PELICANS, PERSONS AND PLANNING

It was during a visit to the north coast, the seaside regions some one hundred kilometres north of Brisbane known as the Sunshine Coast - as if the place might have some ownership over things solar - that the thought arose: what has happened to our planning, our buildings, our dwellings? The development around the new canals shaped from the marshlands behind Golden Beach at Caloundra made one alert to the issues. Pelican Waters was the gleaming new centre, with strips of road and water, but few pelicans.

Here, in these wet, littoral hinterland areas, are the smick waterside homes that create the latest suburban image. The first thing noticed is the open void, the negative space framed by the clean, bright white surfaces that dazzle in the fresh, bright, beachy light. Only a very occasional, lonely tree might remain to disturb the neatly turfed fringes of the streets to remind one that this was once a beautiful, scrubby wetland behind the sandy edge of The Passage, a waterway between Bribie island and the mainland.

The ‘what was once’ can still be seen on the edges of the development that has been a progressive enterprise over the years. When might it stop? Here one can see the trees, vines and grasses that once covered the swampy area, now drained and re-shaped to become a classy, waterside, canal development.

The newness of everything glares at the spectator, as if to challenge the clarity of the seeing that will never match that of the presentation, such is its spotless perfection. Something like a haze hangs over the place. The whole looks like an architectural rendering, with its bland pristine, lifeless surfaces. An array of portals and parapets, screens and skillions, and boxes and bollards with an occasional gable and hip, stands before the eyes, filling space with a layered clutter making it difficult to determine where one house might stop and another start. The proximity of the places and the size of the structures that fill each site as if it might be a planning requirement, creates a muddled white mass behind the front street walls that try to be different to the neighbour’s.

The banally boring sculptural sense of it all gives a surreal hue to the vista that causes one to be unusually alert to this visual uncertainty, a puzzle that highlights the lack of humanity in the place. Nothing appears personal or intimate. There is a sense of the theatrical, the pretend, the fake, here in this 'set' development with its ‘blueboard’ extravaganza that makes everything look like rendered masonry. There is nothing to identify the difference between a scatty timber frame, a plastered solid concrete block wall, or a cavity brick skin when the blueboard is used as a base for high-tech textured render. Has this 'performance' quality of display to do with the desire to be seen in this posh area where prices start at over the one million? Do inhabitants see themselves as ‘star’ actors on location? Why does elitism seem to be so prone to harsh, exclusive appearances? Is it the search for something bespoke?

A perusal of Street View reveals it all. Street View is a wonderful tool – see: https://voussoirs.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-need-for-street-view-in-architecture.html

It was after this excursion that the touch was seen. There was not one mark out of place in the new, smart canal-side cleanliness, but the wall outside of the local Aldi store revealed the human possibilities that were missing. The haunting hand print had been placed on the terracotta-coloured wall, giving it an authenticity that excelled, that hummed with the potential of visual meaning, a literal touch of humanity. How can this sense become rooted in our dwellings, our lives?

The older beach-side development has an innocence and sweetness, a humility, about it that seems to manage time and place better than the new. We seem to have lost the sense of place-making for people. How might this be recovered so that, instead of building the slums of the future, we might create an infrastructure that will only be enriched with the passing of lives?

The board game, Carcassonne, is interesting, not only for its operation of rules, but because it can be seen as a metaphor for our planning today. Piece by piece is assembled by pure chance, and claims are made at random in the hope of winning. Our town planning seems to be just as ad hoc. We need new rules that can shape predictable, pre-determined visions rather than a set of gaming guidelines that allow the play to operate willy-nilly, with unknown outcomes, with patterns that no one is concerned about beyond the need to win with them. These winners can be seen as the developers, and rate-collecting councils. The outcomes of our town planning appear to be as random as those in Carcassonne, the party game. It really is not fun, or a happy event. Planning is much more important that playing with lose rules.

Citadel of Carcassonne, France

If our new suburbs, towns and cities are to hold any sustaining values, they need guidance and strict, enforceable regulations that know what the results might be. Random planning should have no place anywhere, as it has no future beyond bespoke display and profit, leaving copious gaps for negotiation, manipulation and corruption; likewise, ad hoc architecture does little to help humanity, beyond becoming an exhibition of style.

Mine!

We might try to take some clues from our landscape, our bushland, our seaside if we are lost for a new beginning, rather than demolishing everything and starting with the bulldozer to reshape our territory for our smart houses. Then we might realise some meaning, some coherence between lives and place; become aware of an enriching integrity.

The horror grew as we travelled west into the developments closer to the highway where 25,000 homes were being built. It was not just crowded strips of new buildings beside canals here, but hectares of houses, sprawling, filling every available nook and cranny; everywhere, with the same bright, dense clutter. How can we make sense of our muddles? What might this pattern do to living, to life, to the environment?

It is interesting that the hand print on the wall shapes the gesture ‘to stop.’ We should heed its advice and consider our past, present and future. Stumbling along as we do now will not achieve any sustainable outcomes.

STOP!

On review, the old is not that grand. It hardly offers a model for the new. Is it more acceptable because it is less demanding than the new; more forgiving; more naive; softened by time, by the human touch: history? . . . maybe more it is familiar?  

NOTE: All images of street developments have been taken from Google Street View