A Political Ecology Case Study of Sydney Park
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State of Australian Cities Conference 2015 Urbanising Nature: a political ecology case study of Sydney Park Catherine Evans Faculty of the Built Environment, UNSW Abstract: This paper examines the making of Sydney Park, a 41.6 ha park south of the Sydney central business district within the context of urbanisation in Sydney. Formerly a brickwork and landfill site, Sydney Park has been the focus of three iterations of master-planning since the late 1970s. Now a greatly transformed landscape, Sydney Park currently figures as a major hub in the Sydney 2030 Strategic Plan and its ‘Green Global Connected’ vision for the city. This research adopts the lens of urban political ecology (UPE) to explore how this former industrial site has come to feature so prominently in Sydney’s journey towards a sustainable city. Drawing on evidence in planning documents and design reports, this paper documents the various ways in which formations and re- creations of ‘nature’ were articulated, modified and inscribed into and onto Sydney Park between 1979 and 2010 to direct specific social, ecological and economic outcomes. (UPE) offers a platform for assessing the making of Sydney Park as a case study of ambiguities and contradictions that can result from well-intended efforts to ‘green’ the city. Preliminary findings reveal that the journey from wasteland to parkland has invoked specific concepts of nature which represent and in turn have served broader social, political and economic agendas. The discussion revisits the urban political ecology framework to assess the role of Sydney Park’s constructed ecology in the trajectory of urban transformations, with particular attention to the link between ideas of nature and ideas of public benefit. Introduction As Sydney emerged as a global city in the 1980s and new economic realities played out in the urban fabric, several depleted quarries were transformed into parks. Examples include Sydney Park, Bicentennial Park, Chipping Norton Lake, and Penrith Lakes. These manufactured landscapes are valued for their contributions to the health of the urban region, and as large urban parks, they now improve urban conditions, and resolve urban problems. In as far as parks fix cities, we can understand them as landscapes selected, edited and framed to suit particular social, political and economic intentions. Far from natural, urban parks are nature reworked, a reworking which may take many forms—topographies invented, ecologies constructed, vegetation reassembled--involve diverse processes, and serve many purposes. Sydney Park in St Peters exemplifies this type of landscape transformation, that is, a situation in which an urban problem–whether social, economic, ecological, or aesthetic—is resolved by recalibrating the role of nature in the city and rearticulating its materiality. Working from the view that large urban parks are instruments of urban transformation, this paper has two aims. The first is to situate Sydney Park in the context of Sydney’s urbanization from the 1960s to the present in order to explore the influence of culture, economy and politics on the making of the park. The second is to examine the specific concepts of urban ecology and social benefit mobilized in the course of the reworking of this landscape. Sydney Park is located 4.3 km south of Sydney’s Central Station in a corridor of industrial and commercial land currently undergoing extensive regeneration. The land the park occupies was a brick quarry and brick works from the mid-1840s until the mid-1950s. For the next two decades, the site served as a tip, and closed in 1976. The following year, the NSW Planning and Environment Commission (NSW PEC) established the Inner City Open Space Acquisition Program to redress the inequitable distribution of open space in the city. Sydney Park was one of several industrial sites transformed through this program. Today, Sydney Park is the largest park owned and managed by the City of Sydney and one of its most ambitious in terms of social and ecological programs (City of Sydney 2014a, p.3). The paper begins by establishing urban political ecology (UPE) as the relevant conceptual framework for the research. This is followed by a brief history of the park, which traces shifts in concept and program through a review of plans of management, related archival data and observations of the park itself. The discussion situates the treatment of urban ecology and social benefit at Sydney Park in an urban political ecological framework. Urban Political Ecology State of Australian Cities Conference 2015 Urban political ecology is concerned with the social and political production of urban nature (Heynen, 2014, p 598; Heynen et al, 2006). In the words of Roger Keil (2003, p. 724), urban political ecology involves, ‘viewing the landscapes and urban infrastructures of cities as historical products of human- nature interactions.’ Because UPE focuses on socio-ecological change over time, in specific urban contexts (Heynen et al, 2006, p 1), it provides a lens for critical investigations of the deliberate and systematic reshaping that occurs as cities build and rebuild. A UPE perspective traces ‘the linkages among history, ecology, culture, urban morphology and economies of how cities emerge and work,’ and has the capacity to reveal changing assumptions about the role of nature in the city and the connection between these assumptions and broader socio-economic values (Pincetl, 2007, pp 87, 90). Because UPE also provides a critical lens for understanding cities as shaped by socio-spatial- political intentions and outcomes, it is frequently used to investigate issues of social and environmental justice. In simple terms, UPE provides three variables for a critical reading of urbanisation. Although these variables overlap significantly, it is possible to outline the distinct scope of each. Urban refers to the dialectic between socio-spatial processes and the human settlements they shape. UPE challenges ideas of urban areas as contained, bound and fixed entities, and instead considers urbanisation and urban regions as comprised of complex and multidimensional processes in which boundaries and dualities between urban/nature and culture/city are collapsed (Heynen et al, 2006). Urban in this sense also refers to the constant flux over time of spatial reconfiguration as a key attribute of urbanisation. The political in UPE refers to the players and dynamics of political structures, both formal and informal (Keil, 2003). Urban political ecologists focus on two main aspects of the political: conventional institutional governance structures and their associated processes and practices, and moments of disruption, disequilibrium and change (Holifield and Schuelke, 2015). Much UPE research applies actor network theory to investigate the allocation and distribution of power and the processes of decision-making amongst the actors, human or otherwise, as well as the networks that connect them. Actor network theory relies on and reflects the value of a hybrid understanding of urban ‘actors,’ an understanding which deepens our knowledge of who and what is involved in urbanisation. The focus on actors and their networks in UPE also reveals the relationship between political motivations and social outcomes, intended or not, particularly changes in spatial practices, social equity and environmental justice. Ecology in UPE refers to urban ecology, and addresses the complexity of urban habitats and systems (Keil 2003). Fundamentally, urban ecology recognises that urbanisation does not equate with destruction of nature; instead urbanisation integrates and re-forms nature—meaning the environment and its ecosystems, and produces an altered but nonetheless functioning new urban nature. In an example of the overlap of these variables, UPE scholars use the metaphor of metabolism inherent in ecological concepts to focus on the networks, processes and flows that constitute the ‘social and material production of urban nature,’ and to investigate the politics of how ‘nature’ is mobilised and transformed, and how new socio-environmental conditions are produced (Heynen et al, 2006, p 6). Applying urban political ecology to urban green spaces Scholars of UPE view urban green spaces as resulting from entwined social, political and natural processes. Because UPE scholars, such as Matthew Gandy (2003), James Evans (2007), and Jennifer Foster (2010), are alert to masked intentions of urban environmental transformations, they attend more to the social-political and economic contexts, motivations and outcomes than to the design output itself. The materiality of the artefact is frequently the backdrop to a broader investigation in which UPE is the framework for assessing critically the political intentions and social and economic outcomes of urban processes, such as restoration, conservation, etc. While this approach has value in that it reveals issues and ambiguities with what might otherwise be viewed by urban residents as benign efforts to re-nature the city, it falls short of fully investigating the design process and its products, that is the generation of specific forms, and the selection of specific materials and programs, as key aspects of the socio-political and metabolic framing of these sites. This paper extends UPE in two ways: first, quite simply, by expanding the geographical scope of UPE to the Australian context, and secondly, by situating changes in the concept, form and materiality of a specific urban park over time and in relation to its urban, social and political context. This contextualisation registers how unfolding urban ideologies were manifest in a series of interventions in Sydney Park, fundamentally and deliberately altering the ‘nature’ of the park. A UPE perspective, in State of Australian Cities Conference 2015 this case, reveals how, why and in what ways a specific parcel of urban terrain was shaped and reshaped as an instrument of advancing Sydney’s global aspirations. Sydney Park: historical overview Description Sydney Park straddles two of the three geological formations which dominate the Sydney landscape: the sand sheets and swamps of the Botany Basin and the clay rich shale of the Cumberland Plain.