Australian Metropolis

A Planning History

Robert Freestone, Stephen Hamnett, Robert Freestone, Stephen Hamnett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781136888274
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The Australian Metropolis splendidly fills a huge gap in the literature on Australian cities. It is the definitive account of the history of Australian cities and the crucial role which planning has played in their genesis and growth. Spanning two centuries from the very beginning until the present day, it will instantly become a standard work ' Professor Sir Peter Hall, author of Cities in Civilisation..
The Australian Metropolis provides a single-volume introduction to the development of urban planning. It fills the need for a convenient, initial resource for anyone interested in the broad evolutionary sweep of modern planning. By setting the evolution of Australian planning within its broader societal context, The Australian Metropolis presents a balanced appraisal of the positive, negative and ambivalent legacies resulting from attempts to plan Australia's major cities. This book is the winner of two Royal Australian Planning Institute Awards for Planning Excellence in 2000/2001, including the New South Wales' Division Prize for Planning Scholarship in February 2001.

1 Founding cities in nineteenth-century Australia

Helen Proudfoot

In 1788, the scene was set for a great and irreversible change in the way land was perceived and managed in Australia. Until then, the indigenous people ranged over their defined territories according to a seasonal pattern, hunting, fishing and culling the fruits of the land, but not cultivating the soil or domesticating animals for meat consumption. After 1788, the land was claimed as being under the British Crown and a system of land survey was introduced. The land was measured, divided, and appropriated according to a very different system, at first by crown grant, and then by purchase. Though the indigenous people had been living in bands or small communities of fluctuating size, they had not established permanent settlements. Agriculture, pastoralism and urbanism were thus the radical innovations of British colonisation.¹

The timing of settlement by European powers in colonies in far-flung empires had a crucial effect on the subsequent development of these colonies.² The spatial expression of towns in the colonies was determined by a dynamic process which had more to do with contact with the parent metropolitan power than with a perception of the geographical nature of the country settled. In fact, in Australia, only a cursory examination of the continent was carried out by James Cook before it was decided to send the cargo of convicts to Botany Bay. The continent, in all its bulk, variety and extent was unknown, except in outline.

The timing was crucial, according to Louis Hartz, in other ways. He postulates that the preoccupations of the age in which colonies are founded are transferred to colonial offspring and become the guiding principles of their foundation ethos.³ Thus, the English Enlightenment was the guiding hand for Sydney and New South Wales, but by the time Adelaide and Melbourne were founded, nineteenth-century capitalism and utilitarian doctrines were on the ascendant, and the complexion of these cities became different.⁴

The English had been establishing colonies vigorously since the Restoration period in the late seventeenth century. From their small European island, they expanded first into Scotland and then into Ireland. Then the attractions of the New World enticed them to plant colonies along the east coast of North America. When these colonies prospered, a program of emigration was embarked upon. After the American colonies rebelled, the British colonising zeal turned eastwards towards India and the Pacific.

There was an underlying program for the administration of British colonies. These were controlled from London, first under the Board of Plantations, and then under the Colonial Office. Governors, appointed for a fixed term, were to be vice-regal, administrative heads. They were assisted by the army, on the one hand, and a small bureaucracy of public servants on the other.⁵ Chief among the public servants was the surveyor- general, who was charged with the mapping and subdividing of the territory settled.

Though Sydney was founded in 1788, it was 30 years before inland exploration of any extent was seriously embarked upon, and the pattern of Australian capital city foundation—the potential metropolitan urban centres—was not to emerge until the middle of the nineteenth century. It was linked to the foundation of separate states, three of which hived off from New South Wales (Van Diemen’s Land, Queensland and Victoria), with the other two, South Australia and Western Australia, founded as entirely separate ventures.

Maher has pointed out that the capital cities, when they did emerge, were based on a new economic order evolving under capitalism, driven by Europe’s industrial revolution.⁶ Economic potential and administrative structures created a settlement system based on very few principal sites. Each of these was separated from the others by large distances, so the capital cities from the beginning dominated their particular state territories. The port cities, as capitals, were points of contact with England, and became the channels through which the produce of the developing hinterland—wool, timber and beef—was despatched to Europe. The production of these staples, in turn, was able to generate capital inflows to sustain further development.

The colonial urban grid

The key to English colonisation policy was the establishment, in the first instance, of a planned, orderly, principal town. It was a deliberate policy of urbanisation. Towns were to be centres for trade and defence, and a civilising influence. Towns were established along the same conceptual lines, though some had a free settlement base, and town plans were variations on a similar grid pattern. The grid basis, with its cardo-decumanus orientation, was the underlying physical structure, and was markedly similar in each city.⁷

The plan of the Australian colonial town had descended from the earlier ‘Grand Modell’ put forward by Lord Shaftesbury and John Locke for the colonies in Ireland and America.⁸ It was based, even further back, on Roman and Greek colonial models in the Mediterranean, which relied on the symmetry, proportion and regularity of the grid layout. The colonial grid had re-emerged as the most straightforward and flexible planning instrument for the founding of Australian cities. The first nucleus of Sydney, Parramatta, Hobart Town, Port Macquarie, Brisbane and Albany, for example, was the central strip of the Parade Ground, where the soldiers (and convicts) were assembled and reviewed. This very early stage was soon blended into the grid system as the settlement grew and changed complexion.⁹

In London, Granville Sharp, in his role as philanthropist and anti- slavery agitator, had reformulated the symbolism of the colonial grid for use in Sierra Leone, the colony where the resettlement of American slaves in Africa was being tried. He published an influential book on the plan of the proposed town of Freetown in 1794. Sharp advocated the plan’s adoption in the East Indies, America, and ‘elsewhere’. It was an ideal plan, in the Platonic tradition.¹⁰ His suggestion that this egalitarian plan could be useful in the settlement of lands colonised by Britain came at a crucial time for Australian settlement. It is interesting to note that Sharp was a frequent visitor to the country house of William Oglethorpe, who went back to England after he had founded and planned Savannah in North America.¹¹ Savannah’s plan became the archetypal model for American cities, a textbook example of a formal colonial grid. Sharp, who worked in the Ordnance Office in the Tower of London, and who was in close contact with.a body of trained surveyors, saw obvious virtues in Oglethorpe’s Savannah.¹²

The principles outlined by Sharp were adopted by Governor Darling in 1829 in New South Wales and put into practice in the towns planned by Surveyor-General T.L. Mitchell and his team of surveyors. Each town section was to be identical: streets were to be 66 feet (20.1 metres) wide, with the main streets in some cases 80 feet (24.4 metres) wide, and allotments were to be the same size, with a balance between public and private land. In the plan of Melbourne, surveyed as a potential city by Robert Hoddle in 1837, the principles of symmetry, balance, regularity, standard-sized allotments, and squares for internal open space or for administrative buildings were used to good effect, along with surrounding open space parklands in the Township Reserve. In the Australian context, these reserves were used for various purposes: for the development of urban parks, for special land uses attracted to the town and for the extension of the town.¹³ The emphasis on identical-sized allotments might be considered, in a political context, as a ‘democratic’ rather than a merely ‘regular’ arrangement.

Mitchell had been trained in the demanding school of military surveying, gaining experience in the Peninsular Wars against Napoleon. The surveying technique was developed by the English Board of Ordnance at the Drawing Room in the Tower of London where the English National Survey was planned, and taught at naval and military schools. Mitchell took some pride in his map-making and had a meticulous drafting style. His Australian town plans fitted into the surveying framework he had laid down for the division of the Twenty Counties which constituted the settled portion of Australia in 1826. His great achievement was his ‘Map of the Colony’, engraved in 1834.¹⁴ This was the context of all the subsequent town plans in the colony; town reserves were set aside for potential towns within the county structure.

As settlement grew, and Europeans established themselves on the coast and across the mountains, the time came for marking out potential towns which were seen as crucial centres for the local administration of their districts. A surveyor was sent to make a preliminary survey of the site before settlement was firmly established, noting the lie of the land, indicating rivers, hills and any particular features, as well as existing buildings and huts, river crossings and roads, and the local vegetation and type of soil. The plan was set within a larger Township Reserve. It was sent back to Sydney for examination by Mitchell or his deputy Perry, and placed before the Legislative Council. When approved, the town was marked out on the ground: streets and sections were the backbone, town allotments were of standard size. In the larger plans, sites were set aside for a courthouse and a gaol, for churches and schools, and some peripheral sections were marked for ‘suburban allotments’ at a larger size than the standard allotments.¹⁵

The colonial surveyors, as a body of men, led strenuous and hardworking lives, often in trying conditions, working in pairs or sometimes isolated in the field. Their rewards were often meagre. They were key figures who, largely unacknowledged as they were part of the public service, were responsible for far-reaching decisions in land matters.¹⁶ The misleading legend that their town plans were not made on the site of the town, resulting in roads running straight uphill and other absurdities, is patently not typical, although, as alluded to later, John Sulman would use it for propaganda purposes when he was arguing, 50 years later, for a looser, anti-grid street system.

Small town plans can be considered as the germ of capital city planning. A typical one of these is illustrated here: Goulburn was planned as a larger ‘ga...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributor
• Introduction
• 1 Founding cities in nineteenth-century Australia
• 2 From city improvement to the city beautiful
• 3 Towards metropolitan organisation: town planning and the garden city idea
• 4 From theory to practice: the inter-war years
• 5 A new paradigm: planning and reconstruction in the 1940s
• 6 The post-war city
• 7 The corridor city: planning for growth in the 1960s
• 8 Administrative coordination, urban management and strategic planning in the 1970s
• 9 The revival of metropolitan planning
• 10 The late 1990s: competitive versus sustainable cities
• Notes
• Index