Sydney Reaches For The Sky

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31862, 14 December 1968, Page 25

Sydney Reaches For The Sky

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright) SYDNEY, Dec. 12. Many Australian city dwellers are making a belated stand against the skyscrapers rapidly filling their horizons, and one Sydney suburb has just elected a mayor and council whose main campaign pledge was a promise to do something about them.

i Architects and town planners have given a warning that the unplanned growth of huge office and apartment blocks will turn vast areas of Australia’s fast-growing cities into modern slums.

The chief culprit in their | eyes, is a real estate “developer” who puts up a multistorey block of apartments without any thought for the future.

I In their defence, the real Restate men argue that they are filling a public need. Australia’s two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, are : bursting at the seams with populations soaring past the ■ two million mark and still growing. ' Many people feel that to house this rapid increase multi-storey buildings are inevitable. City boundaries already stretch 20 miles from the city centre. The own-your-own apartment plan is a recent development in Australia; until the late 1950 s less than 4 per cent of the country’s population lived in arpartments. About 85 per cent of families Guns For Sale Bonnie Prince Charlies bed was sold by Sotheby’s, the London auctioneers, last week for $2200. And now they are going to sell his pistols—a pair of rare French pocket flintlocks which the Prince presented to a grandfather of the Countess Anna Jemingham. Elaborately inlaid with silver scrolls, the pistols were made about : 1740 by Mahay, the Paris gunsmith.—London, Dec. 12.

owned their own houses, one of the highest percentages in the world. But this urge for one’s own quarter - acre brought the inevitable sprawl as the population grew to its present 12 million. Influenced by thousands of European migrants accustomed to living in inner city apartments, the proportion of flat-dwellers in Australia has doubled in the last 10 years to about 8 per cent. And established house-own-ers, faced with the prospect of skyscraper blocks spreading over their suburbs, have reacted. At last Saturday’s municipal elections, the Hunters ; Hill municipality in Sydney returned nine candidates all ■ pledged to revoke a town plan agreed to by a previous council. This plan would have permitted multi-storey flats in a suburb residents feel should be ‘Tree from exploitation by real-estate developers.” One of Australia’s leading architects, Mr Harry Seidler, agrees that much of the unplanned development of the last 10 years threatens to turn some suburbs into expensive slums. The demand for city land is so great that a quarter-acre building block within five ! miles of the centre of Syd-' ney or Melbourne costs!

$lO,OOO to $20,000. Choice i harbour-side blocks in Sydney ' realise $lOO,OOO and more. ■ With land costs so high, J two-bedroom apartments cost ! about $12,000 in the more . modest locations and up to $60,000 in other areas. Mr Seidler and other leading architects see nothing wrong with the city apartment ■ buildings as such, but they | claim that ugly slabs of con- _ crete pitched willy nilly can ’ destroy a city’s beauty for the _ sake of a little forethought. . As an example, Mr Seidler cites the unplanned orgy of . buildings round Sydney Har- ; bour. Multi-storey buildings r in some areas block out to 1 all but a handful of people ! all views of one of the world’s i most striking anchorages. In fact, many of these buildings have garages overlooking the ’ waterfront—a crime in Mr Seidler’s book. Many Australians think the best example of modern city planning is the United States ’ housing and urban development (H.U.D.) The H.U.D. ' scheme gives city dwellers ' attractive housing at moderate cost, something sadly lacking in Australia, they say. Following the example of Hunter’s Hill, the residents of suburbs are expected to press for planned development. I The question is whether!

they may not already be too late. Experts estimate that Sydney and Melbourne will each have a population of about 5j million by the year 2000. and unless something is done soon the haphazard sprawl may become a concrete jungle impossible to clear. Mr Seidler, for one, is not hopeful. “Given the existing apathy and staggering lack of enlightenment on the part of the bureaucratic machinery that controls our physical environment, it seems there is only room for despair,” he said. If he is right, then Sydney, which has the natural potential to rank as one of the world’s most beautiful cities, may soon be one of the ugliest. Ten years ago the lifting of the 150 ft height limit for Sydney buildings opened the way for tall office blocks that have changed the city’s skyline. On the left of the picture is the Australian Mutual Provident Society’s 26-storey headquarters building, near Circular Quay. The dark building in the background is the 38-storey New South Wales Government office block, and on the right is the 50-storey round tower in the Australia Square complex.