The unruly city
The Unruly City
Green Bans Mural, Woolloomooloo
Sydney has long been a city well-known for its poor planning decisions, reflecting a historically laissez-faire approach to urban design.
Planning advocate J.D. Fitzgerald lamented in 1917 that Sydney was â??a city without a plan, save whatever planning was due to the errant goatâ?. â??Wherever this animal made a track through the bushâ?, he observed, â??there are the streets of todayâ?.
Sydney historian Paul Ashton has subsequently called Sydney an â??accidental cityâ?, because its planning history has been shaped by, at best, opportunistic development and disjointed or abortive attempts at holistic planning. As declared by one frustrated onlooker: â??There is no such thing as planning [in the city of Sydney] â?? [ it is] all opportunism on the part of every agency.â?
That can make for some fairly unruly spaces at times, as local residents and activists have intervened to protect their homes from speculative property development, then as now.
But when residents dared to speak out against the loss of their homes, they encountered the darker side of Sydneyâ??s criminal underbelly…
There are a number of sound recordings here clustered around Victoria St, dealing with the tumultuous period between 1973-4 when resident action forced delays to the construction of the Victoria Heights towers overlooking the city.
Listen in to the sounds of the Rocks in 1973, when the BLF were fighting to save the historic Rocks precinct from redevelopment.