centres by pedestrianizing main streets would revitalize downtown retail districts.” This became a point of collaboration between the CRA and Clarke. Acquiescence in the full scope of Sydney’s office boom may have raised questions about his interest in protecting retail and other non-office or low margin activities. But he was a fervent advocate for the tower-and-plaza model as the nearest thing to a panacea.
Clarke cited examples like Chase Manhattan Bank’s skyscraper project in New York, “bigger than usual for such buildings; it amalgamates several smaller parcels”, with “this extra space being put to good use … at the foot of the great tower is an open plaza where pedestrians and pigeons enjoy one another’s company.” From his perspective, “it is always difficult to create such pedestrian spaces where land is costly and in private ownership, but it can be done if private developers and local government get together to work out a balanced design.” Clarke was interested in tall freestanding towers because, under suitable floor-space ratios, they underwrote the creation of residual space for upgraded white-collar pedestrian amenity. There is nothing to suggest he thought much about businesses needing a CBD location to exploit agglomeration economies.
On a district level, Clarke believed that “comprehensively designing large pieces of a city to a co-ordinated plan” was the only option. One project for downtown Baltimore was held up for praise: “only five existing buildings are to be kept, the remainder will be replaced with eight new office buildings … Most of the existing streets will be closed and discarded. The area will be divided into several pedestrian precincts, with parks and malls.” At this time, the Australia Square project, built over 1962-67, typified many of Clarke’s ideals, but on a moderate scale. Before the 1969 council election, his firm and the CRA collaborated on a more ambitious plan to pedestrianise the section of Martin Place between George and Pitt Streets. Rejected by the Commissioners, it had to wait until after the poll.
The CRA’s first order of business on achieving office was to commission a comprehensive plan of the kind recommended by James Colman. Following a bidding process, the contract was awarded to a consortium under the direction of Clarke, who proceeded to draft the City of Sydney Strategic Plan (CSSP) with input from other members of the group. Sydney Council formally adopted the CSSP as policy on 2 August 1971. Despite having no legal status, the CSSP had long lasting effects on Sydney CBD as a series of guidelines. Briger summarised its achievements as follows:
... a new Floor Space Ratio Code and a Parking Code were approved and the long-term process of implementing the integrated city-wide pedestrian network commenced following the closure of the first section of Martin Place to vehicular traffic. This led to numerous streetscape improvements in what was referred to as the “greening” of the city. Most notable amongst these were Sydney Square, the Circular Quay and Dixon Street (Chinatown) malls, Railway Square, Wynyard Place …
And yet it did not achieve the original purpose for which City of Sydney submitted a draft planning scheme. There was no reversal of over-centralisation in metropolitan Sydney. The CSSP and subsequent strategic plans sought to resolve the over-development versus amenity dilemma, not by controlling building volumes, but by sacrificing the CBD as an open district and gradually raising barriers to vehicle access. Leonie Sandercock thought the CSSP just reinforced “all those inequalities mentioned earlier that result from over-concentration in the centre of a large metropolis … the diversity of the [CBD] itself is reduced by increasing rents, contrary to the rhetoric of the plan.” Ian Alexander found that floor space “ratios under the 1971 Code are in fact up to 20 per cent higher than their equivalents under the preceding arrangements.”
Deconcentrating office construction was never a priority for Clarke, since tall freestanding office towers were an essential component of his model for urban renewal. As he reminisced later, “Sydney’s pre-dominant ‘image’ is its concentrated north-south lineal cluster of tall buildings sharply defined by the CSSP, along its eastern and western sides, dramatically visible from all directions.” This explains why the state government grew generally tolerant of the CSSP. Apparently, the long history of tussles over Sydney’s image had finally drawn to a close. Now both the state and the city council converged on the same glittering vista of skyscrapers-on-the-harbour.
The full report Rise of Luxury Urbanity as a System: Sydney CBD covers the story in more depth. It is Part 1 of a two-part series, following events up to the 1970s. Part 2 will deal with developments from the 1980s to the present time. Sources for quotations in the above article are footnoted in the full report.
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