ARCHITECTURE BULLETIN
Tending to the open field: The art of maintaining publicness WORDS: HUGO MOLINE
Before discussing the ongoing transformations of this Country, we pay our respects to all the people connected to the kinship system of this Country, including the D’harawal, the Dharug, the Eora, the Gaimaragal, the Gundungurra and the Guringai. We acknowledge that sovereignty of this land was never ceded. We look out on a former public works depot in Waterloo, Sydney, now a field of concrete ringed by cyclone fencing. Across the road, in the offices of an arts organisation, we are meeting with people who live around the field or have some connection to it. The field will soon be gone, replaced by new apartment buildings in an area once wetland, then industrial, now the densest residential area in the city. The local government will require the developer to create a new public space here. That’s why we are here, speaking to people, gathering their ideas of what this public space could be. Our work is viewed with suspicion by some; we are a fig-leaf
to overdevelopment, we are the midwives of gentrification. We don’t have the authority to change the building heights, or set affordability standards, so what can we possibly do? In late 2016 we were commissioned by the City of Sydney, to creatively engage with the community surrounding the Danks Street South Precinct so that their stories, values and ideas could help shape the future public spaces to be developed. While in typical development processes, these kinds of engagements happen towards the end of the design process, here the city was trialling a new approach, to do this at the beginning. Since 2020, we have been working with D’harawal Knowledge Keeper Shannon Foster and Jo Paterson Kinniburgh of Bangawarra, as well as Jane Irwin Landscape Architects, to develop an initial public space concept design for the precinct. The precinct forms the northern tip of the Green Square redevelopment and is bordered by Danks, Young, McEvoy and Bourke streets. The site is most easily identified by the large concrete open field, surrounding the Sydney Water Pumping Station and Valve House, located at the south-eastern corner of the precinct. This is Nadunga Gurad (sand-dune Country) known for millenia for its nattai (saltwater/ freshwater wetlands). Since colonisation it has lived many lives, for many people: providing a site for refuge, industry and activism. The site, which houses essential water infrastructure, now sits among multiple traumatic urban changes – the ongoing displacement of public housing communities, Westconnex road adjustments, as well as ongoing forms of gentrification. This site
Montage by MAPA
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