Doing Density Differently

A paper presented by Carmen Lawrence to the Fremantle Society, 2 December 2020. A earlier paper, with the title 'Is increasing density a threat to Fremantle's heritage?' was read to the Fremantle History Society in 2016. That article was published in Fremantle Studies 10, 2019, but was not permitted to be republished online (i.e. on this site) until 2022, long after its socio-cultural-historical moment had passed.

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When I spoke a couple of years ago to the Fremantle Historical Society, I had on my thumb drive an image of what was proposed for St John’s Square. I said I found it hard to imagine that anybody could have looked at that place and concluded that the proposed buildings were suitable for the site.

In my opinion, it violated all the reasonable principles of heritage protection and city planning that I will touch on tonight. Having checked it out again in its almost finished state, I feel even more strongly that the big triangular and architecturally boring building plonked in the middle of the square is completely out of sympathy with the town hall and the church.

The City has forfeited what could have be a wonderful opportunity to create an open, lively community space. No matter what businesses set up there, the new building is and will be a blight on the City of Fremantle for the next 100 years. It is a tragedy – both for the people and the place that is Fremantle.

Several years ago, I was Chair of the Australian Heritage Council, an experience that gave me privileged access to arguments and expertise about Australia’s rich cultural and natural heritage. It also drove home to me the continuing tension between protecting our heritage and meeting the more immediate need to accommodate a growing population.  Tonight I will try to examine how these tensions are playing out in Fremantle and remind us that the problems we are grappling with are not unique to Fremantle, but are all too common across Australia and around the world.

I see heritage, in the broadest sense,  as what we inherit. It’s not just the aesthetically pleasing or familiar, it’s what we value from our inheritance and what we decide to keep and protect in order to understand our past – it’s what we judge important to leave to future generations. It is both global enough to encompass our horror, for instance, at the bombing of Temple of Bel in Palmyra in Syria, the wilful destruction of the Juukan Gorge caves in the Pilbara caves and as local as our own streetscapes and indeed our own personal stories.

It is everything that our predecessors have bequeathed us, or not destroyed, both tangible and intangible. Like many, I think of heritage as encompassing the natural world, landscape, structures, objects, buildings, language – all of these things are part of our heritage.

As a psychologist, I have also been interested in this inheritance because of the way it shapes and expresses who we are. We are not always aware of the extent to which our heritage gives us our identity and gives meaning and depth to our lives, but it does.

There’s now a growing body of evidence which shows that when you strip people of their heritage, whether it is removing landscapes or buildings or language or family connections, it has a direct effect on their sense of well-being and sense of self and indeed, their identity. When people limit their discussions of heritage to the strictly physical, they are limiting its power and scope, since it is really embedded in who we are.

Some of the heritage which shapes us is only dimly comprehended. We may not know, for instance, the precise identity of our ancestors; but their experiences will have helped form our families and their cultural practices, the secrets kept, the rituals and values.  

Equally, we are often ignorant of our shared heritage; most of us are only crudely aware, for instance, of the ancient heritage in this country, but we can still appreciate its importance and deep significance to Indigenous Australians.

As many have pointed out, it is no accident that one of the first targets of those who were engaged in genocide is the obliteration of heritage - find things that matter to these people and eliminate them – the buildings, the books, the people who have knowledge - so-called ethnic cleansing. We have seen such actions throughout history; recently we have seen them in Syria, and now directed at the Uighurs in Xinjiang in China. Such destruction is rightly considered a war crime alongside the destruction of the people themselves.

Victors everywhere systematically seek to remove the vanquished community from gaze. As Milan Kundera put it in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory – destroy its books, its culture, its history. And I think we should acknowledge that such erasure of Indigenous culture was part and parcel of the European migration to Australia.

I think it is important to recognise that the destruction of heritage is not just the result of these big traumatic and cataclysmic events. We are constantly making judgments about what is worth protecting, what we should pass on, as well as what we prefer to forget.

Not all of those judgments are carefully considered or even conscious, and many of course are hotly contested. Some are the result of us caring more about other values like the profitability of the developers, the reputation of architects and some are about our own short-term wants that take precedence over our heritage.

In struggles to preserve our heritage in the face of these economic goals, we may give up what is really precious to us. The metric of money – because it is tangible and palpable – overwhelms the things that we cannot value so readily. Decisions about what matters and whether and how to protect heritage are often made without reference to the views of the public at large. It is only when people object that we find out what they care about.

All too often, when the specialist decision makers do ask people what they want they then ignore what they have been told in these “consultations”. A lot of our public officials and elected representatives, it is sad to say, are not much concerned with protection of our heritage – the siren call of progress and the desire to make a mark overwhelm protecting , repurposing and reusing what we already have; the seduction of the new proves irresistible. Heritage values too rarely take centre stage in discussions about planning and land use unless there is active community resistance. Too often, however, to quote Joni Mitchell, “Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone? They paved paradise, Put up a parking lot.

In addition to the threat to our natural and cultural heritage from climate change, is the rapid growth of cities, creeping urbanisation and increases in density, particularly in the older parts of our cities. It is leading to the destruction of many cultural and natural landscapes.

When thinking about the threats to the heritage of a place like Fremantle I find it helpful to observe that every city, especially liveable cities and every city that we love, has its own unique character that is expressed in the architecture, the arrangement of the streets, the open spaces; it has its own DNA structure. You cannot always see every element of the body, but the DNA is there to see. It is expressed in those architectural and spatial characteristics that are best loved by the city’s inhabitants and that contribute to that sense of identity.

People know what Fremantle is about. It might consist of certain building materials, familiar here, colours, typical arrangements of scale and architectural form, building lot sizes, roof lines, the scale of public and semi-public spaces. I am sure we could all draw a picture of Fremantle that incorporated all of those elements and there would be a great deal of agreement between us about the nature, the DNA, of Fremantle.

It is important that, when planning for increased density, or erecting new civic buildings, or increasing the number of opportunities for people to have recreation on the waterfront, this DNA is respected. In my view, new buildings should have regard to this genetic code, reflecting at least some of the existing patterns when they are being interpreted in contemporary form. There should be a conversation, a relationship.

There should be an attempt to reach some consensus about a community’s values, on what materials, what architectural and spatial forms represent the unique character of a city. Builders, architects, designers and city planners should all become familiar with that character.

If every person in the community recognised and understood this unique character and worked within its constraints, many of the disputes that we have would fade away. Obviously that still leaves plenty of room for variation – I am not talking about uniformity, homogeneity here, but simply respecting the structure, working within that in the choice of colours and materials and detailing, the degree of elegance, the aesthetic characteristics, as well as the architectural expression of the city’s various functions.

That consensus is perhaps diminishing in Fremantle compared with how it once was and has been lost altogether in many places – I think Perth lost it in the sixties really – but this communal eye, as the playwright Peter Shaffer put it, is absolutely critical if we are to protect the city’s heritage. I think it is possible to identify appropriate and inappropriate development, you can look at something immediately and say, ‘Oh that does not fit; that is not right. That does not respect the heritage of this place’.

The architecture that bears no relationship to the surroundings, that does not see the streetscape is, what Jan Gehl calls – impolitely – architects’ bird-shit. He says that the architects very often look at the city from above rather than at the street level human scale; they see the patterns a building makes from the air and then they just drop new buildings into it - the Docklands in Melbourne has exactly that character; a lot of the recent development in London looks like that to me as well. It does not respect what is there and it does not engage in a dialogue that is sufficiently nuanced.

Too much town planning and architecture does not pay attention to the DNA of the city, the existing buildings, the heritage that is there. When the ‘hero’ architects insist on certain types of buildings to increase density, they often appear to forget that people have to live in these places.

People live in these streets, people walk these streets, people live in these buildings. What is missing is an appropriate focus on human wellbeing. Ultimately that is what heritage protection is about – our physical and mental health and our satisfaction with where we live.

We need to keep asking our city planners, our architects, our landscape architects and the people who inform them how we can best plan our cities to enhance people’s quality of life.

Yes, we do need to increase the density of cities like Perth; urban sprawl has its own negative characteristics, including destroying remnant bushland, some of which is unique and irreplaceable. I am not recommending that we just keep sending Perth out to the far reaches north and south, but rather, as we increase density, we have to have a high regard for those two things – the DNA of the city and people’s quality of life.

If you can’t say of a development that it is going to improve the quality of life for the people who already live there and the people who are about to come, then it shouldn’t be proceeded with – it is as simple as that.

What is needed is for the people who are contributing to these decisions to talk to one another. As Lewis Mumford said, ‘The task of the city is to unite the scattered fragments of the human personality’, as he put it, ‘turning artificially dismembered human beings, bureaucrats, specialists, experts, depersonalised agents, into complete human beings, repairing the damage that’s been done by this vocational separation, by social segregation, by the over-cultivation of a favoured function, by the absence or organic partnerships and ideal purposes’. In other words we have to work together in order to have a whole that is worthy of that description.

One of the things that works against better planning is that we know that human beings, in some senses, are almost infinitely adaptable; they can survive, at least for a time, even on rubbish tips, in sprawling refugee camps and in the rubble of war.

People do survive, they live, but in appalling circumstances and at great cost to their health and quality of life. I am not suggesting that bad planning and poor density management are the equivalent of living on a rubbish tip, but I think what a lot of urban planners and others don’t notice is that people’s lives slowly disintegrate.

It is not a great drama, but the adaptation that people make is not without costs to health and wellbeing. Just because people seem to get on with life is no reason to suppose they are not feeling the effects of urban change, of having those treasured iconic buildings destroyed or overlooked, or overshadowed. They see their streets neglected and neighbourhoods destroyed by major highways, as was proposed with Roe 8, overshadowed by high-rise, as has been proposed in North Fremantle. Such changes affect people – while they might appear to adapt, the reality is that they will be harmed.

In planning our cities, there are a number of human characteristics that should universally enter into our calculations. One is our sense of place. I have been researching for some time now a sense of place, place attachment as it is called in psychology.

Most human beings are very, very tightly attached to place. It might be as narrow as their own homes, or their neighbourhood; sometimes it’s the wider community or the significant places they visit. The extent to which people develop robust bonds to a place also determines whether they are prepared to act to defend that place – whether from bushfires or amalgamations.

The erosion of a sense of place and place attachment should always be at the forefront of any decisions about changing people’s environments. In the Hunter Valley for example, once beautiful rural and natural landscapes were pulled apart by coalmining and then coal seam gas exploitation. Rates of depression, alcoholism, family breakdown and financial difficulties, escalated over the period that the change was occurring.

This is a measurable manifestation of a loss of a sense of place -‘solastalgia’ [[#_edn1|]] , to capture the idea that this environment was being destroyed beneath people’s feet. It can happen in urban environments too if respect is not paid to the past, and bit by bit a neighbourhood is pulled apart, so that ultimately people’s connection with it is gone.

As Jacobs [[#_edn2|]] has argued, ‘place attachment is a deep human trait. People do not simply look out over a landscape and say, “this belongs to me” they say, “I belong to this”. Concern for familiar topography for the places one knows is not about the loss of a commodity but about the loss of identity.

People belong in the world; it gives them a home. Although we do move all over the place and people are able to re-attach themselves, this migration is not usually achieved without effort and pain. Many of us here, of course, have relatives, ancestors, who, not many generations ago did just that.

I don’t think we really understand the ways in which that has perhaps influenced the way we think about place now. It may be that we are more energetically attached to this place than we would otherwise have been, had our ancestors been here for time immemorial. But then you look at indigenous people and you say, ‘Ah no,’ that they have that very strong link because of those aeons of connection.

In the literature that I am aware of, the evidence shows that when you have a strong place attachment you also have strong bonds in the community. Part of the close attachment is about the community. When you are increasing density at the expense of people being able to talk to one another, to move readily, to have a mixture of activities, then you are also destroying those bonds.

Where you have strong bonds and good neighbourhood ties people trust one another. They volunteer more. Their health is better. You can almost draw up a list of things that you would like for your fellow human beings and they are all associated with that strong sense of place attachment and also with access to an aesthetically pleasing and a green environment.

There is again, a substantial literature showing that part of what has to happen in any redevelopment is a proper respect for the natural environment. I do not mean just a little bit of green space around a great big tall tower, I mean a capacity to see and interact with it.

The absence of green spaces and green relationships between people in any city in the world and where they live and where they work and where they recover from illness, is very significant. People recover faster from surgery, children have fewer intellectual and attention problems; adults are healthier altogether. The Japanese in fact recommend walking in forests as a way of dealing with problems like heart disease and diabetes and indeed it has effects on them; they talk about “forest bathing”.

So in this, if you like, pressure to increase density, not only do you have to have a proper sense of place and people’s place in it, you also need a respect for the DNA, an appropriate level of access to the natural, green environment

I want to finish by talking about what happens when we move beyond the human scale. It is not just about the sense of place and the attachment to the green environment and respect for the DNA, it is also about being able to see through urban spaces. When you have high rise and great blocks, big straight spaces that you can’t make your way in and out of, those monolithic structures that are so beloved of some contemporary architects, trouble ensues.

Comparing planning in European cities, such as Tübingen and Antwerp, with Fremantle, it is clear that they are much more sensitive to human relationships and human scale. Their planners say things like, ‘We’ve got to maintain the existing community and not destroy it by over-planning’. One of them said, ‘We’ve got to note that our own actions as planners can easily destroy a community.’

They give priority to modernising old and mixed-use buildings rather than pulling them down. They basically say, ‘No, no, no, you don’t pull anything down, you change it in a way that is compatible with what is around.’ They say things like, ‘Make it difficult for investors to buy buildings for speculation.

Speculation can be prevented by designating heritage buildings and by local laws requiring restoration.’ So do not give developers the opportunity to buy a property and then say, ‘Oh but we need an extra five storeys in order to make money out of this.’

It is possible to strike a balance - to design homes for people of all ages and stages of life; to mix working and residential spaces; to consider car use and pedestrian access – all of these things need to be considered as part of any development.

I think if people considered some of those elements that I have talked about this evening we would be less likely to make some of these silly decisions. Like you, I urge our planners and decision makers to think more carefully about the human scale of a city, meaning that the people in it need to be the priority in decisions about what should be done.

Notes

• Glenn Albrecht, Gina-Maree Sartore, Linda Connor et al, ‘Solastalgia: The distress caused by environmental change’, Research article first published 1 February 2007, Australasian Psychiatry.
• Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) writer, philosopher and activist, a well-known critic of the modernist approach to urban planning.

Freotopia

This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally created on 23 July, 2021 and hosted at freotopia.org/books/doingdensitydifferently.html (it was last updated on 20 April, 2024). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.