Boomtown 2050 is a timely and authoritative account of the numerous questions facing Perth’s residents at the intersection of environmental affordance, urban form Boomtown 2050 is in my and public policy, and offers international audiences a view likely to become the most important planning compelling image of the use of design as a form of urban Since 70% of city document produced in infrastructure in 2050 already this city since the 1955 research. It should be required reading for students of the exists today, Boomtown 2050 Stephenson Hepburn plan. city worldwide. ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR CHARLES WALDHEIM opens up an essential debate PATRIC DE VILLIERS URBANIZMA as to how we transform rather ASSOCIATE DEAN , LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE , UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO than rebuild our cities to Richard Weller truly meet the twin pressures of understands cities, spaces population growth and climate and places. Boomtown 2050 In an era when planning is weighed down by the change. The case studies is essential reading about and base data provided in Perth and gives a “warts and prescriptivism of “new urbanism” this work boldly, some Boomtown 2050 needs to be all” summary of what and might even say bravely, tests the veracity of a full range replicated in all cities so as to who we are. This book truly allow us to have an intelligent captures this period in our of living options for Perth. The West Australian capital debate as to the future form evolution and encourages us of our cities. Business as all to appreciate ourselves is set on a trajectory for mighty growth in the first half usual is not an option! more fully for our own PROFESSOR ROB ADAMS of the 21st century...Richard Weller’s book Boomtown DIRECTOR CITY DESIGN AND URBAN ENVIRONMENT, records and for a more MELBOURNE CITY COUNCIL sustainable future. 2050 boldly canvasses options for Perth amid what will LISA SCAFFIDI LORD MAYOR, CITY OF PERTH surely be known as the century of growth. BERNARD SALT DEMOGRAPHER AND COMMENTATOR ISBN 978-1921401-21-3 ISBN 978-1921401-21-3 9 781921 401213 UWA PUBLISHING 9 781921 401213 Children playing in front of Hamersley Iron housing in Tom Price, Western Australia, 1974 [Wolfgang Sievers, courtesy National Library of Australia Wa.pic-vn 3308495-v]. JOHN GLENN: Just to my right I can see a big pattern of lights, apparently right on the coast. NASA: Roger...that is Perth and Rockingham that you are seeing. JOHN GLENN: The lights show up very well and thank everyone for turning them on. Face of the Earth.™ [ArcScience Simulations. c. 2008.] BOOMTOWN 2050 Unlike the light-footed nomad who ranged across the landscape attuned to its flux and flow, cities, because they are fixed in one place, must bring everything unto themselves. Ever since the first villages clustered around rudimentary farmland in Mesopotamian floodplains, settled people have struggled to draw sustenance from their surrounding landscape. With some food in storage, the ancient city temporarily freed itself from nature’s cycles and incubated larger numbers of people than the surrounding ecosystem would otherwise (nomadically) have sustained. Because the city then invariably exhausts its surrounding land it must, if it is to survive, spread further afield. The ever-expanding city must trade what it has in surplus for what it doesn’t. Collectively, cities thus form a network of interdependence and antagonism, a web that now covers the whole planet. In order to survive, the city has literally had to go to the ends of the earth. The city has become the world. This sketch of the problem of settlement is borne out to this day as Perth exhausts its hinterland to produce crops, some of which are exported back to sustain populations in the Middle East, the very landscapes where the first cities began.N ow that there is no more new territory from which to replenish its stocks, the world-city must, for the first time in its history, try to creatively adapt to its environmental limits. V BOOMTOWN 2050 The city of Perth in its regional landscape context. Landsat imagery provided by the ACRS at Geoscience Australia, and digitally enhanced by Landgate (Western Australian land information authority). Perth’s current population of circa 1.5 million is least 700,000 homes. More than housing, the city’s predicted to more than double by 2050. entire infrastructure will have to double. What was To accommodate this influx we need to build at built in 179 years will need to be reproduced in 40. CONTENTS Preface, by Charles Waldheim XIII 1 INTRODUCTION Richard Weller and David Hedgcock 015 2 DATABASE 047 3 LOCAL CULTURE 131 A Note on Structure and Content This book documents two years of work by a team of researchers based at The University 4 MAPPING 147 of Western Australia Landscape Architecture program, funded by the Australian Research Council. The project concerns the creation of different scenarios for the future of Perth’s urban form. Although the city of Perth is the central subject, the methods and ideas you will find in 5 METHOD 165 this book could be applied and adjusted to suit any city experiencing rapid growth. While based on empirical data, the work documented here is also speculative. It’s 6 BAU CITY 179 what is called research by design: when creative processes are used in tandem with more conventional research practices. The product is a form of ‘landscape urbanism’, an emerging international school of thought that argues for shaping cities with greater regard 7 THE CUTTING EDGE 201 for their landscape conditions. Landscape urbanism suggests a form of urbanity that respects the constraints of the landscape’s ecology but also seeks out opportunities for 8 BAU+ 237 development, which draws inspiration from that landscape. Wungong Urban Water: An innovative model, by Brett Wood Gush 239 The book’s structure and content follows the process of the research. We begin by A suburb ‘as if the landscape really mattered?’, by Richard Weller 252 situating Perth in its historical context then survey its physical and cultural conditions. We then map Perth’s landscape systems so as to find any constraints and opportunities for growth. These constraints and opportunities in turn help define and generate a range 9 NEW SCENARIOS 257 of scenarios for the large-scale development of the city into the future. These scenarios embody Australian Bureau of Statistics’ projections that Perth’s population will at least 10 HORIZONTAL SCENARIOS 261 double in the next four decades. The scenarios objectively manifest this projection POD City 265 in horizontal and vertical forms of urban growth. The scenarios are all set against the Food City 275 benchmark of the status quo: what is referred to in the book as Business as Usual. The Car Free City 291 practice of Business as Usual is documented by a visual essay, The Cutting Edge. When Seachange City 297 discussing Business as Usual we reflect on the difficulties of innovation at the level of Treechange City 305 conventional development by visiting two exemplary projects: one in far-flung suburbia, Wungong Urban Water; and the second in the city centre, the New Perth Waterfront. As a 11 VERTICAL SCENARIOS 309 complement to the otherwise very large-scale scenarios, toward the end of the book we Sky City 341 also zoom in to look at housing and offer some examples of innovative work being done Perth’s New Waterfront 355 by Perth’s best architects. River City 361 While this research process can be traced linearly through the book, it is not the only The Path of Density, by Anthony Duckworth-Smith 371 route one can take. The book is intended as a resource, something that can be dipped Surf City 375 into at different points and at different times by anyone interested or directly involved in making the city. 12 DIVERCITY 389 13 DREAM HOMES 397 Dream Homes, by Dale Alcock 399 Hyper housing, by Simon Anderson 403 Think Brick, by iredale pedersen hook 419 Prix d’Amour, by Jon Tarry and Darryn Ansted 429 Acknowledgements 443 Media & Publications 445 X Contributors 447 BOOMTOWN 2050 Index 449 PREFACE News from Nowhere Perth first registered in international media in 1962 by turning on its lights to illuminate the South-Western coast of Australia for astronaut John Glenn orbiting the earth in Friendship 7. As chronicled in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, the luminous outline of Perth’s growing urban bounds afforded the astronaut a moment of terrestrial orientation during an otherwise disorienting series of short days and nights in orbit. With the publication of Boomtown 2050, the outline of Perth’s urban agglomeration once again affords international audiences a momentary sense of self-recognition amid the disorientation and dross of contemporary urbanisation. Regardless of its distance from the conditions for urbanisation in other parts of the globe, Perth, as described here, is both legible to local readers while illuminating the conditions for urban form internationally. Perth’s singularity and remoteness make it an unlikely indicator of tendencies and trends evident elsewhere. Perth is closer to the urban populations of Indonesia and Malaysia than to the eastern Australian metropolises of Sydney or Melbourne. Even the city’s own website describes Perth, with no small pride, as the most remote urban centre in the world. Notwithstanding the contradictions of such a depiction, Perth has consciously constructed an image of itself as a city at the edge of the urbanised world, at once remote from and insulated from the natural and cultural references representing ersatz urban form in the western world. Self-consciously constructed distance aside, the Perth carefully described in this publication by Richard Weller and his colleagues at the University of Western Australia emerges as an uncannily reliable reflection of urban conditions internationally.