Darlington dudded, again

The Eveleigh Yards was the high tech complex of its era, as important in nation building as the sheep’s back, the largest industrial enterprise in the country. It offered lifetime skilled employment. A job there was valued .

Darlington grew, with broad streets, fine terraces and proud churches.

When it dwindled and closed in the 1980s, State Rail took its time to consider its future. You can be sure that its interest is not the community interest, it was not even particularly interested in rail heritage, but dollars.

It lodged two masterplans with the former South Sydney Council, as ambit claims, which adopted sensible balanced principles to develop the site, including conservation of the carriageworks, appropriately scaled development in a context of terraced housing with a modicum of local parks, etc. This was not enough for State Rail which sought to control the site through a Regional Environmental Plan.

As the City was bound to follow the South Sydney legwork (a Labor Council – remember them!), Sartor being the new commissar of State development took over the site and set up the Redfern Waterloo Authority. While it trumpeted community development and attacked the Pemulwuy Housing Project as overdevelopment (how modest it now seems compared to North Eveleigh) the RWA was always a mask for flogging public assets.

Being able to set the development controls was also handy in ramping up its potential value (how corrupt is that – but while ICAC will do its job on Councils, it seems shy at looking at the behaviour of State agencies!).

Whereas with most development sagas, with give and take, an accommodation is reached with communities to achieve compatible outcomes, North Eveleigh has got bigger and worse in terms of social and environmental impact, with each plan.

This has been achieved by token consultation, then ignoring that input, signing off in camera with lots of spin from Minister Keneally’s office about jobs, affordable housing and rejuvenation.

This started badly with a limited in-house architectural competition, with no community involvement, adopting a banal schematic of slab blocks mostly looking east/west at each other across narrow spaces. The limited design resolution means there are no plans to speak of, and who knows where the cars will go? They tentatively say under, but you can be sure the developers will avoid the high costs of excavation into deep wet sand, and housing over decks of parking is more likely.

In spite of some 200 submissions from the community, the adopted Masterplan is virtually the same as that originally submitted. The Department of Planning’s report regurgitates virtually the whole of the RWA’s Preferred Project Report, unchanged.

It is not an independent and rigorous assessment. Councils do a much better job. The only change made in response to the Sartor visit (bless him – he at least bothered to meet some of the locals) was a small park at the western end, hemmed in by a 12-storey block and a huge new intersection with Wilson Street. The price for this was a redistribution of the lost potential and increased heights to the building, higher than the RWA had granted itself earlier in the piece.

What do we get?

On a long narrow site about one kilometer by 100m deep, three to four-storey housing aligned to Wilson Street, supposedly compatible with two-storey terraces across the road, with development stepping up behind to 12 storeys at the western end, with a 16-storey icon tower at the Redfern end (lucky Redfern!). The approximately 1,200 dwellings will house some 500

people plus lots of commercial space, 1,800 car spaces, in addition to the parking for the Carriageworks. The east end of the site with the bulk of the commercial exits onto Shepherd (that grand boulevarde with oodles of capacity!); the west end exits onto Wilson, about as far from the arterial system as they can have achieved for an uncontrolled insertion into the inner west’s major bike route, with large volumes of pedestrians. This is already an accident black spot.

The apartment dwellers are mainly in east/west facing close spaced slab blocks eight to 12 storeys high – don’t expect the generous public domain and parklands of Green Square and Victoria Park, and certainly not the sylvan heights of Moore Park Gardens.

The internal amenity and sun access within these canyons will be appalling in mid-winter. In spite of assurances to the contrary, the plans are not sufficiently developed to assess this.

They have signed off on a concept that is poorly developed, that it cannot be tested against key aspects for amenity, sustainability, traffic and parking, let alone its response to the heritage issues.

The open space provision is about three to four square metres for the new resident population (that’s if you accept that the proposed parks are useful recreational spaces when the park at the eastern end is actually a forecourt to the icon tower and is divided by the ramp and bridge access to the station and the ATP). Office workers also recreate – let’s ignore their needs.

This compares to inner city norms of 10m2 per capita, about what the inner suburbs have at present, and the commonly accepted yardstick.

Scenarios

The Minister’s spin is hollow. This proposal has the makings of expensive but poor quality housing (low rise is much cheaper to build and maintain, and high densities can be better achieved with low rise – take the Pemulwuy project as an example).

In spite of locational advantage, developers are not likely to bite unless it is cheap, and then we all lose. No one will uptake for the commercial on a site one kilometre from the edge of the City. The former TNT towers have a high turnover of low rent tenants (including the RWA!).

Sydney University will be waiting in the wings, and notwithstanding its early vandalism in Darlington is much more popular in Darlington than the RWA.

Two State seats and two prominent ministers’ seats are imperilled. Both Keneally and Tebbutt ignore their constituencies and work their PR machines. As Darlington votes solidly Green, they have been sacrificed by the puppeteers in Sussex Street.

The sooner these are marginal seats, the better. Balmain has already been written off by Sussex Street.

Source: South Sydney Herald March 2009 www.southsydneyherald.com.au