It was easier for Haussman in Paris and Moses in New York. When they needed to
make major changes to the city, they just did it. But things are different now: the
participatory planning movements begun in the sixties have democratised the
planning process; the diminution of the resources and power of the public realm
has stripped government of its ability to conceive, execute and regulate large urban
redevelopment projects, and the abject failures of numerous grand city visions have
left urban planning and design with an apparent loss of nerve.
The groundswell for Melbourne’s Docklands redevelopment had its genesis in the
hubris of the eighties real estate boom. It was facilitated by the relocation of port
activities further downstream and ideologically fuelled by a global movement to
reconnect cities with their associated bodies of water. Boston, Baltimore and New
Orleans all did this in the seventies and eighties. As debate and propositions for
development proliferated to fever pitch, the city and the state plunged into a deep
recession. Victoria became, in Senator Robert Ray’s words, ‘the Albania of the
south’. The Labour government was dumped and a new ‘fiscally responsible’
conservative government was elected in a landslide. It seemed at the time that decades would elapse before economic conditions supported the Docklands
development. But the Kennett government, defiant, made it an integral part of its
plan for the revitalisation of Melbourne. In 1995, the State Government adopted the
development strategy of the Docklands Authority. Ownership of the site was
transferred to the Authority and an amendment to the Melbourne Planning Scheme;
passed in October 1996, became the statutory control for Docklands.
A conventional development process would have the Authority decontaminate the
site, design and construct the servicing and vehicular infrastructure, provide
community facilities and parks, subdivide the remaining land and sell it off for
development subject to rigorous urban design and planning controls in the service
of a clear end vision over 25 years. This is not the Docklands process—and that’s
what makes it so interesting. A mixture of philosophy and pragmatism has
produced a unique laissez-faire development process inconceivable prior to the
Reagan/Thatcher years. Government funding for infrastructure was out of the
question, given the state of the public purse; confidence in the ability of
conventional planning processes to deliver a successful outcome was low; and there was a born-again faith in the market as the driving force for
urban development.
top The Stadium precinct with Melbourne Docklands visions for surrounding sites. above The Victoria Harbour retail, hotel and export centre.
The foundations for the Docklands development strategy are financial and
market-driven. Property consultants JLW Advisory first carried out a market demand
assessment of the site. On the basis of this, the Docklands Authority identified
preferred uses through testing propositions against market demand. This became
the basis of the subdivision of the huge site into seven development precincts—
Business Park, Victoria Harbour, Yarra Waters, Batman’s Hill, Technology Park,
Docklands Stadium and West End. Five of these precincts have been thrown open
to the market for development proposals through an iterative process of initial
registration of interest, assignment of five to seven developers per precinct, culling
to two, then appointment of the preferred. Development proposals are evaluated on
five criteria—design and public amenity, integration with other precincts and the
city, financial risk, viability and other factors. In addition to paying for the precinct
and providing its internal infrastructure and amenities, developers make a
contribution to the infrastructure and amenities for the whole Docklands area. Assessment of design quality is
performance-based in a ‘permissive’
rather than a ‘proscriptive’ environment.
In order to assist initially uncomfortable
bidders in this environment, the
Authority commissioned a study by
Ashton Raggatt McDougall to
complement the Planning Scheme. ARM
produced the Conceptual Planning and
Design Framework and Visions
document in November 1996, which
provides an urban design analogue to
the JLW Advisory market assessment.
This excellent study defines a
contemporary urban fabric for the New
World which, while integrated with the Hoddle grid, makes a separate place.
To guide designers, it employs patterns
(called frameworks) similar to
Christopher Alexander’s, which are
combinations of text, diagrams
and images.
Interestingly, one of these (illustrated
with an ARM project) argues for the
importance of commissioning talented,
proven designers for all buildings, and
advocates competitions for key sites
among recognized good designers. The
open structure of the ARM concept, and
the emphasis on designers of quality, is
consistent with McDougall’s proposal
as early as 1989 in an RAIA Docklands
Design Workshop. Reactions of designers for bidding developers to
the document, though, are mixed.
Bids are evaluated by technical
specialists and reviewed by two
panels—Design, Amenity & Integration
and Finance, Risk & Viability; both of
which are supported by advice from
technical specialists. Recommendations
are made to a steering committee
advising the Authority, which then
submits its preference for precinct
developer to a Cabinet sub-committee
for approval. Under the Planning
Scheme, the Minister for Planning is
the Responsible Authority. Planning
approvals for land use and subsequent
development are required in the
usual way.
The Docklands Authority expects the
first build of the entire site to be
completed in 10 to 15 years—a relative
moment in comparison to Melbourne’s
downtown development period. Instant
City is fast becoming a reality and the
current state of play is this: Developers
have been appointed for the Docklands
Stadium and Yarra Waters precincts.
Two developers have been appointed to
proceed with an integrated precinct for
Business Park. A preferred developer
has been selected for Victoria Harbour,
subject to Authority requirements. Two
developers remain in the running for
Batman’s Hill and both have been asked
to ‘strengthen their bids’.
The 52,000 seat Docklands Stadium, by
Daryl Jackson with Bligh Lobb, is under
construction and expected to open in
February 2000. Three corner segments
of the stadium precinct are being
tendered: the north-west area has been
awarded to Docklands Stadium
Consortium for Channel Seven’s new
headquarters, with The Buchan Group
as architects; the south area has the
same consortium and architects
proposing a mixed-use development,
and the north-east corner, said to
be “the poor cousin”, has not yet
been offered.
As the two competing proposals for
Business Park appeared to individually
rattle around on the huge site, they
have been amalgamated. Entertainment
City, being designed by Landmark
Parsons and Hassell for a consortium
led by Viacom, is a movie theme park
with film studios. Beside it will be the
Yarra Nova 24-hour city: a mixed-use
development including residential,
office, retail, restaurants and marina;
being designed by Nation Fender
Katsalidis and Synman Sushin Bialek
for a MAB-led consortium. Victoria Harbour, to be developed by a
Walker Corporation consortium with
The Buchan Group and Ted Ashton as
architects, features an international |
business centre along with a health-care
complex and associated residential,
hotel and entertainment uses.
Yarra Waters, designed to date by HPA,
Bates Smart and Ashton Raggatt
McDougall for Mirvac, is a linear housing
development mixing high and medium-rise
buildings to take advantage of the
north facing water frontage.
At Batman’s Hill, the money is on Bruno
Grollo’s Melbourne Tower, to be the
world’s tallest building, designed by
Denton Corker Marshall. Cox Sanderson
Ness has designed for YarraCity a low
residential and mixed-use precinct
including home offices and preserving
the historic TEC Shed on the site.
Activity in the Technology Park precinct
is quiescent following the withdrawal
from the single bidding consortium of a
number of key educational institutions,
but interest is sufficient to sustain a bid
launch by the end of the year.
West End precinct, site of the Spencer
Street Railway Station and a key link
between the grid and Docklands, will be
offered to developers in the future.
The first stage of Trunk Infrastructure,
comprising design and construction of
roads, bridges (including the Bourke
and LaTrobe Streets bridge) services,
and landscaping works, has been let to Transfield-Powercor.
The Docklands game is a fast game: so
fast that the Authority itself has
difficulty recording and documenting its
evolution. As material is released, it is
obsolete. Many of the players remark on
its constant state of flux—some
enjoying the wild ride and others finding
it frustrating. The stakes are high and
each developer has a lot riding on the
bid and, if appointed, the development
itself. All of this seems appropriate to a
millennial enterprise in a post-modern
global environment located in a state
whose economic resurrection has been
fuelled by gambling.
Is it possible to judge the quality of the
product of the Docklands development
process now? Any evaluation in depth
will have to wait until there is a critical
mass of the fabric on the ground but
some provisional conclusions can be
reached from an examination of the
Authority’s published graphic material,
conversations with participating
architects, the Authority’s Divisional
Manager, Planning, Design & Public
Affairs, Bill Chandler, and others with an
interest in the site, and following
Docklands reports in the media.
There is a disturbing quality to the
visual material emanating from the
Authority. Representations are plans and
aerial views of the whole development,
showing alternative combinations of bid
proposals as well as detailed aerial
views of particular precinct proposals.
These are computer-generated images
in colour, washed with an unnaturally
even bright light which imparts a hyper-real
quality to the scenes; reminiscent
of a Doris Day or Pedro Almovodar
movie. The impression is of a lack of
conviction in the design, and that the
ease of automatic image generation is
leading to facile architecture. Gone are
the charged visions of a Sant’ Elia, a Le
Corbusier, a Hugh Ferriss or even a
Krier or two. In their place is an
architecture and urbanism apparently drained of content. The hope is that the
representation has trivialised the
architecture and that the designers for
the successful bidders will now have a
chance to develop their proposals with
some rigour and depth.
The Stadium is a massive anchoring
volume at the centre of the Docklands
ensemble. It is intended to be situated
in urban fabric—a Colosseum, not an
MCG, but the images show a circular
mass in an uneasy relationship with
four corner buildings surrounded by
roads—hardly the fabric/object
relationship of the Colosseum to Rome,
despite the presence of buildings on the
other side of the street.
The least promising precinct appears to
be the Business Park, with little
discernible urban order in comparison
to the stronger geometries of Victoria
Harbour, with its annular buildings over
the water, speaking to the Stadium.
The attenuated truncated pyramid of
the Grollo Tower for Batman’s Hill is
either presented as an artifact, like a
dining centrepiece on the Docklands
table, or photographed attached to its
developer with the obvious allusion—in
both cases disengaged from reality so
that its impact is difficult to assess. It
too suffers from the same uneasy
relationship to its surroundings as the
Stadium—it is neither a tower in the
park nor a tower in the city.
Yarra Waters is the most developed precinct, with an inventive street
pattern comprising short streets
perpendicular to the river,
counterpointed by long sweeping
curves. High-rise towers on podia
cluster at the east end, with a further
pair bracketing the Bourke Street axis
to the west to punctuate a rhythmic set
of medium-rise blocks. In defence of
the other precinct designs, it should be
said that this site is the easiest to
develop and appears to be further along
in its design.
The permissive Docklands process has
produced a collection of singular and
disparate precincts, each with its own
urban pattern, program and typology.
For the area to be read, understood and
experienced as a place, the common
areas—circulation networks,
community facilities, public open
space—must link the pieces together.
The site already provides two major
unifying elements—the river and the
great aqueous plaza of Victoria Harbour.
These alone are not enough. They need
to be supported by careful attention to
linkage at interfaces between precincts,
common attitudes to the waterfront
edges, a considered system of public
open spaces, a tree-planting program
and the nature of connections (physical
and visual) to the CBD. There is a
worrying lack of clear information about
intentions and progress in the design of
the public realm which the Authority sees as comprising trunk infrastructure,
public space common to all precincts
and public space within precincts. The
Design Frameworks document is
currently under review by ARM, EDAW
and Wood Marsh. The work of Wood
Marsh, novated to Transfield-Powercor,
on a pedestrian bridge extension to
Bourke Street across West End to the
stadium, studies of a vehicular
extension to Latrobe and other advice
on road design provide a glimmer of
reassurance; but these proposals have
yet to be publicly released. Unless the
design of the public realm is successful
here, the Authority’s new laissez-faire
model of urban development may be
short-lived.
above The Yarra Quays/Yarra Waters scheme.
Paradoxically, the Docklands—an
enterprise of monumental proportions
—is a chimera in the city’s
consciousness. Melbourne’s citizens,
usually vocal about their built
environment, are relatively quiet about
it. Is it just too big to grasp?
Melbourne’s design community, known
for its vigorous discourse, is strangely
subdued. Is that a carry-over from the
silence of the bidding period or are so
many of the city’s professionals
involved in the production, evaluation
or regulation of Docklands that debate
is gagged?
And design is not the only issue. Local
media has been full of speculation
about who will actually govern the
Docklands—the City of Melbourne, the
Authority or some other constituted
body. If control does not cede to the City
of Melbourne, what are the implications
for the future of the city of dual
authorities operating central
Melbourne? These are matters of great
civic moment which demand
critical attention and participation if
Melbournians are to function as true
citizens of their city. Anthony Styant-Browne is the principal
of an architecture and urban design
practice in Melbourne. |