New South Wales Sites
Sydney
Olympic Park, Homebush Bay, Sydney
artilce published Landscape Australia no 22 (3- 2000)
A Blueprint for Urban Development?
by Elizabeth Mossop*
| Presents an international perspective on the Homebush site, and looks at the success of the site as a blueprint for future urban development and future Olympic site development. |
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Locating the major Olympic development in Sydney's traditionally underprivileged western suburbs, as well as being a key 'Green Games' idea, sent a very clear message that the Olympics were to benefit all Sydneysiders, not just the coastal elite of the eastern suburbs.
The development at Homebush has changed the city's psychological landscape by bringing this forgotten industrial landscape of the Parramatta River into our consciousness, as well as providing much-needed investment and facilities in Western Sydney. This strategy has meant that the economic impetus of the Olympic Games has been successfully used to rehabilitate the heavily contaminated industrial landscape of Homebush.
While there are still some heavily polluted areas in Homebush Bay, the Olympic development has gone much of the way in bringing back a significant area of degraded and unusable land. This strategy provides an excellent model for the planning of future events for long-term benefit and for urban development, generally at a time when the reuse of 'brownfields' is of increasing importance.
This decision, to create one centralised location at Homebush, has required a clear vision of what this urban area would be in the future and what urban typology would be developed for this significant area of land. It offered the potential of a real urban transformation of these middle-ring suburbs at a time when urban renewal of the post-war city is a vital component of any long-term `Green' strategy for Sydney.
The decision instead to take the fundamentally suburban model of the 'Sports Park' has meant the urban legacy of the Games is intensely problematic. This strategy has resulted in the collection of a large number of highly specialised sports and leisure facilities in an area without a really integrated public transport network and isolated from a more substantial residential population and from other supporting uses. It means there is a real question over the viability of many of the facilities and over how the whole of the Homebush site will fare as a place post-Olympics.
Compounding this problem is the fact that the park component of the 'Sports Park' has gone unregarded for much of the development process. Even now, the shrinking budget allocated to the initial stages of the Millennium Parklands is disproportionately small, particularly given its extent and the contribution it could make to the success of the overall development. Potentially the most significant legacy of the Games, the completion of the park's development and the integration of a further range of complementary uses, including more residential, would increase the viability of Homebush as a sports and leisure destination within the Sydney region.
At the project scale, the central focus on environmental issues and its prominence in international and local scrutiny of the Games has served to make a significant procedural shift in the procurement of major public facilities. The achievement of 'ESD' (environmentally sustainable development) has been integral in winning proposals, project implementation and the image and marketing of the Games. To what extent green rhetoric has been a substitute for real environmental innovation is extremely difficult to evaluate, given an ongoing climate of secrecy surrounding the Olympic developments.
The argument has been made that it was more important to shift mainstream developers, bureacrats and politicians 10% in the right direction because this was 'achievable', than to fight for more significant gains. However, it does seem that a rare opportunity for design innovation was lost; it appears that demonstrated experience, management capability, financial expertise and an attractive economic package were all of greater significance in project selection. It seems that project resources have been allocated to additional layers of management rather than on more sophisticated design, research and development. It is telling that, generally, the smaller projects have exhibited the more exciting and successful design solutions.
Perhaps the considerable achievements in project delivery for the Olympic Games will give us the confidence in the near future to be more courageous and innovative in both planning and design.
Somehow, the message that design innovation and quality can be key ingredients in marketing, economic viability, urban livability and environmental sustainability needs to be communicated to decision-makers and to the public at large.
* In 2000 Elizabeth Mossop was Assistant Professor in Landscape Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design, USA . She is also a Director of Spackman and Mossop Landscape Architects in Sydney, Australia.
