Fluid City

Transforming Melbourne's Urban Waterfront

Kim Dovey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135159719
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Fluid City traces the transformation of the urban waterfront of Melbourne, the re-vitalization of the Yarra River waterfront, Melbourne Docklands and Port Philip Bay. As the financial and industrial centre of Australia, in the late nineteenth century, Melbourne developed a new world exuberance. Yet the twentieth century saw Melbourne suffering from a declining industrial and economic base. The city in the 1980s was de-industrialising, and the re-facing of the city to the water was a key urban strategy of the 1980s and 90s and a catalyst for economic transformation. This book bridges significant gaps between different discourses about the city and to challenge singular ways of viewing the city.

CHAPTER ONE

FLOWS

WATERFRONTS

The regeneration of urban waterfronts is one of the key urban design and planning stories of the late twentieth century. No longer required to serve as working ports or industrial sewers, waterfronts have become places of urban transformation with potential to attract investment and reverse patterns of decline. The waterfront has also been a primary scene of experimentation in architecture, planning and urban governance. These transformations are played out in a globalising world with increasing tensions between global capital and local place identity – tensions that are mediated by city and state governments with strong imperatives to attract investment and construct images of progress. The urban waterfront has become a new frontier of the city with opportunities for significant aesthetic, economic, social and environmental benefits; it is also the new battleground over conflict between public and private interests.

Most waterfront land that becomes available for redevelopment is disused industrial land related to former port uses. Ports are fundamentally places of flow, portals that mediate local/global flows. The harbour or dock connecting the city/state to the world shares this function with the ‘port’ connecting my computer to the World Wide Web. Ports were generally the first sites of global colonisation, funnelling flows of people, products, capital and ideas. They traditionally developed a close and intimate relationship with the city and its labour force, often involving districts of working-class housing within walking distance. Developments in transport technology throughout the twentieth century have seen port activities moved progressively to smaller and deeper sites without the need for contiguity with the central city. The result is often large tracts of derelict public waterfront in close proximity to the older city; what Hoyle has called the ‘abandoned doorstep’ becomes the opportunity for an urban facelift.¹ While such places are no longer geared to the flow of goods, they are increasingly geared to the flows of capital and ideas of an information economy.

The shift from an economy dominated by manufacturing to one focused on information industries has a range of effects. The increased flexibility of global capital in the late twentieth century has transferred manufacturing activity to cities with cheaper labour. Formerly wealthy manufacturing cities are often faced with a loss of jobs, an outflow of population and a declining tax base. There is also often a loss of collective self-esteem and business confidence. The city can become studded with abandoned sites that become both symbols of decline and opportunities for regeneration. The future of the city becomes dependent on attracting new industries, investment and jobs. The ‘new economy’ is driven by technology and information industries such as leisure, tourism, banking, finance and science; it is dominated by what Reich calls ‘symbolic analysts’: those whose job it is to manipulate numbers, words and images in the knowledge industries.² The increased flexibility of capital investment brings a focus on capturing these flows of footloose capital for purposes of job-creation and economic regeneration.

There is now a substantial literature on the global trend towards waterfront regeneration.³ The primary global models were developed in the 1970s and 1980s in North American cities such as Baltimore, Boston, Seattle and New York with global dissemination from the 1980s. A rich variety of schemes incorporates project types such as markets, maritime heritage districts, shopping malls, theme parks, housing, commerce, hotels, convention and exhibition centres, sport stadia and museums. Many such waterfront projects are part of a wider move to what Hannigan calls the ‘urban entertainment district’ formed from a collage of mix and match components.⁴ He invents neologisms such as ‘shoppertainment’, ‘eatertainment’ and ‘edutainment’ to describe these new functional hybrids. Not all waterfront developments are formula driven and there is considerable scope for visionary architecture, urban design and planning. The best example is probably Bilbao in northern Spain where a waterfront strategy (incorporating the Guggenheim art museum) is geared to broader infrastructure development. The museum (by architect Frank Gehry) is a thoroughly seductive and masterful piece of design that serves to transform the image of the city.

There are, however, dangers and contradictions to be faced by cities engaging in strategies to attract global capital for waterfront regeneration. The increased flexibility of capital flows enables developers to play off one city against another. Cities desperate for jobs and investment compete to create the conditions attractive to global investment, a form of global ‘discount war’. Key incentives can include public subsidies through tax shelters, infrastructure provision and low land prices.⁵ Others include a weakening or removal of planning restrictions and a willingness to ‘streamline’ democratic processes. Transformations in the planning process that take decision-making out of the public domain, also often render it opaque through ‘commercial-in-confidence’ secrecy agreements. This protects both the government and the project from public critique; the level of public subsidy can be hidden making assessment of public interests very difficult. The absence of public policy discourse creates a vacuum that is generally filled by marketing visions of the project, which have no legal relation to the contract. A key danger here is that such incentives and subsidies can simply siphon local investment from one part of the city to another with a tax loss to the public purse and a windfall profit for local investors.⁶ The major hedge against such siphoning is to ensure that waterfront land is effectively reserved for mega-projects on large precincts, with subsidies restricted to new investment. The result is to close out smaller projects and reduce diversity. All of this places the state in an unenviable position – seemingly unable to attract investment without substantial subsidies coupled with a loss of public control and democratic process. With the state unable to afford infrastructure costs, the temptation is to cede control to private capital in return for infrastructure funding. Yet the project then becomes driven by private interests and over a shorter time span, subject to the unpredictable cycles of boom and recession in local and global markets.

In this context, state control of infrastructure and urban design guidelines are seen by many as the ‘dead hand’ of bureaucratic regulation that will neither meet the global market for footloose capital nor satisfy the demand for new urban imagery.⁷ It is as if the ‘hidden hand’ of the market will service public interests better than the ‘dead hand’ of the state. New modes of entrepreneurial governance emerge in the form of public-private partnerships. The city becomes increasingly governed by coalitions of public and private interests; ‘authorities’ with a clear autonomy from elected government blurring the boundary between public and private sectors.⁸ This slippage enables governance without electoral obligation – the legitimation of authority is granted on the basis that autonomy is necessary to wealth generation. This is an elite form of governance which presumes that entrepreneurship is the preserve of private industry. It also tends to be focused on instant large-scale projects with short-term profits. Some of the contradictions of waterfront developments are seen in case studies such as Baltimore's Harbour Place, which is widely touted as a success story. Yet as Harvey points out, this was a public-private partnership with substantial public subsidies for hotels, convention centres and stadia; and its broader effects have been to exacerbate disparities of wealth and power: ‘The private-public partnership means that the public takes the risks and the private takes the profits. The citizenry wait for benefits that never materialize.’⁹

In this global market, intercity competition focuses attention on the urban imagery that identifies the city and differentiates it from other cities. Such imagery includes the iconography of architecture and landscape, as well as the more subtle dimensions of heritage and culture. The ‘image of the city’ originally explored by Lynch¹⁰ as a form of urban cognition takes on a new and crucial economic role as a form of discourse and branding. In this new market, urban iconography is not simply found but is constructed, both on the ground and as a form of discourse. One of the first effects of this focus on the image of the city is that the market seeks to exploit local authenticities of place – the ‘local colour’ or ‘difference’ embodied in heritage, architecture, urbanism and culture. This quest to exploit the uniqueness of the local faces the contradiction that the market also tends to destroy that which it seeks to preserve. Highly valued places have a ‘monopoly’ on that amenity, yet as such places are incorporated into marketing and branding, ‘place myths’ are constructed. Local experiences of place become global commodities; differences are ironed out and the monopoly is weakened. The market pursuit of the authenticities of place remains reliant on local distinctions, and a part of what is attractive about the local is the vibrant ‘buzz’ of a diverse urban community. The paradox, as Harvey points out, is that capital cannot afford to eliminate forces which may be antagonistic to redevelopment.¹¹ The goose that lays the golden egg cannot be turned into a battery hen.

Many waterfront projects are focused on a wholesale reconstruction of the urban image with spectacles of artistic, social and economic dynamism. There is a special synergy about waterfront projects that turns large tracts of highly visible public land into the opportunity for a new urban iconography; such projects can revitalise the waterfront, attract investment, build local political capital and serve as effective advertising for further investment.¹² Both of these trends, towards the exploitation of the unique and the transformation of the derelict, often come together in waterfront projects. What they have in common is the focus on place mythology and marketing – urban identity is reconstructed as it is commodified. The rise of ‘brand marketing’, which focuses on the packaging of an ever-expanding range of products, fits the move to place marketing well – the city becomes the brand name as its iconic images become logos. This process places a premium on attracting the kinds of urban development that will in turn help to transform the imagery of the city as a brand.

The shift from manufacturing to an information economy since the 1970s has fundamentally changed the relation of image to content in architecture and design. Brand marketing has led to a substantial rise in the symbolic component of commodities – the ‘symbolic capital’. The economic development of cities has come to depend more strongly on aesthetic production, a shift that has transformed the relationships between the architecture and planning disciplines. While planning can be effective in protecting existing places, the production of new forms of place imagery turns the focus on to urban design and architecture. We see a new alliance of high style and avant garde architectural production with broader development processes. Architecture has become more integrated into the constructions of place and place marketing – the production of imagery (both fictional and real projects) begins to play a key role in the advertising and legitimation of projects to both clients and community.¹³ Advertising imagery for both the waterfront and the city becomes crucial to this process, and one effect here is the partial replacement of urban plans by urban design and marketing visions.¹⁴ The discursive construction of the city and its future has become a key dimension of urban transformation and discourse analysis in turn becomes crucial to its interpretation.

The global trend to waterfront developments is also part of what has long been called the ‘disneyfication’ of the city as a thematic, scripted and branded form of place-making.¹⁵ These are projects where as Goodwin puts it: ‘images and myths are relentlessly packaged and presented until they become “hyperreal”... the distinction between the “real” and the “representation” is effaced’.¹⁶ There is also a blurring between private and public space, between culture and commerce. The liminal spaces of the shopping mall and housing enclave, where public meanings are merged with private control, migrate to the waterfront, blurring the line between public and private interests. Thus waterfront projects are often highly choreographed and packaged urban lifestyles that construct new forms of social and cultural identity.

In the information economy, urban development also becomes characterised by the pursuit of what Mitchell calls ‘smart places’ with high levels of IT infrastructure producing global ‘electronic propinquity’: ‘investment, jobs and economic power seem certain to migrate to those neighbourhoods, cities, regions and nations that can quickly put the infrastructure in place ...’.¹⁷ Paradoxically, a key attraction of ‘smart places’ is the liberation from the inertia of place: ‘Commerce isn't impeded by distance. Community doesn't have to depend on propinquity.’¹⁸ Yet the attractions remain local – not just the IT infrastructure, but also the local networks of globally connected managers and the buzz of creativity and authenticity.¹⁹ This is a city of ‘live/work’ spaces, ‘24-hour neighbourhoods’ and electronically mediated meetings – one can conduct global business while enjoying the local colour. Others see the emergence of ‘smart places’ in a more critical light. For Dear, as planning becomes less integrated cities polarise into an information rich ‘cyburbia’ contrasted with an information poor ‘cyberia’. The city develops as ‘... a noncontiguous collage of parcelized, consumption-oriented landscapes devoid of conventional centers yet wired into electronic propinquity ... a partitioned gaming board subject to perverse laws and peculiarly discrete, disjointed urban outcomes.’²⁰ Likewise, Graham and Marvin suggest that the new networked infrastructures lead to a ‘splintering urbanism’ that is internationally integrated yet locally fragmented, privileging certain places and users while by-passing others.²¹

Hannigan suggests that the proliferation of entertainment districts in North America is based on a social contradiction: a voracious middle-class appetite for the consumption of authentic place experience is coupled with a deeply rooted reluctance to take risks.²² Put another way this is a desire to experience ‘diversity’ without risking contact with genuine ‘difference’. The quest for experience lead...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Flows
• Part A Riverscapes
• Part B Dockscapes
• Part C Bayscapes
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index