By Jane Dargaville
Despite the City of Sydney's own predictions its Green Square renewal project was a transport fiasco waiting to happen, it still holds high hopes for the project.
The Green Square project in Sydney aims to reinvigorate a cluster of the city’s oldest suburbs –including Zetland, Beaconsfield, Alexandria, Waterloo and Rosebery – and covers an area of 292 hectares in the city’s inner-south.
The City of Sydney’s vision is “to transform Green Square into an attractive, vibrant and sustainable urban place, with a diverse mix of housing, open spaces, offices, shops and facilities that will act as a focal point to the wider South Sydney area”.
At the heart of the development is the Green Square Town Centre, which is spruiked as a future vital and thriving commercial, retail, cultural and entertainment hub. Green Square is strategically located between Sydney’s CBD and Australia’s busiest international airport and shipping port, at Mascot and Botany Bay respectively.
After colonial settlement, the area was used as farmland before it evolved into the city’s main industrial area and, later, some parts were developed as housing for workers.
From the 1950s, manufacturing in the area began to decline and the vacant brownfield land that became a feature of the landscape was for many years considered to be of limited use.
With few public spaces or community facilities, inadequate roads and infrastructure, the area became degraded and decrepit.
With urban renewal, however, the locality is predicted to become a hub of economic and employment growth over the next half century.
Projections are that, by 2031, the area will have a residential population of more than 44,000 people and a workforce of 22000.
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Parts of Waterloo and Zetland are already in perpetual shadowland due to poorly designed apartment buildings that jut up into the air and are crammed ever so tightly together as to act like a shadow wall to sunlight. Sydney City Council and the NSW State Government are promising more, much more of the hideous same. Why we cannot have sensitively designed buildings that maximise sunlight and open space is not for any other reason than money, that is, money for unscrupulous developers. Moreover, the infrastructure cracks in the Green Square proposal are enormous and difficult to fix. For one, the telephone exchanges at Redfern and Kensington were never designed to deliver the anticipated huge telecommunications demand that Green Square will invoke. Telcos currently describe Waterloo as being on the fringes of already saturated networks and subject to appallingly slow net speeds. For another, Clover Moore’s vision of a light rail from Green Square to Central Station overlays fancy onto fact. Light rail, or ‘trams’ as they are called in Melbourne, are notoriously slow and inefficient when sharing the roads with cars, buses, etc. The only serious people mover would be a dedicated, underground metro. I know, apartment buildings that let in the sunlight, lots of open spaces and an extensive metro. I am talking about Barcelona, right, not Sydney?