Is increasing density a threat to Fremantle’s heritage?

Carmen Lawrence

Lawrence, Carmen 2019, 'Is increasing density a threat to Fremantle’s heritage?', Fremantle Studies, 10: 71-80. [presented Fremantle Studies Day 30 October 2016]

This paper was not be permitted to be available online until vol. 11 of Fremantle Studies was available in 2022—six (6) years after this paper was presented, long after its socio-cultural-historical moment had passed.
The Fremantle Society asked Dr Lawrence to present a paper on a similar topic to the Society, and she kindly did so at its AGM, 2 December 2020. With the permission of the author and the (Fremantle!) Society it is available here: "Doing density differently".

I was until very recently Chair of the Australian Heritage Council. It is a statutory limited position which needs to be renewed, so I was actually surprised to be retained with the change of government when Tony Abbott was elected Prime Minister. Today, I thought I would try and go directly to the question of Fremantle’s heritage and some of the pressures that I see that are on us here, but are universally experienced. In many ways, sadly, the things that we are grappling with are not unique to Fremantle, they are common problems confronted across the board.

Just to establish where I am coming from, I see heritage, in the broader sense, of course, as what we inherit. It is just not the good stuff, it is what we value from that inheritance and what we decide to keep and protect ultimately that I think exercises people - what we leave to future generations. It is both global enough to encompass our horror, for instance, at the bombing of Temple of Bel in Palmyra in Syria, which you would have seen recently - and as local as our own streetscapes and indeed our own personal stories. It is everything that our predecessors have bequeathed us, or not destroyed, both tangible and intangible. So we are talking about the natural world, landscape, structures, objects, buildings, language - all of these things are part of our heritage.

This inheritance, I think it is important to remember and as a psychologist it has always interested me because this inheritance shapes and expresses who we are. We are not always aware of that but it is absolutely true. It gives us our identity and it gives meaning and depth to our lives. There’s a lot of evidence - and I will talk a little bit about it - that shows that when you strip that away from people, whether it is removing landscapes or buildings or language or family connections, when that heritage is diminished in any way it has a direct effect on people’s sense of well-being and sense of self and indeed, their identity. So when people talk about heritage in a physical sense I am immediately reminded that that is a very limited way in which to think about it, because it is really embedded in who we are. Most heritage, whether we are aware of it or not, is directly experienced and incorporated into our sense of ourselves. Some of it is only dimly comprehended. We may not know, for instance, that we have ancestors going back who were convicts. In my case I have discovered five so far and one of them certainly helped build the Fremantle gaol. But that, even if it is only dimly apprehended, was passed down in little ways through my families. Some of our heritage we don’t know about and we are only in a sense crudely aware, for instance, of indigenous heritage in this country. As many have pointed out, and I always like to stress, that it is no accident that one of the first targets of those who were engaged in genocide is the obliteration of heritage - find things that matter to these people and eliminate them - the buildings, the books, the people who have knowledge - it is no accident that they are the targets of so-called ethnic cleansing. We have seen that all around the world, we are seeing it now, we see it with ISIS. It is now described as a war crime; the destruction of heritage is now being considered on a par with destroying the people themselves. Victors everywhere systematically seek to remove the vanquished community from gaze. I think it is obvious in a sense, what is being done there. As Milan Kundera put it in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - it is a great book - the first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory - destroy its books, its culture, its history. 1 We have certainly made a fair go of that, with many of the indigenous people in this country.

I think it is important to recognise that the destruction of heritage is not just the result of these big traumatic and cataclysmic events. We are constantly making judgments about what is worth protecting, what we should pass on, as well as what we prefer to forget. Not all of those judgments, it has to be said, are carefully considered or even conscious, and many of course are hotly contested. Some are the result of us caring more about other values like the profitability of the developers, like the reputation of architects, and some is about our own short-term wants that take precedence over our heritage. In struggles to preserve our heritage in the face of these economic goals, those goals may take precedence over what is really precious to us. So in a funny kind of way the metric of money because it is tangible and palpable - overwhelms the things that we cannot value so readily. Decisions about what matters and whether and how to protect heritage are often made without reference to the views of the public at large. It is only when people object that we find out what they care about. Those judgments are often made by experts and specialists and when they do ask people what they want it is often as not to ignore it once they have found out. A lot of our public officials, it is sad to say, are not much concerned with protection of our heritage. It does not come up as a big issue to be discussed and debated. We know that if it is not valued - if the community does not speak up about value that it attributes to heritage - then it is not going to get the attention that is needed; we do not protect what we do not value. To shamelessly paraphrase Joni Mitchell, sometimes we do not know what we value until it is under threat or indeed it is gone altogether. 2

In addition to the threat to our natural and cultural heritage from, for example, climate change, something I am very interested in is the rapid growth of cities, creeping urbanisation and increases in density, particularly in the older parts of our cities. It is leading to the destruction of many cultural and natural landscapes. As I say, this is not unique to Fremantle, or indeed, Australia. As cities grow and develop more people move - if you are looking globally - from often simple rural environments. Industries move into those environments, people sit on the edges of cities, often, it has to be said, in slums. But those environments that they leave behind are often degraded and diminished. A lot of them are places which are home to the world’s great treasures. These are places that are, in a sense, left behind - the natural wonders of human and cultural heritage sites. You only have to look at what is happening in China to see destruction happening apace. In a way China is what has happened around the rest of the world, but on steroids and speeded up. You can see just how much destruction has been wrought by industrial development. They are now starting to try and rewind the clock a little, especially with the natural environment, but a lot of their cultural and built heritage has gone - gone forever. The frenetic development has been a disaster for conservation. That is not to say there have not been people in China who have been very keen to protect their heritage - that long and ancient tradition that they have - but it has not been sufficient. One of those people who has attempted to warn against the destruction in China, Shan Jixiang, China’s top cultural heritage official, says the following, and it says to me that heritage officials in China have about as much influence as they do in Australia, tragically. He said recently, ‘The protection of cultural heritage in China has entered the most difficult, grave and critical period. Much traditional architecture that could have been passed down for generations as the most valuable memories of the city has been relentlessly torn down’. 3 I am surprised he was able to say that and continue to say it. He warned that without support much of China’s heritage would be extinguished. A lot of cultural heritage officials have said precisely that.

I want to now talk to a more local scale but begin by using an image that I think is helpful in thinking about the heritage of a place like Fremantle. Every city, especially liveable cities and every city that we love, has its own unique character that is expressed in the architecture, the arrangement of the streets, the open spaces; if you like it has its own DNA structure. You cannot always see every element of the body of it but the DNA is there. It is expressed in those architectural and spatial characteristics that are best loved by the city’s inhabitants and that contribute to that sense of identity. People know what Fremantle is about. It might consist of certain building materials, familiar here, colours, typical arrangements of scale and architectural form, building lot sizes, roof lines, the scale of public and semi-public spaces. I am sure we could all draw a picture of Fremantle that incorporated all of those elements and there would be a great deal of agreement between us about the nature, if you like the DNA, of Fremantle. The important thing here is that when you are thinking about increasing density, or building new civic buildings, or increasing the number of opportunities for people to have recreation on the waterfront, this DNA has to be respected. In my view. New buildings have to respect this genetic code, reflecting at least some of the existing patterns when they are being interpreted in contemporary form. There has to be a conversation; there has to be a relationship. There used to be a consensus I think - and still is in many places - about a community’s values, so there should be consensus (and it can be developed) on what materials, what architectural and spatial forms represent the unique character of a city. Builders and architects and designers and city planners should all become familiar with that character. If every person in the community recognised and understood this unique character and worked within its constraints, a lot of the disputes that we have I think would fade away. Obviously that still leaves plenty of room for variation - you are not talking about uniformity, homogeneity here, you are simply saying okay to the structure, work within that in the choice of colours and materials and detailing, the degree of elegance, the aesthetic characteristics, as well as the architectural expression of the city’s various functions.

The consensus that I think in some ways is diminishing in Fremantle compared with how it once was and has been lost altogether in many places - I think Perth lost it in the sixties really - but this communal eye, as the playwright Peter Shaffer put it, is absolutely critical if we are to protect the city’s heritage. So you can identify appropriate and inappropriate development, you can look at something immediately and say, ‘Oh that does not fit; that is not right. That does not, if you like, respect the heritage of this place’. The architecture that bears no relationship to the surroundings, that does not see the streetscape is, what Jan Gehl calls - impolitely - architects’ bird-shit. He says that the architects very often look at the city from above and rather than the street level human scale, they are seeing the patterns that it makes from the air and then they just drop buildings into it like that. You can see the Docklands in Melbourne has exactly that character; a lot of the recent development in London in my view looks like that as well. It does not respect what is there and it does not engage in a dialogue that is, I think, sufficiently nuanced.

Having said that what is missing in a lot of the kind of architecture that does not pay attention to the DNA of the city, the existing buildings - the heritage that is there. In many of the examples that I have seen of what are sometimes called the ‘hero’ architects' insistence on certain types of buildings to increase density, is that they actually seem to forget that people have to live in these places. People live in these streets, people walk these streets, people live in these buildings. What is missing is an appropriate focus on human wellbeing and that has always been my focus. Ultimately that is what heritage protection is about - our physical and mental health and our satisfaction with where we live. We need to keep asking in our communities, particularly our city planners, our architects, our landscape architects and the people who inform them how we can best plan our cities to enhance people’s quality of life. Yes, we do need to increase the density of cities like Perth; urban sprawl has its own set of negative characteristics, including destroying remnant bushland in the case of Perth, some of which is unique and irreplaceable. So I am not recommending that we just keep sending Perth out to the far reaches north and south, but rather as we increase density we have to have a high regard for those two things - the DNA of the city and people’s quality of life. If you can’t say of a development that it is going to improve the quality of life for the people who already live there and the people who are about to come, then it shouldn’t be proceeded with - it is as simple as that.

Part of what is needed is that a lot of the people who are contributing to these decisions need to talk to one another. As Lewis Mumford said, ‘The task of the city is to unite the scattered fragments of the human personality’, as he put it, ‘turning artificially dismembered human beings, bureaucrats, specialists, experts, depersonalised agents, into complete human beings, repairing the damage that has been done by this vocational separation, by social segregation, by the over-cultivation of a favoured function, by the absence or organic partnerships and ideal purposes’. In other words you have got to work together in these things in order to have a whole that is worthy of that description. One of the things that bothers me is that we do know that human beings, in some senses, are almost infinitely adaptable; they can at least for a time survive even on rubbish tips, when you look at some of those images in the Philippines; if you look at people surviving in the rubble in Aleppo. People do survive, they live, but their lives, of course, are in appalling circumstances. I am not suggesting that bad planning and poor density management are the equivalent of living on a rubbish tip, but I think what a lot of urban planners and others do not notice is that people’s lives just slowly disintegrate. It is not a great drama. But the adaptation that people make is not without costs to health and wellbeing. Just because people seem to get on with life is no reason to suppose they are not feeling the effects of urban change, of having those treasured iconic buildings destroyed or overlooked, or overshadowed. They see their streets neglected and neighbourhoods destroyed by major highways, as is proposed with this Roe 8 monster, overshadowed by high-rise, as is proposed in North Fremantle, with the McCabe Street development, and already exists in that hideous Tasker’s building. Those things have an effect on people. There is a very substantial facile generalisation that says that because that people can adapt to almost any circumstance that their needs do not matter, you can kind of shoehorn them into the space and place that is needed.

I would argue that as human beings we have a number of characteristics that are very important to take account of. One is our sense of place. I have been working for some time now on sense of place, place attachment as it is called in psychology, similarly in human geography. Human beings are very, very tightly attached to place. Sometimes it might be as narrow as their own homes, sometimes it is a neighbourhood, sometimes it is the wider community. The people who are not attached are the ones who have serious problems of various kinds. One of the things that you can do, as I say, in order to destroy culture, is to detach people from place. There is a growing research literature that underlines the importance of a sense of place and feelings of attachment. People develop these robust bonds to place and it determines whether they are prepared to act to defend the place. If you are not embedded in a place, you do not seek to defend it. We did some work on local government amalgamations and sense of place. We looked at Vincent and Fremantle, for instance, both communities that we judged would have a strong sense of place. It turned out we were right about that. They were the two communities that were strongest in their opposition to the local government amalgamations. In other places people seemed inclined to take it or leave it, but in this case there was a very strong connection. Interestingly the attitude of Fremantle residents towards their local government was not very flattering when compared with Vincent, but that is another matter.

This erosion of place and place attachment is something that should always be at the back of the mind of people who are thinking about making changes, because the changes can take place under your feet. In the Hunter Valley for example, that beautiful land there for agricultural purposes principally, but natural habitats as well, pulled apart by coalmining and then coal seam gas exploitation. Rates of depression, alcoholism, family breakdown and financial difficulties, escalated over the period that it was occurring. This is measurable manifestation of a loss of a sense of place. You know Glenn Albrecht’s work on that issue - he coined a word, ‘solastalgia’, to capture the idea that this environment was being destroyed beneath people’s feet. 4 That can happen in urban environments too if respect is not paid and bit by bit a neighbourhood is pulled apart, pulled apart, pulled apart, pulled apart and ultimately the sense that people have of connecting with it is gone. As Jacobs has argued, ‘place attachment is a deep human trait. 5 People do not simply look out over a landscape and say, “this belongs to me” they say, “I belong to this”. Concern for familiar topography for the places one knows is not about the loss of a commodity but about the loss of identity. People belong in the world; it gives them a home. Although we do move all over the place and people are able to re-attach themselves, it is something that is not done without effort and pain. Many of us here, of course, have relatives, ancestors, who, not many generations ago did just that. I do not think we really understand the ways in which that has perhaps influenced the way we think about place now. It may be that we are more energetically attached to this place than we would otherwise have been, had our ancestors been here for time immemorial. But then you look at indigenous people and you say, 'Ah no,’ that they have that very strong link because of those aeons of connection.

In the literature that I am aware of, the evidence shows that when you have a strong place attachment you also have strong bonds in the community. Part of the close attachment is about the community. When you are increasing density at the expense of people being able to talk to one another, to move readily, to have a mixture of activities, then you are also destroying those bonds. Where you have strong bonds and good neighbourhood ties people trust one another. They volunteer more. Their health is better. You can almost draw up a list of things that you would like for your fellow human beings and they are all associated with that strong sense of place attachment and also I might say, an aesthetically pleasing and a green environment. There is again, a huge amount of literature showing that part of what has to happen in any redevelopment is a proper respect for the natural environment. I do not mean just a little bit of green space around a great big tall tower, I mean a capacity to see and interact with it. There is substantial literature showing that the absence of green spaces and green relationships between people in any city in the world and where they live and where they work and where they recover from illness, is very significant. People recover faster from surgery, children have fewer intellectual and attention problems; adults are healthier altogether. The Japanese in fact recommend walking in forests as a way of dealing with problems like heart disease and diabetes and indeed it has effects on them; they talk about “forest bathing”. So in this, if you like, pressure to increase density, not only do you have to have a proper sense of place and people’s place in it, you also need a respect for the DNA, an appropriate level of green engagement. I have skipped over that literature very quickly - parks and gardens have restorative effects and have always been known to, but they have been demonstrated very clearly now, to have very significant effects. But so too, as I say, does that understanding that this is my place, this is the DNA of my place.

In Fremantle I have not tried to talk to particular developments - though I have mentioned a couple - the McCabe Street proposal, if that goes ahead. There is another one that you would be aware of in the old Spotlight site. I do not think that has come to anything yet, but the proposals being suggested are very like, as I understand it, the scale of old Johnston Court, which is one of those buildings that sticks out like a sore thumb. Similarly adding an extra storey here and there, out of sync with the streetscape, out of sync with the texture of the environment, is likely to have very significant effects as well.

I just want to finish by talking about what happens when you move beyond the human scale. It is not just about the sense of place and the attachment to the green environment and respect for the DNA, it is also about being able to see. When you have that kind of development, or great blocks, big straight spaces that you cannot make your way in and out of, those monolithic structures that are so beloved of contemporary architects... It might sound like I am having a go at them and I am to a degree - but I think such proposals need to be examined very carefully. I have just done some recent research looking at some of the European cities that have some similarity with Fremantle, places like Tübingen and Antwerp. They are much more sensitive to those human relationships and human scale. Their planners say things like, ‘We’ve got to maintain the existing community and not destroy it by over-planning’. One of them said, ‘We’ve got to note that our own actions as planners can easily destroy a community.’ They give priority to modernising old and mixed-use buildings rather than pulling them down. They basically say, ‘No, no, no, you don’t pull anything down, you change it in a way that is compatible with what is around.’ They say things like, ‘Make it difficult for investors to buy buildings for speculation. Speculation can be prevented by designating heritage buildings, local laws requiring restoration of facades and roof.’ So do not give them an opportunity to buy a bit of property and say, ‘Oh but we need an extra five storeys in order to make money out of this.’It is possible to strike for the balances and importantly to mix up the inhabitants, to have proper balance in terms of age, the age structure, the working and residential spaces, car versus pedestrian - all of these things need to be considered as part of the development and not as in the McCabe Street case, say, ‘Well we are just going to run all that traffic through North Fremantle,’ (I admit to a conflict of interest here possibly, it is where I live). Turning North Fremantle into a throughway for the convenience of a very high-rise development is clearly not acceptable. So there is a need to control bulk, height, setback, scale and variety. I have on my thumb drive here an image of what is proposed for St John’s Square, which many of you will be familiar with. I find it hard to imagine that anybody could have looked at that place and said that that building, or those buildings, were the solution to the problem that we have there. Apart from anything else having a whole lot of office space is not likely to bring life to the city; you actually need people who live there and a big triangular building with all these grey facades plonked in middle of a square, out of sync with the town hall and the church is giving up what could be a wonderful opportunity. That is going to be a blight on the City of Fremantle in my view for the next 100 years and I think that is a tragedy.

So that is I guess not a very pleasant note to finish on but I think if people considered some of those elements that I have talked about from the point of view of psychology and community we will be less likely to make some of these silly decisions. I hope that in future people will think more carefully about the human scale of a city, meaning the humans in it need to be the priority in decisions about what should be done.

Transcript of a paper presented by Winthrop Professor Carmen Lawrence. Former State and Federal politician Carmen Lawrence, now Winthrop Professor, was the Director of the Centre for Social Change at UWA and Chair of the Australian Heritage Council.

Notes

1 Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, published in France in 1979, is composed of seven narratives with some common themes. The book considers the nature of forgetting as it occurs in history, politics and life in general.
2 Song by Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi, which contains the lyric ‘that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’.
3 Reported by Tania Branigan, ‘Building Boom in China is “destroying heritage’”, 6 August 2010, published in Dawn, 19 July 2019. www.dawn.com/news/551355.
4 Glenn Albrecht, Gina-Maree Sartore, Linda Connor et al, ‘Solastalgia: The distress caused by environmental change’, Research article first published 1 February 2007, Australasian Psychiatry.
5 Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) writer, philosopher and activist, a well-known critic of the modernist approach to urban planning, www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/ jane-jacobs-480896.html

Fremantle Studies Day, 2016

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