Killing Sydney: The Fight for a City's Soul

by Elizabeth Farrelly

'Presents serious issues in a way which neither patronises or mystifies the lay reader.' Paul Keating on Three Houses

A blueprint for the future of our city in a radically changing world.

Columnist Elizabeth Farrelly brings her unique perspective as architectural writer and former city councillor to a burning question for our how will we live in the future? Can our communities survive pandemic, environmental disaster, overcrowding, government greed and big business?

Using her own adopted city of Sydney, she creates a roadmap for urban living and analyses the history of cities themselves to study why and how we live together, now and into the future.

Killing Sydney is part-lovesong, little by little, our politics are becoming debased and our environment degraded. The tipping point is close. Can the home we love survive?

Praise for Killing Sydney

'If you believe that Elizabeth Farrelly is expressing your long held concerns about the state of our governmens, our cities and our environment in her Sydney Morning Herald Saturday articles, then I encourage you to get Killing Sydney and have a month of Saturdays in the one book. That's what I'll do because I most often strongly agree!' Councillor Clover Moore, Lord Mayor of Sydney

'This is an important book for all Aussies! Written with passion, beautiful prose, and insightful knowledge. Read and weep. More than ever we need to push pause on development and so called "progress". Go Elizabeth!' Di Morrissey AM

'Great cities need great champions. Sydney needs Elizabeth Farrelly.' Adam Spencer

Genres: Nonfiction, Australia, Architecture, Urbanism, Politics

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 27, 2021

About the author

Elizabeth Farrelly is a Sydney-based author and columnist who is trained in architecture and philosophy and holds a PhD in urbanism from the University of Sydney. She is a former Associate Professor (Practice) at UNSW Graduate School of Urbanism and a former City of Sydney Alderman and Councillor. A weekly columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald she is the author of several books including Glen Murcutt: Three Houses, Blubberland; the dangers of happiness and Killing Sydney; the fight for a city’s soul. She is a Walkley-shortlisted writer, an internationally awarded critic, a former Assistant Editor of The Architectural Review, London and a regular commentator on urban affairs in Sydney and internationally. Her portrait by Mirra Whale was a finalist in the 2015 Archibald Prize and she is currently building an off-grid dwelling in rural NSW.

Reviews

[Boy Blue · Rating 3 out of 5]

This review has two parts. Part I is all about what turned this excellent piece of work into a steaming turd. Unfortunately, I've run out of space so Part II is on the Kindle edition of this book and is all about the fascinating facts and interesting ideas you'll find in here. If you want to learn and be happy go to Part II.

Part I

Farrelly is equal parts prophet and pedant and given her insistence on using Dichotomy to understand everything it's apt that the book itself suffers a dualistic fate; half of it great, half of it middling to shite.


I devour Farrelly's columns in the Sydney Morning Herald and while I usually find myself nodding in agreement, on occasion I mutter in frustration that she's completely missed the point. This book gave me the strange pleasure of experiencing both emotions in the same text. 


Farrelly is a brilliant architectural critic (probably the best in Sydney, possibly the best in Australia), she's also a pretty good historian, and an exceptional citizen. The parts of the book that deal with these areas are glowing if a tad repetitive and tedious.

Where Farrelly is weakest is when she strays from her expertise into musings of an anthropological and philosophical bent. Something she won't debate because she admits in this very book that she was useless at philosophy at university and it doesn't suit her. The first half of this book is a gushing fountain of knowledge and insight, fascinating facts spill out of Farrelly at a rapid rate (I've done my best to collate them and while I won't post them all some of the more fascinating ones feature at in Part II of this review on the Kindle edition). Killing Sydney's narrative twists and turns as Farrelly sets the foundations for what appears to be a brilliant treatise on the city. Unfortunately, in it's twilight stages it quickly unravels as she takes all her groundwork and wastes it on constructing a facile, flimsy, and false dichotomy of architectural gender.

Yes you read that right, architectural gendering. Despite her regular tongue in cheek, "it's more than just a tower being a dick" jokes, she never really develops this architectural gendering theory beyond womb-like and dick-like spaces. Obsessed with biological correlatives the interior is inherently female for no real reason and buildings as objects are male for no real reason. I did like her desire to look at architecture and buildings not as objects in space but rather looking at the negative space and the spaces created between them but this doesn't need to be and nor is it improved by gendering. Here's a couple of the worst quotes. 

"Mona is that very rare thing, an interior with no exterior. In bellybutton terms, it is all innie and no outie. It is, in this sense at least, an intensely female building."

Later on mona. 

"Almost entirely without exterior, its dark, fecund interiority is mysteriously intensely female, like some dark-winged Celtic goddess rising from the deep within to answer Wright's Adonic male."

(Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim)


Then she goes completely off the rails recasting the Tower of Babel as some feminine scapegoating. 

"Babel, you recall, is where everything started to go wrong. In Babel, or Babylon - often depicted as a circular or spiral tower - men started to speak different languages, and so to misunderstand each other, replacing harmony with division and strife. This is the faithless city, the harlot, the city that failed mankind. It is a version of the Pandora myth, containing echoes also of Eve's role in Eden, where femininity is scape-goated for the emergence of evil. But be she princess or whore, the city is identified as female."

That is the biggest pseudo-intellectual bullshit babble I've read since Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change research (which is a real paper you should check out). But back to Farrelly's interpretation, It's wrong on every level. 


Let's start with the assumption that Babel is Babylon. According to the Bible, the city "Babel" comes from the Hebrew verb בָּלַ֥ל (bālal), meaning to jumble or to confuse. That is a reference to the confusion of languages which we'll address in a second but ironically Farrelly has jumbled and confused Babylon the centre of Babylonian culture with Babel a mythical city that may also have been called Babylon or have been in Babylon but not in the Babylon of classical history. When Farrelly earlier talks about the Whore of Babylon, that's the figure in Revelations and has nothing to do with the Tower of Babel. This conflation is egregious and creates such a huge misunderstanding. 


Screw it I'm just going to put the section directly from Genesis in here because it's just basic stuff that Farrelly gets so wrong. And I find it important because it's symptomatic of this erroneous and broad sweeping attempt to gender everything.

1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.
4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth.

The Tower of Babel is about God punishing men for their hubris. They decide to build a tower (a dick tower in Farrelly's language) to the heavens. Which I actually think was quite a noble goal. God decides to be a dick himself and scatters us to the winds and prevents us from being able to talk to each other. There is no mention of women anywhere. None whatsoever. There is no female scape-goating and it has nothing to do with the whore of Babylon.


Farrelly also ignores causation. Men didn't just start to speak in different languages for fun. They were forced to do it as punishment for creating a giant tower. I feel like this was a missed opportunity for Farrelly to say even God doesn't like the object in space theory of architecture but instead she tries to make women the victim of a story they don't even feature in. But then to further enrage the astute reader she says this story is a version of Pandora's box. Well firstly, Pandora's Box came way after this story, and secondly they're not at all the same. Pandora is a naughty girl who disobeyed orders. The men of Babel don't have orders to disobey rather they're enterprising and get punished for it. Then she says it carries echoes of Eve's role in Eden. Ok yes there are echoes but only because both are stories in Genesis but the meanings are completely different one is the creation of original sin and the expulsion from paradise (which has a lot in common with Pandora's Box), the other is a punishment for a man driven attempt to return.


Lastly, 100% no, the city is not identified as female. Babel as represented completely by its giant tower is male. It is the alpha and omega of dick tower imagery. But what peeves me off more than anything about this silly confusion is the missed opportunity to actually make comment on how architecture and building is at the heart of civilisation. Onwards to more nonsense.


The false dichotomies carry on. 

"Women read fiction, especially relationship fiction, men read documentary. Women read people-books, men read thing-books. In architecture similarly, men emphasise the object while women focus on the space around and between. Gender is of course, much more complex than this binary view, but I still think it's a useful diagram."

Arrgggggghhhhh

"By the same token, one might argue, the garden is an essentially female entity - not only because it is 'soft' (in the sense of organic, living and growing) but because a garden is a space. An interior. This is especially evident in the case of a walled garden, which creates an enchanted within."

Yet she conveniently forgets this position when discussing the Barangaroo headland.

"The park itself is an outie - deliberately and entirely convex, with no possibility of anything to be in. Any suggestion of maternal protection is gone. There are no secret places, no surprises, no hidden nooks and crannies."(outie as in outie bellybutton)

um what? It's convex because it has a giant subterranean space underneath called the Cutaway. An INTERNAL space but also aren't all gardens inherently internal and female because you can...... that's right, be in them? Alright I'll stop. How can you possibly reason with someone who has the position that a space is female because it is a space and you can be in it?


I should also mention that Farrelly hates sport in a way that only the person who was always picked last at school could. She mentions the Bankwest stadium redevelopment being a bad idea but then wilfully ignores the fact that it has had a huge increase in weekly crowds and people who go to the games there think it's an awesome stadium. Yes it is bigger than what was there before but it's also not massive, it's capacity is about 30,000 which is actually quite intimate when compared to the Olympic Stadium at Homebush. I thought Farrelly would embrace the small home grounds of sports teams as a massive potential for community engagement and the creation of brilliant public spaces if done well. But she eschews that opportunity to say that all people playing sport are boofheads, everyone watching sports are fat, beer-guzzling losers, and the people running sport only care about money. Some of which is quite possibly true. Certainly the damage done to Parramatta not just in creating Bankwest but also the Powerhouse Museum and other redevelopments are abhorrent but maybe rather than dismissing the whole enterprise why not suggest how Parramatta could have developed a bigger and better stadium in a way that worked with the environment and city.

It's fascinating that people can live in the same city and have such strongly contrasting feelings about what makes it great. Farrelly immediately dismisses the beach and harbour as window dressing to the city she loves. Sydney's beating heart for her are the CBD, Inner West, and Eastern Suburbs. It doesn't surprise me that she would wax lyrical about Barcelona and discovering the 'pokability' of London. She wants to live in a busy inner city and there are many like her. However, there are also many that aren't like her. For me what makes Sydney great is not that it was developed in the mid 1800's with the high density living that typified London and other European cities of that era. For me the greatest thing about Sydney is the water. It has the greatest harbour in the world, and more incredibly not one but dozens of world class beaches less than 10km from the CBD. Where else can you find that? Rio? Match these stunning watery testaments with the mostly warm climate and you have an outdoor city par excellence. There are very few cities that can boast the same abundance of natural wealth that Sydney has. To add to the seaside you also have the Blue Mountains on the western border, Ku Ring Gai in the north and the National Park in the south. Sydney is basically carved out of the most stunning natural environments you could imagine. For Farrelly to dismiss all this for the busy streets of Surry Hills really annoyed me. Suburbs like Surry Hills are a dime a dozen around the world but there is nowhere that has the harbour and foreshore of Sydney. 

Farrelly does make a convincing argument for the protection of her inner city spaces and I back her on that but her undermining of the harbour and foreshore is crazy. Especially considering she later uses the famous Trollope quote which despite reading for the second time this year (having also read it in Peter Carey's 30 Days in Sydney) put a massive smile on my face. Turns out the best writing about Sydney was done well over 100 years ago.

"Of Sydney harbour one cannot speak with too warm enthusiasm. I myself know nothing equal to it. The Port runs into a variety of nooks and crooks, of creeks and corners, with here a bay and there a bay, and scores of queer rocky promontories on which the shrubs cluster among the rocks... the picturesque town itself and all its bright adjacent villas, clustering round three or four of its brightest coves. In the way of sea and town scenery mingled together, nothing can be more lovely than Sydney."

So am I telling you not to read this book? Um actually no. Read the first 3 chapters, they're brilliant. Then get up on your toes and tiptoe through chapter 4 and 5. Then close the book and walk away. Or if you're a sadist, gender studies student, or fan of the aforementioned Glaciers, gender, and science: A feminist glaciology framework for global environmental change paper carry on with gusto.

[Jennifer (JC-S) · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Sydney’s not full. And it’s not failing because of density. It’s just fed up with too much development too fast and too close, development that is ugly, greedy, undercontrolled and importunate.’

I read this book because, while I have never lived in Sydney, I have spent quite a bit of time there both personally and professionally. I spent some time in the beautiful Education Department building in Bridge Street in the early 1980s (since sold by the NSW government) and in other buildings around the CBD. I have enjoyed walking around the inner city especially Surry Hills and Potts Point. But these days, my visits are occasional (for medical reasons or cultural purposes) and more often my rare trips terminate in what the real estate world now calls ‘Outer South Western Sydney’ (around Tahmoor and Picton).

Walking around the centre of Sydney or catching the train (during non-peak times) is enjoyable. Trying to drive around in Sydney or using public transport during peak times is horrific. To me, Sydney looks full. How can Sydney accommodate more people? This is the question I kept in my mind as I read Ms Farrelly’s book.

From reading this book (and from my own observations) too much of the development is driven by profit: short-term profit by government as public assets are exchanged for money; and longer-term profit by developers fitting as much income-generating activity into as little space as possible. And the people? For me, that is the heart of Ms Farrell’s message. Most of the development or redevelopment disregards what people want or need. Especially people on low incomes. And what about the people whose lives have been disrupted by WestConnex?

If cities are meant to be about and for people, then people’s views should be considered. Ms Farelly mentions the newDemocracy model. I was fortunate enough to be part of the group selected to look at Housing Choices in the ACT, and I think that the process followed there was a good example of citizen involvement. I am one of those people, Ms Farrelly, who lives in and likes Canberra. And Canberra has problems of its own: travel can be problematic for those without access to a car, especially in the more remote suburbs. But development in Sydney troubles me more. The endless urban sprawl, the impact (on the environment and on people’s health) of the commuting between home and work, the reclamation of public space for private development.

Ms Farrelly raises several important questions in this book If you have an interest in Sydney, if you care about cities meeting the needs of their inhabitants, then I recommend reading this book. The issues raised by Ms Farrelly apply to all large cities.

Note: My thanks to NetGalley and Pan Macmillan Australia for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book for review purposes.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

[Boy Blue · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is Part II of my review of Killing Sydney. Part I can be found on the paperback version and is significantly more derisive. If you like cool facts and being happy, stay here. If you like breaking things and the dark side check out Part I.

Part II

INTERESTING FACTS, QUOTES & OPINIONS

Early Sydney

"Of Sydney harbour one cannot speak with too warm enthusiasm. I myself know nothing equal to it. The Port runs into a variety of nooks and crooks, of creeks and corners, with here a bay and there a bay, and scores of queer rocky promontories on which the shrubs cluster among the rocks... the picturesque town itself and all its bright adjacent villas, clustering round three or four of its brightest coves. In the way of sea and town scenery mingled together, nothing can be more lovely than Sydney." -Anthony Trollope

Sydney was colonised in 1788 which was about 50 years before industrialisation, individualism, and democracy had fomented a mantra of density is the devil. Hence Sydney has a dense close packed centre.

10 July 1901 was a fire in Anthony Hordern & Sons Palace in Haymarket. 5 people died, including Harry Clegg who famously teetered on a ledge for half an hour 120 feet up until jumping to his death. In 1912, still scarred by that incidennt, parliament put through legislation banning buildings above 120 feet (12 storeys) in the city and 100 feet (ten storeys) in the rest of the state. This lasted until 1957.

From 1912 to 1957 Kings Cross had a 100 Foot Statutory limit on building height. This resulted in the 10 storey red brick apartments that line the streets from the water up to William St.

Sydney once boasted the most extensive tram network in the Southern Hemisphere. You could go by tram to Taronga Zoo, to Bondi Beach, Coogee, La Perouse, Balmoral or Balmain. But we ripped it out. We now have the most extensive - and expensive - private toll-road system in the world. Penrith to Paddington costs $53 a day.

Broadly, the Sydney terrace evolved from the London terrace, which had emerged when Charles II's post-fire legislation kicked medieval wooden London into the mercantile age.The size and shape of the London terrace house was governed by the landholder's desire to get as many houses as possible onto one street, and the authorities' newfound desire (starting with Elizabeth I) to ensure that such speculative building was done with a modicum of safety and control. The London statutes that ensued over the next two or three centuries and which finally produced the New South Wales Building Act in the early twentieth century linked the allowable width and height of a terrace house to the width of the street. In this way, broader streets, as in London's Kensington or Fitzrovia, found themselves with grander houses and, by extension, occupants, but the general model was the same: no timber projections, no balconies, and all party walls to protrude through the roof, thus preventing the spread of fire.

"Surry Hills, bordering Chinatown, was the rag-trade and opium district; a squalid slum run by ruthless madams and razor gangs, rife with prostitution, petty crime and sly grog. It's houses, often a mere 3 metres wide, were crammed in, side by side, and even, in some cases, on top of each other. A lot of these houses still exist - and although, they're now mosques, bespoke hat shops and absinthe bars, as well as homes to the middle classs......." LET ME JUST INTERJECT HERE. Surry Hills is not typified by mosques, absinthe bars and bespoke hat shops. It's mostly cafes, restaurants and bars.

Sydney Going Up - 1957 Onwards

Mid twentieth century push for skyscrapers during the height of high modernism. Harry Seidler and Geradus 'Dick' Dusseldorp. Together they got the height restriction removed in 1957 and replaced by FSR floor space ratio. An FSR of 10:1 could mean 10,000 square metres on the ground results in 100,000 square metres of floor space in the building, in any configuration. Thus a 12:1 zoning gives you a 36 storey building on one third of the footprint. Their vision was tall thin towers with cafes, walkways and plazas, shopping precincts on the bottom. After doing Ithaca Gardens together they embarked on Australia Square in 1964 going from the previous 12 storeys to 40. Sydney's first true skyscraper (Though the AMP tower was the first through the height limit).

The first tower boom in the 1960's, density was the fear and remedial decongestion the driver. Tall towers set in parkland or plazas. Seidler's vision was to get built mass off the ground and divert people off the streets. Seidler and Dusseldorp were also the first to realise the value and commoditise "the view". The second wave of skyscrapers in Sydney starting in the 80's is residential towers which is aiming at increased density for environmentalism and housing supply this is still going.

1970's Jack Mundey and Builders Labourers Federation used work bans to block the destruction of Hunters Hill Bushland and then the destruction of Inner Sydney

Sydney Today

Central to Eveleigh rail corridor got upzoned and approved for dozens of 30 storey appartment towers. Which explains that development around Redfern station, and the demolition of The Block.

The use of rail corridors to upzone areas was also done on the Sydenham to Bankstown line, with the Metro Southwest development an excuse to upzone that entire corridor. This was coupled with Greater Sydney Commission upzoning Marrickville to allow for more tower building up to 20 storeys high.

Twenty towers 40 storeys high have been or are being built on the Waterloo public housing site, which is now a metro station.

The push to build residential towers throughout Metropolitan Sydney has been relentlessly promoted by development lobbies - The Property Council of Australia and the Urban Taskforce.

"Sydney is shallow compared with Melbourne, crass compared with Adelaide, and flint-eyed compared with Brisbane, yet still has a messed up beauty that entrances me every time."

Lightrail has been beset with issues. Overpriced, too far between spots, only seats for 108 of the 466 per vehicle passengers, moves up to 80km p/h. No noise damping grass or green spots on the rails. No underground power for most of it. Trip from Circular Quay to Randwick takes 45 minutes which is slightly longer than the bus it replaced. Tram heralded internationally as the slowest system in the world.

Quotes on Architecture and International correlatives

"Density does not equal height does not equal urbanism."

"The desolation that is felt at the relization of the maddest of all Utopian schemes, the open-planned housing complex, where streets are replaced by empty spaces from which towers arise, towers bearing neither the mark of a communal order, nor any visible record of the individual house, and demonstrating in every aspect the triumph of that collective individualism from which both community and individual are abolished." - Roger Scruton

"When an area becomes derelict and cheap, students and artists are the first to colonise. They go where it's cheap, infiltrating what most people regard as a slum neighbourhood, happily living cheek by jowl with the endemically poor. They're happy to be counter fashionable and gradually, over a decade or more, make it cool. The next wave, following them, is the professional demographic - those who, while trained, live on slender means. This often includes young architects who take up and renovate whatever small terraces, tiny studios and warehouse spaces they can get their hands on. Adding a graphic richness to the grain and texture, they gradually transform the neighbourhood. This is the start of the gentrification process. Cafes and bars pop up, attracting visitors from surrounding - nicer - suburbs who are drawn by the activity, the buzz of the gentrification process. The hood becomes cool. Prices rise. The wealth classes follow. And now the urban poor, who generally coexist quite happily with bohemian arts culture, are forcibly squeezed out. The place goes from cool to mainstream and then on to safe, predictable, dull. Kings Cross is a classic example; before that The Rocks and before that Paddington. You've heard of trickle-down economics? You might call this trickle-up urbanism.

Le Corbusier famously said


"Il faut tuer la rue-corridor"


We must kill the corridor-street


Corbu cities were composed of identical tower blocks on a cartesian grid comprising an infinite number of points of equal value. Mass-produced apartment buildings, or unites, were conceived as vertical villages and commercial skyscrapers as vertical streets. This argued Corbu would allow density and open space to coexist, reducing the on-ground footprint of each person to a small fraction of what it was, and would allow open space to replace the street. Speed and efficiency!

Robert Moses the power broker in New York was the person most able to realise the Corbusian city paradigm. With all of his plans ready at the beginning of Roosevelt's New Deal in 1933, he managed to build dozens of expressways, parkways, thirteen bridges and tens of thousands of high-rise apartments in dozens of high-rise slum-clearance schemes famously denounced by James Baldwin as 'negro removal' schemes.

Motorways

Canberra is the shrine to post-war traffic engineering. Expressways everywhere so that driving anywhere in town is done at 80km an hour. You need a car. Millions of trees but no shade for walkers because the trees all shade the streets. Another example of the car first mentality.

The British have tended to favour the ring-road or bypass system. Which has another set of issues, creating no-go deadzones and don't actually improve traffic flow.

A H 'Harry' Garnsey was the man with an expressway plan for Sydney. Spent decades creating plans and documents, studying other countries to find the ideal expressway system for Sydney. 1957 Cahill expressway the result of this. A heinous crime akin to Melbourne's Yarra rail line from the 1850's, Perth's Kwinana Freeway in 1959, Brisbane's Riverside Expressway in 1975. Garnsey's 1971 Statutory Planning Scheme went up against the City of Sydney Strategic Plan and lost. Thank Christ.

1980's bought the Western Distributor through Ultimo to feed the Harbour Bridge. 1990's bought the Eastern Distributor through Woolloomooloo, Surry Hills, and Darlinghurst. The Entertainment centre near Paddy's Market and the Powerhouse Museum were both developed to block the expressways that would otherwise have charged through there.

2012 report for the Institute of Transport and Development Policy noted: "by the late 1960's traffic engineers from both the United States and the United Kingdom had observed that adding highway capacity was not decreasing travel times, and theorised that this was due to additional trips that were generated or induced because of the new roads"

Seoul removed its Cheonggyechceon elevated motorway built in 1969, restoring the wide-flowing river beneath and creating a new recreational precinct. Apartment values rose by 25%. Portland removed its Harbour Drive in 1978 and replaced it with a park. San Francisco removed the Embarcadero Freeway. Paris turned the Georges Pompidou expressway into the Paris-Plages. Berlin turned the Tempelhof airport into a park. Akron, Ohio, turned a highway into a pop-up woodland known as the Innerbelt National Forest.

Farrelly talks about A A Gill who says ancestors are not what make you interesting. I found this a fascinating view for her to put forward when she's so insistent on heritage protection. She seems to believe that development and renewal is only good when done her specific way.

"And if there is no citizenry, there can be no society. With the citizen reduced to consumer, society is reduced to the market."

As already mentioned Part I of this review can be found on the paperback edition of Killing Sydney. It's much more critical. You've been warned.

[Keen Reader · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 Stars!

“In the six years between 2011 and 2017, successive right-wing governments in New South Wales sold off $53 billion of assets.”

I am well aware of Australia’s reputation for being dominated by lying, greedy, rich, right wing men plundering the resources and assets of the nation at the expense of the environment, the non-millionaires and indigenous communities, but I have to say the extent of the chronic corruption and blatant cronyism that has plagued the NSW government and the city of Sydney for decades was profoundly shocking. The playbook is often so crude and blatant (tactics which the nation’s leaders have specialised in for generations) that it started to look a lot like the template used in post-communist Russia, and the mass extraction and theft of assets that continues to go on there.

“A huge chasm separates contemporary Western culture from ancient cultures. The name of the chasm is Modernism. Modernism’s intensely individualistic, egoistic and optimistic culture has deluded us into believing that death is no longer real, so sacredness is no longer necessary.”

Farrelly delves into so many fascinating and diverse areas, like with engineering, we learn that apart from Queensland, Australia’s engineers are entirely unregulated, so that anyone, outside of QLD can claim to be an engineer and provide engineering services and use it in their marketing, without any regulation. It also makes you wonder, just how much of the world has been spoiled or destroyed by property speculators with the full blessing of politicians?...

“Society is the collective made manifest. To magic it away painting it as a figment of some socialist dreaming, is to remove any obligation to it, especially any obligation of public expenditure. It also removes any duty to behave in anything other than a strictly ego-driven or tribal manner.”

Apparently after a fire in 1901 and the very public death of one, 22 year old Harry Clegg, who eventually leapt to his death from 120 feet, led to an act of Parliament in 1912, banning buildings over 150 ft in the city and 100 ft across the state. This wasn’t logical as nothing in the new act would actually have prevented his death. And yet this remained the law until Harry Seidler and Geradius ‘Dick’ Dusseldorp lobbied tirelessly to overturn the rules and so from 1957 the pair, along with any others who wished to, were allowed to build to skyscraper level.

“This idea sits at the heart of offence culture. But its cover slide from ‘my feelings are hurt’ to ‘therefore, you should be silent’ can only, at best, generate mediocrity. At worst, it leads to totalitarianism.”

At one point she poses the question, “Why have we allowed the ‘going there’ to assume so much more importance than the ‘being there’ ?” She also does a fine job of exposing the fallacy that sharing equals loss, that more is always better, believing that most of us actually believe that adequate is more than adequate. She also explores ideas around Miswanting, induced demand and generational inequity, and cites the likes of the Futurists and the Situationists. We also learn that Mussolini was actually the person responsible for building the world’s first motorway in 1924, the Autostrada dei Laghi between Milan and the foothills of Lombardy.

“Latterly this paradoxical pro-wealth populism has been compounded by postmodernism’s push to render truth personal and relative, and exploited by the neo-liberal lie that what’s good for the rich is good for us all, via trickle-down economics. Together, these three fallacies enable the now widespread ‘post-truth’ presumption that rules and facts are optional.”

This is a phenomenally important book, and Farrelly is on storming form at times. Her love, experience and understanding of the city results in an almost lyrical fluency. Her knowledge is both academic and heuristic amounting to a commanding authority of her subject. Merging key aspects of politics, philosophy and urban planning, Farrelly has concocted a passionate and hugely engaging piece of work which makes for great reading.

“All these models rely on the old assumption that government interests are identical to the public interest. But when governments begin to idolise corporations and emulate their rapacious behaviours, they no longer see the public as a constituent beneficiary, but as a strange mix of exploitable customer and threat.”

[Lily Manning · Rating 3 out of 5]

strength of this book: some good history and interesting facts about Sydney’s urban planning / public transport systems / submission to capo developers

weakness of this book: very tepid acknowledgment of Aboriginal history / all the things Farrelly seems to want to protect are of European/ colonial influence

I feel like she just wants Sydney to be Paris so bad!

[Terence S · Rating 2 out of 5]

Killing Sydney, by journalist and former Sydney councillor Elizabeth Farrelly, is a book which aims to investigate the forces which threaten to ruin Sydney’s urban development and propose ways to correct them. Considering Farrelly is a former Sydney councillor, and a longtime architecture journalist, I expected this book to be a detailed investigation of Sydney’s problems, both past and present, and a roadmap for the future, and it was - for the first two and a half chapters. After that, it turned into a confused, misguided tirade against manhood and modernity, where Farrelly confuses the city’s culture with its architecture, and argues that living in the past is the best way to save Sydney’s future.

The first two chapters are, by far, the best part of this book. Farrelly’s strengths are on show in her examination of Sydney’s architectural and political landscape. Her writing is eloquent and easy to understand, and her passionately expressed descriptions of Sydney’s beauty and uniqueness are brilliant, and bring life to her explorations of Sydney’s streets, spaces and structures. Her examination of Sydney’s misguided development at the hands of shortsighted, apathetic governments and greedy private companies is presented with passion and backed up by Farrelly’s interviews with citizens and government insiders.
Farrelly pulls no punches as she highlights how major projects like the light rail ("It's almost as though the government mapped the public land in an area, totted up the potential development yield, popped a light rail stop on each plot and joined the dots"), the Westconnex motorway (“an old-style twentieth-century solution to a twenty-first century problem”) and the cheaply made, expensively rented ‘luxury’ apartment towers like the infamous Opal Tower, now plagued with structural deficiencies (“In Australia, any clown can call themselves a fire, or any other sort of, engineer”), have been ruined by the pursuit of greed, with Sydney’s history, natural beauty and community spirit sacrificed to the short-term gain of businesses and politicians, with no return for the taxpayers apart from a mismatched collection of poorly-planned, poorly-built structures.

After the first two and a half chapters, Farrelly seems to have established that a perfect storm of political incompetence and private greed has made Sydney’s culture “shallow compared with Melbourne, crass compared with Adelaide and flint eyed compared with Brisbane” - and more expensive to live in than almost anywhere else in Australia. Unfortunately, she then writes off these major factors as secondary to what she argues is the real problem with Sydney’s development - ‘male’ architecture, which is apparently anything tall, modern and, it seems, any buildings that Farrelly personally dislikes.
Farrelly says she wants to look beyond “most discussion about gender and cities [which] quickly … takes an insistence that high-rise buildings are phallic symbols and therefore bad” so she argues that, in addition, low-rise buildings and parks are womblike symbols and therefore good. Perhaps Farrelly could have made some sense out of this by actually expanding on it, but she instead throws around misinterpreted examples of historic architecture (ancient Babylon being “often [depicted as] physically and conceptually round, womb-like) and lazy stereotypes (“the privileged - and male - status of sport, and the underprivileged - and female - status of nature”) as if, somehow, a series of disjointed case studies will form a cohesive argument for her.

Now, I may have found Farrelly’s attempt to turn tower-as-phallus/garden-as-womb jokes into an urban planning theory bizarre and a bit cringeworthy, but her vision for applying this to Sydney really frustrated me. Firstly, Farrelly’s arguments seem to contradict themselves with surprising regularity. For instance, after spending several pages explaining how, in her view, classical walled cities were “often [depicted as] physically and conceptually round, womb-like” and that “be she princess or whore, the city is identified as female”, she states (on the next page, too) that she’s “not suggesting that [these] cities were in any sense feminist or feminised”. She argues that parks and nature are vital, feminising parts of the urban landscape, places to be within, to explore and enjoy nature, but also says that “The park [in Barangaroo] is also an outie - deliberately and entirely convex, with no possibility of anything to be in'' and that “a city…is artifice, a ‘made’ thing. So it doesn’t follow that the leafier, or more ‘natural’, the better”. I’m not sure whether Farrelly is presenting these counterpoints as a way of making her debate ‘balanced’, or simply as strawmen to knock down, but it comes across as indecisive and confused in text, and reinforces my belief that a concrete opinion is the only concrete thing Sydney’s politicians and journalists will never touch.
When Farrelly does commit to her arguments, though, they bear little relation to the points she’s outlined, and instead come off as wistful pining for a rose-tinted past where nothing in Sydney was tall or modern. For instance, her solution to the “faux-natural mishmash of suburbia” and the soulless, substandard and expensive apartment towers that have appeared across Sydney, is to sing the praises of Sydney’s old terraces, which have “gradually formed inner-city neighbourhoods whose freewheeling byways…are now the envy of many” - despite the fact that those same houses started out as squalid inner-city slums, and are only desirable now thanks to years of sprawl and gentrification. In fact, sprawl and gentrification seem to be Farrelly’s solutions for most of Sydney’s problems, as she states that Sydney’s formerly grimy industrial port and working-class ghettos “read as impossible relics of a glorious and civic-minded past", and “that … nimby zoning that springs from unalloyed self-concern can have an element of…sharing altruism”. Perhaps that altruism is shared by the well-heeled residents of the inner city, who think anything beyond Parramatta is rural and make snide remarks about people who drive to work and shop at supermarkets, but as someone who spends two hours a day commuting through the results of Sydney’s collective nimbyism and love of sprawl, I don’t feel the love from Sydney’s “courtly and gracious” buildings. I just resent the fact that, thanks to the lack of development in the city and inner suburbs, along with the dominance of big business in shaping the city, I, along with most of Sydney’s residents, face a no-win situation - pay a lot to live in the distant suburbs, or live way beyond our means to shave a few minutes off the trip to work.

Okay, now for the tough task of summarising this book. Just like the city it deals with, Killing Sydney contains both good and bad, and offers ideas that are both inspiring and frustrating. Unfortunately, Farrelly doesn’t actually offer any specific solutions to the problems she highlights, and the ideas she supports seem wildly out of touch with the reality of life in Sydney. Perhaps I expected something more practical from this book than a long, contradictory diatribe dressed up with academic-sounding purple prose, but in one respect, Farrelly has succeeded: Killing Sydney has made me pay more attention to the architectural, cultural and political landscape of Sydney as I live, work and interact with it. It’s just a pity, really, that I can’t see how most of the book’s concepts apply to the city it’s supposed to save.

[Gillian White · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just as we need expert, independent, passionately dispassionate communicators who can help us with pandemics and public health, we need them in architecture and planning. Complicated important things like these affect us profoundly, but without specialist guidance we cannot understand, assess or assist; we are prey to misinformation, misdirection and misspent money. If this sounds like all we can do is hiss, it's because no one is helping us. Farrelly’s book helps. It gives us access. It contributes expertise about utility and function. Even better, it takes account of the missing ingredient in what little discussion there is about the spaces in which we live - its beauty. Or lack of it.

We citizens can feel when the architecture and town planning are working - at least we can after it's finished - but it's impossible to assess in advance without a great deal of training. We can't follow the proposals, not least because they are highly technical and their embodied results are only revealed sometime far in the future. The law is complicated; the issues are complex; the economics are eye-watering; and even though our built environment is permanent and unavoidable, we are excluded. They keep it all secret, buried in a welter of hidden agendas. Random public announcements might as well be about advances in dental technology, for all the comprehension and control we have. 

I don't want to live in an asphalt environment, where there are no trees and no beautiful spaces and no sharing of them. I want to be proud of a city of whose best bits I am part owner. I thought it was a clear and universally held truism that our governments, (which after all, have resources we provided for them), should try for the best on behalf of the public. And when it is difficult to know, as it always is, we should be able to trust that they will take some care and approach the task in good faith. So it’s utterly bewildering when it becomes evident that not even their intentions are honourable. Nothing is so depressing as the mindless carelessness of plonking a great big glaring advertising sign on a bridge over citizens’ heads in their city (as our Premier recently said she wanted to do), unless it’s chopping down mature trees or repeatedly building houses that are unlivable and ugly as well as unaffordable. Given our collective talents it’s all so unnecessary. Such a waste. One of my favourite words - and it applies here - is a German one: Verschlimbesserung. It means making things worse while trying to make them better. 

Farrelly’s book forces us to face the sense of betrayal and loss in this “disimprovement” that we have tried to hope isn't really there; that what results from their decisions isn't really what they meant; that it isn’t all really beyond our ability to comprehend or influence. For readers, it’s a book full of inhalations and exhalations. In some parts it's like re-reading a farewell letter from a lover from whom you’d hoped much. In other places Farrelly explains with piercing clarity why some things work and some things don’t. She’s gathered disparate facts together in one place, filtered them through education and experience, and expressed them with evocative power. It helps us to see how all those muddled confusing variables and everyone’s inattention are connected to the slowly unfolding consequences for our lives.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Killing Sydney - The Fight for a City's Soul' is a beautifully written, inspiring call to arms but it is not a polite book. As @elizabeth farrelly argues so eloquently, the stakes are too high now to waste time pulling punches.
Blooming on the shores of our lovely harbour, Sydney has largely managed to balance progress and nature or greed and goodness - what Farrelly describes as Primate and Angel - producing the jostling, messy, colourful, vibrant, sassy Sydney everyone loves.
But greed’s been let off the lead and Sydney is in dire danger of death by development. Farrelly isn't anti-development, but she is furiously anti-exploitation and the scale and rapacity of the plans and construction sweeping Sydney patently favour short-term gain for some at the expense of the long term health and welfare of many.
This is a book about Sydney, but its wisdom and insights apply to the struggles facing all modern cities. In fact, I'd argue that they apply beyond the city limits and out into the country where the tricky discussion of self-determination versus the urgent systemic change in agricultural management required to mitigate climate collapse is getting hotter.
Killing Sydney ends with the lovely 'A Citizen's Manifesto - for everyone who wants to help Sydney find its better self' - a practical, inspiring list of all the positive things that anyone can do to become a better citizen. It starts with 'Make noise' and finishes with the promise of 'a bigger, richer, more imaginative life' and by the end I had my hanky out and would have willing trotted after Farrelly into a battle for our city's soul.
What's at stake here is community. Yours, mine, ours and theirs - the generations to come. What happens next depends on each and every one of us choosing to engage, to fight for the health and prosperity of diverse, thriving, vibrant communities at every level.
Start by reading this book.

[Giovanna Walker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Phew. Finished it. It was a tough slog in some sections. I'm pretty well read, but there were MANY words I didn't understand (& a book that includes 'behooves'....). Whilst that did annoy me slightly, was Farrelly trying to be erudite? All those big words.
I'm an ex-Sydneysider, so for me it was interesting read to see what's happened in the last 20 years or so. For the powerful, not the people. At times I wanted to shout at the book when I was reading it, so frustrating what decisions were made, and the WAY they were made. Some of her predictions coming to pass - like the exit ramp at one of the new freeways, near Balmain - a nightmare with no short term solution.
She does go on a little bit, repetition, and I did skip some paragraphs. the comparison between 'innies' and 'outies' was....didn't quite do it for me. The comparison of masculine and feminine, were interesting (CBD being the masculine realm, suburbs the feminine realm).
Does she provide solutions? Not really, they're all a bit airy fairy and put it back to the public, but where?
It would have been interesting if she 'compared' Sydney to other cities in Australia more fully (she only looks at one social housing project & seems obsessed with Barcelona).

[Adeline Moya · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-read for any Sydneysider who cares. A thorough lesson on city-planning in general. I loved how philosophy and history are intertwined in this book. It is not just a technical urbanism book. The book asks what kind of city do we want to live in. Farrelly doesn’t mince her words when it comes to developers greed and politicians lack of vision or laziness. You cannot separate urbanism and city planning from politics and economic questions and this book describes these tensions very well. Killing Sydney hurts as it reminds you of everything that’s been lost and wasted away but It also has a glimmer of hope, giving us ideas on how to stop submitting to ugliness.

[Ronson Rouble · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended, Elizabeth is a credible authority on Sydney and the book covers City of Sydney topics in an engaging read that offers Her opinion on future planning & suggested growth direction.

Two points/comments

1 - The author is wrong to be negative towards Barangaroo. Barangaroo is a fantastic clean modern business district and the public space of Barangaroo park is great
(Source: worked in Barangaroo for 2.5 years)

2 - The author is correct about Canberra (however Canberra is improving)

[Josh Goodman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very enjoyable read, although the content less so. Farrelly uses a really nice tone and an engaging multi-disciplinary vocabulary to walk through a very slow and ugly car crash of Sydney's history of policy and greed. I would love to read her only talk about how magical Sydney's urban fabric is, but that book doesn't really make sense anymore. Would recommend to others, but in the same way that emerging from Plato's cave can often bring disenchantment and sadness.

[Upasana · Rating 4 out of 5]

An important but very painful read. I appreciated Farrelly’s knowledge, perspective and insight. It has left me somewhat but necessarily anxious. Favourite chapter was the final one in which the author highlights the importance of genuine consultation and of dissent and debate. I intend to follow up with books and research on effective community consultation and good examples of contemporary urban design that incorporates respect for cultural and particularly Indigenous history.

[Bettina · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a young Sydney female civil engineering student, I picked up the book and found it initially a hopeful read on Australian architecture. As the book progressed I became frustrated with the negative undertones of the author's views. I am not a huge reader so this is from personal belief, that this book didn't leave me feeling as though Elizabeth adequately represented the large workforce of many Australian's that are are passionate and believe in the future of Sydney City.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating book about a subject not often discussed so openly - that of our cities and how contemporary politics is shaping their development - for better, but also for the worst. It examines Sydney's development and the forces at play as it moves into the future. This mixes politics with architecture and sociology and is an interesting snapshot of this point in Sydney's life as a city.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

A former Sydney City Councillor's perspective on the destruction of Sydney by developers and various governments. Interesting points of view on what makes for a good city. The book is not just about architecture but any means.

[Tom Yeomans · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a fantastically enlightening and infuriating read, super engaging and damning in its presentation. Said a lot about Sydney that I’ve felt for a very long time but haven’t been able to articulate

[David Wilmoth · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book on Sydney for a long time. Passionate but grounded in the awful facts of how Sydney's planning and development has been so degraded. And the book is also a love letter to Sydney - its setting, its history, its places so well known and some so secret.

[Annabelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

Best bits were when she was ragging on Canberra