Transformation of Sydney’s Industrial Historic Waterfront

The Production of Tourism for Consumption

Ece Kaya

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9789811396670
• eBook ISBN:
  9789811396687
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the impacts of tourism-led transformations on the industrial historical waterfront at Darling Harbour and The Rocks in Sydney, Australia in the context of urban restructuring and deindustrialisation. The book also offers an extended reflection on the paradoxes between tourism and heritage. This discussion is not a new concept. However, this book critically explores the significance of the industrial heritage assets of these areas and the implications of the transformation procedures. Although Darling Harbour and The Rocks have generally been considered success stories of transformation with mixed touristic, recreational, residential and commercial activities, this book examines and evaluates how industrial history and heritage values have been affected. It demonstrates that tourism/leisure-led developments create urban landscapes in which cultural identity and historical assets are sacrificed and/or reinvented.

© The Author(s) 2020

E. KayaTransformation of Sydney’s Industrial Historic Waterfronthttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9668-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Setting the Scene

Ece Kaya¹

(1)

UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Ece Kaya

Email: [email protected]

The redevelopment scheme destroys the character of this historic area and ignores the position of the people affected. Working class residents were being driven out of inner-city areas because of the government’s lack of courage to tackle the ‘sole right’ of the developer.

(Jack Mundey , quoted in The Sydney Morning Herald, 23/08/1973)

I am bulldozing it through, and that is the whole purpose of the exercise. We only have four years to get rid of any unnecessary delays. I would like to see the bulldozers down in Darling Harbour in the next couple of months.

(Neville Wran , quoted by Ross Dunn in The Sydney Morning Herald, 2/05/1984)

End Abstract

When I first read these two quotes, I thought that they show exactly how the changes are being characterised in Sydney. My work is based on the argument that the transformation of industrial waterfronts that has become the driving force of the cities has affected the visual form of cities and changed places of production to places of consumption. Consumption here associates with consumption of services, knowledge and ideas. However, in industrial societies consumption used to refer to any activity associated with the selection, purchase, use, maintenance, repair and any disposal of any product or service (Campbell, cited in Thorns 2002). It was the consumption of goods manufactured in industrial production. Once the European Industrial Revolution took place in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with the developments in agriculture, manufacture, communication and transportation and totally affected the existing social, economic and cultural conditions. The series of changes started in Britain and spread throughout the continent. The beginning of a transformation from an agrarian to an industrialised economy had varied throughout Europe; Britain was the first country to become industrialised (Henderson 1961). Considerably in a short time span, unordinary alterations in agriculture, industry, trade, population, economic policy and thought occurred. The most obvious factor in bringing this revolution to birth was the great progress in industry. Industrialisation came with a change in architecture as well: construction techniques and used materials varied, and building types emerged for new uses. The innovations of the period—surfaced roads, improved water and railways, new materials like iron and steel, steam power—provided speed in addition to continuity of delivery and lowered the costs of transportation (O’Brien 1993). Railway systems especially became the major transportation network within Europe which supplies raw material and energy source for factories plus delivers finished goods to distant markets and have remained that way.

The Industrial Revolution and the establishment of the first European settlement in Australia happened roughly at the same time. As steam power was first applied to the problems of pumping water from Northumberland mines, and waterpower to the looms and mills of Lancashire, the first loads of convicts were sent across the globe to what would become Sydney (Lee 2003). With the impact of industry, in 200 years since British settlement, Australia has transformed from a convict colony to a nation of 24 million people with one of the highest living standards in the world. In this sense, I do not think that it would be wrong to state that industrial facilities embody the heart of a nation’s economic development, with considerable historical and social significance. Therefore, industrial heritage reflects the traces of an industrial past that has contributed to the economic development of a country, and it should be included within the scope of preservation in order to provide a reminder of and a connection to the past. Through adaptive conservation, industrial heritage can be reintroduced into contemporary urban life, with their suitable functions and unique identities sustained. The conservation of industrial heritage and protection of the material fabric of such heritage can also maintain its cultural significance which is a remnant of the working-class history.

In Sydney, a number of industrial areas have been seen as prestigious areas suitable for redevelopment and financial return and have been transformed to accommodate new uses. These changes have also influenced how we see places—increasingly for shopping, tourism, and recreation and leisure activities as well as high-value residential precincts, and how we approach heritage and tourism sites (Lash and Urry 1994). Emphasising the historical and cultural significance of industrial areas, this book argues that industrial heritage is primarily impacted by political and economic thinking rather than by informed heritage and conservation issues. The lack of political will to conserve these places or the willingness to erase the working-class history has resulted in the destruction of significant heritage values. According to Ian Baxter¹ (2000), too much has been lost and greater efforts should have been made to conserve the industrial past.

This book offers a critique of how industrial heritage has been considered during the conversion process of former industrial areas located on inner-city waterfronts in Sydney and why waterfront redevelopment projects create similar landscapes around the world. Together with this critique, it assesses the role that tourism has played in the process. To this end, the book examines the redevelopment of two case-study areas—The Rocks and Darling—and the consequent transformation of their history. These two former industrial waterfronts have been repositioned largely as leisure precincts as a result of economic and urban restructuring processes that have occurred between the 1970s and the 1990s. Production has been removed from the city centre and mass consumption has given way to more differentiated and specialised consumption (Logan and Swanstrom 1990). This process has led industrial cities into decentralised urban agglomerations.

The timeframe, between the 1970s and the 1990s, addressed in this book is also vital for heritage debates and a change of direction in the discourse. Interest in heritage has been growing, and the concept of heritage evolving as a result of the changing attitudes, needs and expectations (Herbert 1995; Misiura 2006). Harvey (2001) argues that people produce heritage and with this production, contemporary concerns come from their experiences. Society’s relationship with its past, whether to understand or to ignore, varies according to what to remember and what to forget. Forgetting allows for the provision of living spaces for present projects. Connerton (2008) explains this as the formation of a new identity. The creation and re-creation of identity are the concerns of heritage (Smith 2006). In this book, I discuss heritage as a concept related to postmodernity and post-Fordist economic restructuring process that exposed the economic dimension of heritage. According to Harvey (2001), the link between heritage and the marketplace became apparent in the 1970s. The economic thinking of the time enabled the commodification and commercialisation of heritage with the modern mode of leisure (tourism) as a new form of consumption.

People choose and decide an inheritance to be passed on to an imagined future (Tunbridge and Ashworth 1996). In this respect, the need to preserve the past is in conflict with the reconfiguration of the old. Smith (2006) alerts us to the problematic of the Authorised Heritage Discourse² (AHD) and the reconfiguration of the past. If heritage is to bring the past to the present, this book argues that the industrial heritage of Darling Harbour is completely lost. And if heritage is a discourse that sits in negotiation between the past and the present, as described by Laurajane Smith, then I argue in this book that the past of The Rocks has been negotiated with the tourism future. The industrial and commercial past of Darling Harbour has not been employed in the present; nor has the industrial and working-class residential past of The Rocks been brought to the present. Both areas signify the new form of consumption. This context highlights the paradox between heritage and tourism. Heritage is a threat to heritage and postmodern heritage destroys heritage, because the presentations of historic areas are placed within the context of political agendas in promoting tourism. Thus, heritage has become a popular entertainment (Wright 1985; Hewison 1987).

Public interest in the past as heritage was expanded in the late twentieth century. This heritage boom period (Hewison 1987; Walsh 1992; Lowenthal 1998; Dicks 2003) was related to deindustrialisation, the restructuring of the tourist gaze and the widespread commercialisation of the past as ‘experience’. It was when culture became a product of globalisation and led to a series of economic and political transformations; when cultural tourism became a dominant tourism aspect in the world economy. Kevin Walsh (1992) refers to this process as ‘heritagisation’, a process in which “objects and places are transformed from functional things into objects of display and exhibition” (Harrison 2013, p. 69). Urry (2002) argues that the barrier between the heritage asset and the scenario, which shapes the heritage experience, has become increasingly blurred, and that the idea of features identified as significant about a plac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Setting the Scene
• 2. Love or Hate—Preserve or Demolish: What to Do with Industrial Heritage?
• 3. The Modern Mode of Consumption: Tourism
• 4. Post-Industrial Waterfront of Sydney: Place from Production to Consumption
• 5. Making Cities Attractive, Commodifying The Rocks
• 6. Gain or Loss: Darling Harbour Transformed
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter