http://usj.sagepub.com/ Urban Studies http://usj.sagepub.com/content/46/12/2595 The online version of this article can be found at: DOI: 10.1177/0042098009344229 2009 46: 2595 Urban Stud Kim Dovey, Ian Woodcock and Stephen Wood A Test of Character: Regulating Place-identity in Inner-city Melbourne Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of: Urban Studies Journal Foundation can be found at: Urban Studies Additional services and information for http://usj.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Email Alerts: http://usj.sagepub.com/subscriptions Subscriptions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Permissions: http://usj.sagepub.com/content/46/12/2595.refs.html Citations: What is This? - Oct 16, 2009 Version of Record >> at FUND COOR DE APRFO PESSL NIVE on June 17, 2013 usj.sagepub.com Downloaded from
Transcript
http://usj.sagepub.com/Urban Studies
http://usj.sagepub.com/content/46/12/2595The online version of this article can be found at:
DOI: 10.1177/0042098009344229
2009 46: 2595Urban StudKim Dovey, Ian Woodcock and Stephen Wood
A Test of Character: Regulating Place-identity in Inner-city Melbourne
Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com
On behalf of:
Urban Studies Journal Foundation
can be found at:Urban StudiesAdditional services and information for
meets powerful resident resistance to change, often in the name of ‘neighbourhood char-acter’. This conundrum is nowhere more apparent than in Melbourne where the state government’s planning system seeks both to densify urban development and to protect existing ‘character’. The metropolitan strategy aims to contain the city’s outward expansion by identifying a growth boundary and by con-centrating development in transit-oriented
A Test of Character: Regulating Place-identity in Inner-city MelbourneKim Dovey, Ian Woodcock and Stephen Wood
[Paper first received, August 2008; in final form, May 2009]
Abstract
During the 1990s, urban planning in Melbourne changed from prescriptive regulation to a place-based performance framework with a focus on existing or desired ‘urban character’. This paper is a case study of a contentious urban project in the inner-Melbourne suburb of Fitzroy: a highly valued place characterised as an irregular and transgressive mix of differences: between building types, functions, forms, heights and people. Contrasting conceptions, experiences and constructions of ‘character’ are explored from the viewpoints of residents, architect/developer and the state. To what degree does the regulation of ‘character’ open or close the city to creative innovation? Can it become camoufl age for creative destruction? How to regulate for irregularity? The paper concludes with a discussion of theories of place (Massey vs Heidegger) and the prospects of concepts such as habitus (Bourdieu) and assemblage (Deleuze) for the interpretation of a progressive sense of place.
Introduction
Over recent decades, metropolitan planning in Australian cities has been dominated by a major conundrum. On the one hand, legis-lators argue that there are economic, social and environmental imperatives for higher density development, urban consolidation and compact city policies. On the other hand, implementation of these policies invariably
Kim Dovey and Ian Woodcock are in the Department of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, 3010, Australia. E-mails: [email protected] and [email protected].
Stephen Wood is in the School of Behavioural and Cognitive and Social Sciences, University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales, 2351, Australia. E-mail: [email protected].
46(12) 2595–2615, November 2009
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‘activity centres’. Meanwhile, Melbourne’s residential design code, ResCode, demands that ‘neighbourhood character’ be the pri-mary criterion for assessing residential de-velopment applications in established urban areas. On the one hand, there is a densifi ca-tion strategy destined to alter the ‘character’ of numerous areas; on the other, is a design code to ‘respect’ and ‘protect’ existing ‘character’. Tensions between these policies are com-pounded by the notorious diffi culties in pro-viding clear defi nitions of ‘character’. When residents seek to protect ‘neighbourhood character’, ‘urban character’ or just ‘character’, what is ‘it’ they are working to defend?
In 2002, the inner-city council of Yarra received plans for a proposal which would become a test case for the use of ‘character’ as
a planning tool, teasing out some of the com-plex meanings of the term and the ways it can be mobilised in urban politics. This innovative housing project, known as NKYA, was proposed for a former industrial site in Fitzroy—a gentrifying district with a mix of functions, building types and heights (Figure 1). The architect/developer, Ivan Rijavec, argued that the project was con-sistent with Fitzroy’s prevailing ‘character’ which he labelled ‘urban jazz’—inventive, transgressive, multicultural and free-form; unconstrained by neo-colonial ideology or blanket height limits. Residents were not entertained and organised a resistance cam-paign with a website called ‘urban joke’ where the project was proclaimed as “the death of the character of Fitzroy!”. They dubbed the
Figure 1. The ‘Cheesegrater’: advertising image
Source : Rijavec Architects.
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project the ‘Cheesegrater’—it cheesed them off; it grated on their nerves. This proposal became the subject of a major dispute in the planning tribunal VCAT (Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal) where it was even-tually approved with glowing testimonials on its architectural and urban quality from expert witnesses.1 From this view, ‘urban jazz’ was a marketing slogan and a cover for market-led development. This case study was chosen as a high-profi le and critical test case (Flyvbjerg 2004); there is no suggestion that this is the only conception of urban character.2
In what follows, we fi rst provide an outline history of ‘character-based’ planning, before sketching the urban morphology and con-text for the case study. We then consider how Fitzroy was characterised in interviews with those who were active in resistance to this project. The concept of ‘urban jazz’ is then dis-cussed, along with the important role played by boundaries and heights in this story. After considering parallels and differences be-tween interviewee understandings of Fitzroy’s character and the ‘urban jazz’ idea, the paper concludes by linking this discussion to some pertinent theoretical frameworks including those of Harvey, Massey, Heidegger, Bourdieu and Deleuze.
Legislating Character
The discourse of ‘character’ fi rst came to prom-inence in Australia during the debates on streetscape conservation in the 1980s, a period marked by a proliferation of academic liter-ature about ‘place’.3 However, the regulation of ‘character’ emerged in the planning liter-ature in the 1990s without theoretical justifi -cation. In its earliest incarnations, ‘character’ was mixed with ‘heritage’. At a federal level, the 1992 Australian Model Code for Residential Development included a section entitled ‘Urban Character and Heritage’ which argued that character
is defined by a host of factors: landform, landscape, streetscape, site layout, built form and heritage are some of the most important. Together these factors affect our perception and understanding of a place (Commonwealth of Australia, 1992, p. 2.1).
Note how heritage is separate in the title and becomes a subset in the text. In 1992, a radically market-led political regime (Liberal Party) took control at state level. Urban regu-lation was seen by the state as a brake on market-led development; the discourse of ‘planning’ and ‘regulation’ was replaced with that of ‘facilitation’, ‘flexibility’ and ‘per-formance’ wherein all planning controls became ‘guidelines’ (Dovey 2005, p. 38). A de-regulation of local government planning resulted in vehement residential opposition to ‘inappropriate’ development (Lewis, 1999). New developments were described by resi-dents as ‘out of character’ or in violation of the urban or neighbourhood ‘character’. The defi nition of ‘character’ was never clarifi ed but was, at least in part, circular—this place has ‘character’ because residents say it has and the ‘character’ is defi ned by what they refer to. At this time, character was defi ned by the state government as a composite of the ‘form’ and the ‘feel’ of a place
On the one hand … character is the inter-relationship of various aspects of built form, topography, vegetation, density, sub-division pattern and activity … On the other hand, char-acter is also used to refer to the ‘feel’ of an area … (Victorian Government, 1994, p. 27).
During the 1990s, requirements to respect the existing local character were raised to the highest priority in assessing new residential development proposals in Melbourne. How-ever, the task of characterising specifi c places was left to local government authorities. Character studies were commissioned and, by the turn of the century, most of the metropol-itan area had had its character assessed. Such studies fulfi l bureaucratic requirements to
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label and classify neighbourhoods accord-ing to character type; and they fulfi l resident demands offi cially to valorise and protect the character of their neighbourhood. However, they do not engage with the experiences of residents and the ways these relate to the physical characteristics of the urban fabric. If the LGA decided that a proposal was out of character, the matter could be appealed to the state’s legal tribunal known as VCAT; the lawyers were to become the fi nal arbiters of ‘character’.4 In 1999, a middle-class backlash to unregulated suburban development played a key role in forcing a change to a centrist (Labor Party) government; the fl exibility of site-by-site planning, however, remained in place.
The methodology deployed for this paper was to approach the concept of character from three directions with the aim of understand-ing it as experience, as discourse and as spatial form. Interviews with residents were directed at understanding character as an experiential phenomenon within a framework of the phe-nomenology of place (Relph, 1976; Casey, 1997). A second approach was to study the urban fabric, interviews and planning codes as forms of socially constructed discourses and subjectivities to be analysed (Fairclough, 1995; Rose, 2001). A third approach involved a study of formal spatial structure and urban morphology wherein the urban fabric is seen as a network or assemblage of spatially structured and ordered forms which in turn structure spatial experience and social en-counter. Such an approach incorporates the study of urban typology, density and street-life (Bentley et al., 1985; Hillier, 1996; Habraken, 1998). The study draws in a philo-sophical sense from a broader range of social theory (Lefebvre, 1991; Giddens, 1991; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Bourdieu, 1977, 2000) and is premised on the view that place research requires a multiplicitous meth-odology (Dovey, 2008).
Fitzroy
Fitzroy is an inner-city suburb housing a mix of residential, retail, light industrial and cultural uses within walking distance of the central city. It is Melbourne’s oldest suburb and was initially sub-divided in 1839 when demand for labour without public transport produced a cheek-by-jowl mix of factories with row-housing and a reputation for pov-erty and crime. The 1950s saw an infl ux of post-war migrants from southern Europe. In the 1960s, several entire blocks were replaced with high-rise public housing; a residents association was formed in 1969 primarily to resist further high-rise housing. From the 1970s, Fitzroy saw a growing component of student and artistic bohemian life which produced an aura of authenticity that at-tracted a sustained wave of gentrifi cation from the 1980s onwards. Row-houses were re-novated and industrial buildings converted to residential use. House prices rose to almost twice the metropolitan median as the popu-lation density fell. The ethnic mix changed as post-war migrants moved out of the worker housing and new migrants of Indo-Chinese, Middle Eastern and lately African ethnicity moved into the public housing.
The study area for analysis here comprises a 25-hectare district surrounding the subject site (Figure 2). The area has busy streets on all sides. Brunswick Street to the west is a small-grain mix of cafés, bars, restaurants and specialty stores; the vitality and diversity of streetlife here are a city-wide and tourist at-traction. The northern and southern edges are both heavily trafficked arterial roads. Our focus will fall mainly on the residential and industrial urban fabric on the interior of the study area. Figure 3 is a series of layered maps showing street network, zoning, building footprints, entry types, heights and graffi ti within the study area. There are some significant differences in lot-size, height,
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entry interface, permeability and functional mix between the (traditionally residential) northern and (traditionally industrial) south-ern sections. Figure 4 shows a series of typical streetscapes within the study area ranging from north to south. The older residential interface is generally mediated by small front gardens (Figures 3D, 4A–B) while the con-verted industrial and new residential build-ings generally have entrances directly on the street (Figures 3D, 4C–D), often coupled with garage doors and blank walls. Indus-trial buildings in the northern section and row-housing to the south serve to blur this division and the transformation of most warehouses and factories into apartments
has largely eliminated the functional divide. Many blocks, particularly within the south-ern section, contain new residential infi ll in various contemporary styles. The zoning code divides the area into ‘residential’ to the north and ‘mixed-use’ to the south (Figure 3B).
The commissioned urban character study claims that Fitzroy is “notable for the con-sistency of its Victorian streetscapes” (City of Yarra, 1997); however, these maps suggest that this is an overgeneralisation. In the desire to establish character areas and to fi nd in character something consistent and pure, certain characteristics of the city (low-rise Victorian) have been privileged while others (taller industrial, contemporary) are ignored.
Figure 2. Fitzroy and study area
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The study identifi ed the prevailing character as predominantly 1–2 storeys with some buildings up to 15 metres in height. Build-ings over 15 metres in height, particularly the public housing but even the industrial heri-tage, were not seen as part of the ‘character’. Over 40 buildings in the study area are three storeys or more and the tallest is 33 metres (Figure 3E). The taller public housing is about 600 metres away.
The Resident Experience
Resident understandings of ‘character’ as they informed this debate have been explored through interviews with those who were active in the residents’ association and in resistance to the NKYA project.5 All quotes not otherwise attributed are from interviews with residents. In general terms, such resident defi nitions of urban or neighbourhood ‘character’ have a good deal in common with the ‘feel plus form’ defi nition that meshes the tangible with the intangible, combining elements of Fitzroy’s built form with its social aspects
[Urban character is] the feel of a place, what it represents to you; the people, the buildings, the things that happen there are all part of the urban character.
Common to all interviews is the idea that Fitzroy is diverse: a mixture of buildings (type, lot-size, style, age, height), functions (retail, residential, industrial), practices (artworks, graffi ti, streetlife) and people (appearance, age, household type, sexuality, social class)
It’s a mixture. This block is a mixture of very old cottages and these warehouses, and there are warehouses and cottages in lots of blocks, they have to co-exist.
Fitzroy’s all different … my house is single-fronted, all the houses around me are like that, but two blocks over they look completely different, I don’t think it detracts from the area at all.
While interviewees are generally approving of such juxtapositions, note that difference is approved at a distance: “two blocks over”. There is a widespread view that the conversion of industrial buildings to residential use has been done in a way that generally respects both the heritage and ‘feel’ of the character
I think it’s fascinating to see the different types of warehouses and how creative people are, and generally they keep in well with the look or feel of the suburb.
It’s not violating an industrial character to make it into a 21st century dwelling, that’s adding a layer.
There is, however, an ambivalent attitude to the taller factories which are seen as an important component of the mix, but of a height that is not acceptable in new developments
[Fitzroy is] predominantly 2–3 storeys and I think that’s really important to its urban character, the scale … I think scale is more im-portant than anything … we have some large buildings, we have five or six, but they’re landmark buildings, they’re not the norm.
The mixture of built forms is linked to the historical functional mix of worker housing with industry. While in many parts of Fitzroy gentrifi cation has replaced light industrial with residential land uses, there are pockets where the mixture persists and some residents see this as part of the character
You can live next to a business that runs 24 hours a day and you can have forklifts that operate at 3 and 4 in the morning and you sort of accept it
In social terms, interviewees characterise Fitzroy as a place of overlapping networks of students, artists, bohemians, academics, professionals, left-wingers, greens, junkies, old-timers, migrants, public housing tenants and refugees. This is not seen as a stable or
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necessarily harmonious mixture, but as having a somewhat seedy, edgy and transgressive character
[Fitzroy] is different, it is … it has that ‘edge’ that people are interesting, that it has a good atmosphere. It has a sort of a seedy side, a sort of an underbelly that is in a way a little bit scary, but it also has a community, it has char-acter and it has depth.
[Fitzroy] always has been a breeding-ground for progressive politics … a hive of coffee shops is consistent with a hive of political activists and fringe politics sits well with fringe music.
This idea of a ‘breeding-ground’ or ‘hive’ links the urban morphology to the political and social mix. The term ‘consistent’ is used here in a different way than in the offi cial character study; not as harmony between forms, but more the ‘thick’ consistency of connectivity between different fringe networks. The social diversity is generally portrayed positively with a relaxed tolerance of difference and a sense of liberation from conformity
You don’t get the sense that people really care what you look like or what you say or how you act … there are so many different sorts of people and it wouldn’t matter who you were you’d fi t in there … it’s different, it’s probably
things that I would like to be, but probably aren’t.
Note the ambivalence in this latter passage as Fitzroy is defi ned as having a character this resident ‘fi ts in’ to, but doesn’t quite embody. New residents become spectators in their own neighbourhood where those who con-tribute such differences—often those who are seen really to ‘belong’—are displaced.
The seedy, transgressive and edgy character has become part of the way in which Fitzroy now markets itself. Tourists can buy postcards depicting multilayered posters peeling from walls and some buildings on Brunswick Street have been renovated in ‘derelict’ style. There is plenty of graffi ti within the study area, especially on the blank frontages of in-dustrial buildings and newer infi ll housing (Figure 5). The row-houses in the northern section with gardens and low fences are rela-tively free of graffi ti (Figure 3F). Attitudes to graffi ti refl ect the ambivalent desire to identify with Fitzroy’s character while maintaining distance
I admit that when I see it on my own wall here, you know I have a fl itter of irritation. If my whole wall got painted like that, I would [care] … but I really don’t care … No, I don’t mind the graffi ti. I like the graffi ti.
Figure 5. Laneway graffi ti
Photo : Kim Dovey.
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Fitzroy is seen by most interviewees to be an open community with a strong sense of social capital. Some longer-term residents describe the neighbourhood as a ‘village’, a walkable spatial network with a high density of locals in a fairly intimate scale
Everyone smiles whenever you walk past them on the street or says, you know, ‘hi’, while you’re out walking your dog or you’re out walking in the morning … it’s a nice feeling.
As with the general definitions of urban character, this social capital is described as a ‘feel’ or ‘feeling’. It is linked by some residents to the row-housing type (Figure 4A–B) where small front gardens and porches become sites for social interaction. This sense of com-munity and social capital is seen as under threat from new building types
I think there’s a big difference between sort of row-living and stacked-living … you know what’s going on with all your neighbours in a row, you hear them you smell them.
The social capital is also linked to a history of struggles against development—mass demo-litions in the 1960s, freeway construction in the 1970s, and a threatened swimming pool closure the 1990s. The ‘Cheesegrater’ or NKYA is just the most recent round.
Urban Jazz
The NKYA proposal required the demolition of a range of poor quality industrial build-ings to construct a cluster of attached buildings ranging from three to eight storeys. The de-velopment was designed as four connected buildings with separate entries and different architectural treatments, accommodating 152 dwellings and two corner cafés. The de-sign included a mix of housing types with a concern to avoid a singular form and to create different frontages to each street. Entrances formed a row-house rhythm, avoiding blank
walls and carpark frontages. The height peaked at 26 metres on the north-east corner where the building was to be surmounted by a folded section of lofts (Figure 6). The formal image that captured most attention was a six-storey section (19 metres high) on the south-west corner—a cluster of vertical tapering cylinders with a grid of small windows that was soon labelled by residents as the ‘cheesegrater’. These small windows did not relate directly to fl oor levels and, together with the tapered cylindrical forms, created the illusion of a taller building (Figure 1).
The proposal was submitted in 2002 dur-ing a period of intense disputation over planning issues in Melbourne and where major projects were generally decided by the VCAT tribunal. Alert to the policy framework wherein urban character would be a key issue, the architect/developer Ivan Rijavec undertook and submitted an extensive urban character study that contested the offi cial study outlined earlier. He suggested that urban character had been misconstrued as “what lobby groups want to see more of rather than what is actually there”. Using the same ‘character area’ of broader Fitzroy used by the offi cial character study, he proposed that Fitzroy’s character be described as ‘urban jazz’
South Fitzroy’s urban topography is typi-fi ed by unregulated planning practices and the urban character consequently appears free-spirited, Jazz-like … a ‘riff’ of terraces up against a corner pub, warehouses over the road, up and down, in and out, a surprise at every turn (Rijavec 2002, p. 3).
In this conception, ‘urban jazz’ had two loosely defi ned threads. One was the “up and down, in and out” structure of a variegated and improvised melody line applied to urban morphology. The second thread identifi ed jazz as an aesthetic current that cuts across the norm, the unleashing of a “free-spirited”
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built form. Jazz was seen as ‘low-brow’ taste cutting across mainstream taste
South Fitzroy could be described as a ‘free-style’ urbanism or an ‘architectural multi-culturalism’ which assimilates a variety of scales and architectural types in a diverse urban landscape. This is a ‘new world’ typo-graphy, spirited, un-authoritarian, distinctly Australian (Rijavec 2002, p. 4).
Rijavec suggests that the mis-perception of character in the offi cial discourse parallels a neo-colonial history of viewing Australian landscape through Eurocentric eyes. From this view, the regulation of built form through “arbitrary height limits” is a form of cultural cringe that causes “pancake solutions” where developers push the envelope to a uniform height; it is these developments “which are
most out of place in the variegated urban typography of South Fitzroy” (Rijavec, 2002, p. 3). This argument was presented fi rst in the planning application and later at the plan-ning tribunal; a large number of photographs were used to support the contention that dif-ference rather than uniformity characterises the area. It showed that anyone wanting to preserve the existing urban character of South Fitzroy would support differences of scale and typology; and that anyone want-ing uniformity across this area would be supporting a ‘desired’ rather than an ‘existing’ character.
Heights and Boundaries
This project generated interplay between two disputes—one over vertical extensions of height and another over the horizontal
Figure 6. The NKYA Project in context: the model as advertised
Photo : Kim Dovey.
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boundaries of the character zone. Most of the discussion was about height, as one resi-dent put it
It will change the character of the street as it is now, it’s just a huge monolith sticking up … This will make everything else look very small.
Yet how to define “everything else”? As a performance-based measure, the regulation of ‘character’ requires a judgement of how a development proposal will ‘perform’ within its urban ‘context’— within what boundaries does this performance take ‘place’, especially when the character is not defi ned by anyone as an enclosed or bounded experience? During the debate, the ‘context’ became de-fi ned by four main boundaries as outlined in Figure 7. The original urban character study suggested that nearly all of Fitzroy (and >100 hectares) was a single character area; this is also the area drawn upon for the ‘urban jazz’ argument. However, when the project was fi rst proposed, the local council determined the area of concern to be a square of 9 hectares within about 100 metres of the site. When resistance erupted, the residents’ association defi ned the neighbourhood as a larger 25-hectare precinct bounded by main roads (our study area). The fi nal judgement in the planning tribunal (VCAT) inscribed a new 13-hectare district incorporating only the southern half of this area.
What is at stake in this inscription of boundaries is the way in which relative and maximum heights may be determined. What portion of Fitzroy should set the precedent for this site? Is it the ‘street’ as presumed in the earlier quote or the larger Fitzroy as used by the commissioned character study and by Rijavec? The boundaries of the ‘character’ area are key to its defi nition and to its use in the politics of urban development. The territory defi ned by residents does not coincide with either the range of objectors (some formal objections came from outside this area) nor their arguments that height precedents for the
Figure 7. Urban character areas
NKYA site are established by buildings with-in the smallest character zone. In the smallest precinct, the tallest building (the former MacRobertson factory on the opposite corner) has a 17-metre peak (see Figures 3E and 7). The VCAT judgement invoked a new precinct which incorporated a 33-metre building over 200 metres to the east of the site (see Figures 3E and 7). The height of the proposed building was shown to have a precedent in the broad urban context but not within the local streetscape.
Interviewees were united in their concern for height limits yet divided on what this should be. Some would like to see a 2–3-storey blanket height limit on new development.
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Many also realise the impossibility and unsustainability of this and argue for a 4–5-storey limit, with peaks no higher than the neighbouring MacRobertson building
[It should be] a similar height to across the road, to MacRob. Three storeys would have been okay, but eight, no.
Yet in the architect/developer’s view
MacRobertsons [diagonally opposite] is about 7 [storeys] 7 plus … if you look at equivalent storeys.
These contrasting views show the danger of using a discourse of ‘storeys’, the height of which varies between industrial and resi-dential buildings. The reality is that the MacRobertson building peaks at 17 metres (after a setback) and the NKYA project was to peak at 26 metres (on the street façade). The planning tribunal largely accepted Rijavec’s conception of the urban character, that new juxtapositions of height are consist-ent with the existing character. They argued this by drawing a new character zone that incorporates an existing 33-metre building over 200 metres away and not visible from the site.
If an existing character is to be the basis for planning regulation and the existing fabric is characterised by variegated heights, then the state is faced with enforcing some form of ‘regulated irregularity’ of heights. While height limits are often varied for reasons of amenity, heritage or landmark sites, it is diffi cult to require a particular site to remain low-rise because neighbouring sites are taller and the variegation must be preserved. No landowner wants their site to be a shady ‘low note’ in the urban jazz. Consistent application of the rule of law suggests that, if 26 metres is permitted on one block, then this sets a precedent. What will stop the entire neigh-bourhood being redeveloped to that height, effecting a loss of variegation? This issue was addressed by Rijavec in interview
In our case, it won’t happen … because the adjoining properties are on much smaller allotments.
Thus, height variegations are seen to be pro-tected not by planning regulation, but by the inertia embodied in the smaller lot-size of 19th-century development and their heritage controls. If further site amalgamations do occur, then one can imagine the future residents of NKYA mobilising to stop similar developments and protect their views down onto this mixed low-rise neighbourhood.
Jazz Grates
There are important parallels and differences between Rijavec’s idea of urban jazz and interviewees’ experience of Fitzroy’s character as formal, functional and social diversity. In both views, the character of Fitzroy is seen as an edgy ‘mix’, a contested place character-ised by difference and change rather than uniformity or stability. Its identity is seen to be forged from on-going juxtapositions and oppositions to mainstream conformity; it is home to a range of people and activities that are often identifi ed with the ideal of the ‘creative city’, a community unifi ed in the minds of its proponents by an ethic of toler-ance (Florida, 2005).
One key difference lies in the distinction between the horizontal diversity of form produced by small lot-sizes and the vertical diversity of varied heights. While Rijavec sees both as important, the design proposal privileges vertical differences of height over horizontal differences—variations on differ-ent street façades do not disguise the fact of a large single development on a consolidated site. Most interviewees, by contrast, tend to privilege horizontal differences between building styles, functions and people. While recognising existing height differentials, they see the taller buildings as landmarks of industrial heritage and want no more of them.
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A further difference stems from Rijavec’s propensity to emphasise Fitzroy’s formal character and interviewee tendencies to high-light Fitzroy’s social character. Rijavec privi-leges an architectural edginess; character is a form of urban drama or surprise where friction and abrasiveness enhance the drama. Interviewees tend to privilege the social edgi-ness and tolerance for difference, judging built form according to how well it sustains or erodes the social character. This is refl ected in the distinction in scope of urban character areas—highly localised for residents versus up to 100 hectares for Rijavec. Yet Rijavec’s urban character study was also based in a phenomenology of eye-level photography of immediate streetscapes
What I love doing is just opening any page and just pointing; because you don’t have to say anything, the picture tells the story (Rijavec: interview).
Streetscape perspectives of the proposed development in context were, however, not-able for their absence.
Part of what interviewees fear is the dom-inance not only of tall buildings but of those who enter and leave via the garage door, more comfortable looking down on Fitzroy than living in it, who want to clean up the graffi ti and remnants of transgression. The resistance is primarily from the gentrifi ers who are paradoxically defending Fitzroy against more of themselves. Many of those who opposed the new development lived in up-market apartments and acknowledged that “it would be inhabited by people just like us”. Yet they also saw themselves as defending Fitzroy against the wrong kind of gentrifi er
Some of them are positively regressive, they want their million-dollar apartment and you know: ‘Leave me alone, and if I want to be self-ish and destroy everyone else’s urban amenity, then, bad luck, pal, you know, that’s my right’.
While residents value change, they experience urban character in relatively static terms
evolving only through creative small additions. Rijavec’s conception of urban character is more dynamic, always in a process of creation
Regulations, whatever they are, should allow for a growth that continues that experiment of what urbanism is about rather than caps it and regulates it in relation to something that happened before, doing that presumes that we can never improve (Rijavec: interview).
This desire to produce new forms of urban creativity is consistent with the Fitzroy char-acter of transgression and edginess. However, Rijavec’s conception of urban jazz was gen-erally seen by interviewees as a rhetorical cover for a sharp increase in height, bulk and density along with a diminution of hori-zontal diversity.
The labels given to this project by the resi-dents and developers—the ‘cheesegrater’ and ‘urban jazz’ respectively—were each regarded by the other as forms of marketing spin. The six-storey extruded ‘cheesegrater’ form with its accentuated verticality (Figure 1) became the iconic image in the mass media where it was frequently described as an ‘eight-storey tower’. Yet the taller folded section on the north-east corner (Figure 6) defi ed an easy iconography; it was variously referred to by residents as a ‘spaceship’, an ‘upturned bathtub’ and an army ‘tank’. The iconic image of the ‘cheesegrater’ became the hook for public debate and made it appear that residents were opposing the project on aes-thetic grounds when their key concerns lay with bulk and height. The transgressive aesthetic of ‘urban jazz’ played well in the planning tribunal where a string of expert wit-nesses testifi ed to its innovative qualities—arguments that were implicitly used to justify approval of its height. An architecture that grates against mainstream taste has long been a measure of its avant-garde credentials. And in Fitzroy, as we have seen, a project that ‘grates’ can also be considered consistent with the idea of character—just as the industrial uses once grated against the residential, these
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renovated factories grate against the low-rise housing and the graffiti grate against the gentrifi ed social order. So how was the ‘cheesegrater’ any different?
One line of thought is to pursue the analogy of ‘urban jazz’ into the language of musical notation. If a streetscape is construed as a series of jazz riffs, then perhaps buildings can be seen as notes (the ‘notable’ building) with a certain pitch (height) and duration (lot-size). The ‘tone of the neighbourhood’ has a similar meaning to ‘urban character’ and suggests consistency. The musical ‘key’ is an arbitrary framework or semantic fi eld within which notes, melodies and rhythms intersect; a tune can be played in a different key, yet all performers generally remain in one key for the performance to work. The key also establishes a ‘home base’ (the tonic note and chord) within this framework to which the music returns; the return (the tonic note, rhythm, rhyme, refrain) will sound similar in a different key. The key is the framework of power that establishes certain fl exible rules and there is a parallel with an urban design framework, a context within which different buildings establish harmony and discord. Jazz is a musical form that encourages impro-visation and a stretching of the rules. It is experimental, low-brow and has often been linked to political subversion, perhaps be-cause people can talk under it. The idea of urban jazz that was used to legitimate the project was inspired by this creative rule-breaking and juxtaposition of differences. Yet from the interviewees’ perspective, the shift of height was seen to change the tone of the neighbourhood—jazz in a new key.
Rijavec’s conception of urban character situ-ates it as part of a narrative of urban develop-ment that proceeds through a series of layers
If you look at the way the suburb developed … there were certain economic and creative im-petuses that established a kind of a typology which was then overrun by the next one and then overrun by the next one and overrun by
the next one and so it’s a very dense, layered urban topography (Rijavec: interview).
This quote suggests that the source of renewal of urban character lies in these “economic and creative impetuses” that establish a new typology and give the place a fresh identity. The earlier layers are seen to be “overrun” yet also remain as remnants within a layered urban fabric. In this sense the proposal can be argued to move the neighbourhood into a new key.
The planning process provided plenty of spectacle for the mass media and a feast of legal and consulting fees. There is widespread concern among interviewees that when ‘char-acter’ was deployed as a legal term, it became something else which ironically enabled the transgression of character
Urban character is problematic as a subject matter that is designed to inform planning decisions … a well-qualified practitioner can defi ne it as being a jigsaw of … all things dissimilar … and therefore I’m going to put up something entirely dissimilar … and it’s not out of ‘character’ … all [character] is, is a vehicle by which someone can say, ‘Oh, I like it’ or ‘I don’t like it’.
Despite winning the case, the architect/developer is also caustic about the planning process
It’s a ludicrous system because the govern-ment, by shirking its responsibility, it sets up a framework for a fi ght and then the people who pay for the fi ght are those people who live there and those people who are trying to do a development there … it might be a politically expedient system because everyone vents themselves, they feel there is this idea that justice is being done (Rijavec: interview).
In this ‘flexible’ and ‘performance-based’ planning system, confl ict is all but guaranteed by a practice of developers making ambit claims which local authorities reject. These proposals are then appealed to the planning
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tribunal VCAT where a compromise is gen-erally approved. In this case, the initial pro-posal for 128 apartments was expanded to 152 apartments before it went to VCAT; the architect/developer concedes that the ap-proved project was an ambit claim
VCAT approved everything we did … In most cases … you go in with scheme A and you come out with, you know, ‘Can you drop a storey here and do this, that and the other thing’ (Rijavec: interview).
Slippery Characters
The discourse on urban regulation we have seen here is partly a product of different desires: desires of residents to conserve valued neighbourhoods and to limit change; desires of architects to add new character to the city and of developers to build a taller building at a higher profi t; market desires for a com-manding view; and those of strategic planners and the state for higher density development. The initial eagerness of residents to put this test of ‘character’ at the centre of the planning process was matched by the eagerness of developers to engage in site-by-site exceptions to urban regulation. Like its cousins ‘identity’, ‘place’, ‘home’ and ‘community’, the term ‘character’ is not easily contained or legislated. In terms of urban regulation, these are slip-pery characters.
There are many theoretical lenses we might deploy to understand what it is that was being threatened and constructed here and it may be useful to view this case through a few of them. For Harvey, the politics of place operates in a context where local character is a form of local monopoly value in tension with global capital (Harvey, 1996, pp. 297–298). From this view, the experience of place serves at once to ground a phenomenology of dwelling (in the Heideggerian sense) and to attract capital through the market desire for unique-ness and authenticity. Capital seeks to retain ‘character’ because it cannot afford to kill
the goose that lays the golden egg (Harvey, 2001, pp. 394-411). Thus capital opens up spaces of antagonism to its own processes and these are spaces of hope for a better planning process so long as the politics of place is not parochial. Massey has been the key proponent of a progressive, global and open sense of place that is open to difference, forward looking and globally connected (Massey, 1994, 2005; Cresswell, 2004). For Massey, Heideggerian notions of place iden-tified with stasis, nostalgia and enclosure are limited and problematic because they privilege deeply rooted identities that mar-ginalise difference (Massey, 1993, p. 64). The ‘progressive sense of place’ is always in process; it valorises routes rather than roots (Massey, 1993, pp. 66–67; 1992, p. 14). In this view, ‘place’ can have a complex and unique ‘character’ without essentialism, a sense of home for residents that is neither inward- nor backward-looking. In its embrace of difference, Fitzroy could be construed as a paradigm case of Massey’s progressive sense of place. Yet while Fitzroy was not defended on essentialist grounds, the resistance to change was deep-seated. Massey’s anti-Heideggerian conception of place tends to distance the experience of place from the ontology of dwelling and it does not fully ex-plain the depth of antagonism towards the ‘cheesegrater’.
This is scarcely the place to open debate on Heideggerian philosophy, but it may be useful to distinguish between Heidegger’s ontology (the spatiality of existence) and his essentialism (the primordiality of place). Heidegger can be read in both these ways, yet the claim that place is a taken-for-granted on-tological ground (existence takes place) does not necessarily suggest that senses of place are rooted or fi xed in the ways that Massey and many others rightly condemn. The evidence here and elsewhere shows that the experi-ences of place in everyday life, whether or not taken-for-granted until threatened, surface
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as part of the politics of place where they are further constructed and shaped.6 Spatiality and sociality are inextricably intertwined; space is socially constructed as the social is spatially constructed (Lefebvre, 1991; Massey, 1993). This reciprocity is apparent in the continual slippage (often in mid-quote) be-tween social and material aspects of Fitzroy’s character. In this context, there is a clear need for concepts and approaches that cut across the sociality/spatiality divide, a need to move beyond a false choice between place as pre-given (fi xed, essential) or as entirely socially constructed. We suggest that the conceptual frameworks of Bourdieu and Deleuze may be fertile in this regard.
There are clearly aspects of urban character that residents have diffi culty articulating—the proposed project violates a sense of ‘appro-priateness’ or ‘feel’, something pre-conceptual and taken-for-granted. Bourdieu’s (1977) conception of the habitus is a set of pre-conscious dispositions that structure the taken-for-granted doxa of everyday life
He inhabits it like a garment [un habit] or a familiar habitat. He feels at home in the world because the world is also in him, in the form of habitus (Bourdieu, 2000, pp. 142–143).
The habitus is described as “a sense of one’s place” but also a “sense of the other’s place” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 113) and as a “feel for the game” of social practice (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 5). The concept of habitus is derived in part from Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodied spatiality (Carman, 2008, pp. 217–219). The resonance between habitus and habitat can be a useful conceptual frame here because it parallels that between social and physical character, between the feel and the form. As we turn place identity into plan-ning codes, we move from the pre-conscious experiences of place in everyday life to the production of a discourse of ‘place’ and ‘character’ within institutionally structured fi elds of power (Bourdieu, 1993): news media,
housing markets, planning tribunals. From this view, ‘character’ is the taken for granted ‘doxa’ of urban life that becomes a para-dox of urban design and planning. The habitus is the ‘feel’ that is threatened by the ‘form’. In this case study, resident opposition was deep-seated without being deep-rooted in a singular or purified identity—hence the paradox of gentrifying residents self-consciously defending the mix against their own domination.
This conception of character as deep-seated but not deep-rooted suggests that it is im-manent rather than transcendent; grounded in the myriad particularities and everyday practices of place revealed by morphological analysis. Another useful conceptual frame-work in this regard is the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987) on ‘assemblages’ and ‘multiplicities’. An assemblage is not a collec-tion of things (whether buildings or people), but an entity that emerges from the inter-action of parts. Assemblages are at once social and spatial territories connecting material forms with discursive practices (DeLanda, 2006). The assemblage is thus a conceptual framework that potentially connects both the ‘feel + form’ and the ‘social + physical’ dimensions of place. The concept of place can then be seen not as bounded location but as an assemblage of connections. Such a conception cuts against any notions of place as an organic tree-like concept that organises spatial meanings around an essentialised stem. The pre-conceptual ‘doxa’ of everyday place experience maps usefully against Deleuzean notions of sensation, affect, desire and intensity. Urban character can be described as a kind of ‘intensity’ that haunts the urban assemblage. The ‘sense’, ‘feel’, ‘atmosphere’ and ‘character’ can be seen as intensities in the sense that desire, love, fl avour, light, colour, tone and experience have intensity (while height and bulk have extension). The widespread description of Fitzroy’s char-acter as a complex social and formal mix
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suggests an ‘intensive multiplicity’—more like a soup than a salad in the sense that the fl avour is found more in the interaction of ingredients than in fragmented parts. When taller buildings or different faces appear on the street, the tone of the neighbourhood changes. Again, as character is legislated, as ‘feel’ is reduced to ‘form’, intensity is reduced to extension. Urban regulation is a process of coding: character is coded into character-istics; parts are made to stand for the whole; desires are captured and identities are fi xed.
The desire from both Fitzroy residents and the architect/developer to retain the mix and the intensity of Fitzroy in a context of potentially escalating heights suggests that it may be useful to conceive of Fitzroy as a ‘plateau’. While often associated with Deleuze and Guattari’s book A Thousand Plateaus (1987), the term originates with Bateson (1973) where it is defi ned in opposition to schizmogenesis: the way a positive feedback process escalates out of control (like an arms race). The way that one tall building in a neighbourhood can set a precedent that triggers the right to go ever higher is an example of schizmogenesis. There are links here to Jacobs’ (1965) theory of the ‘self-destruction of diversity’ and to Harvey’s (1985) work on the circuits of capital leading to creative destruction. For Bateson, the ‘plateau’ is a stable state that is valued for its intensity and where schizmogenesis is held at bay. It is a “self-vibrating region of inten-sities whose development avoids an orient-ation towards a culmination point” (Bateson, 1973, p. 113). For Deleuze and Guattari, the plateau is also a ‘plane of consistency’ in an assemblage that is open to change but not to suicidal escalation. The concepts of place, plateau or plane (note the shared etymology of these the pla words) denote immanent fi elds of everyday practice that ground modes of thought and identity formation without transcendent ideals (Stagoll, 2005).
There is no suggestion here that any particu-lar view of character is right or wrong, nor that character is always seen in the ways it is in Fitzroy. The suggestion is that character can be seen as an urban intensity that is threatened by escalating heights and that height control can be conceived as a socio-spatial plateau: a place assemblage that is open to change but not to suicidal escalation. While there may well be a strategic need for dramatic transformations of place, the practice of ap-plying performance-based regulation of character on a site-by-site basis is a recipe for trouble. While it may appear that site-by-site planning may be more sensitive to the differences between places and the nuances of place experience, one of its effects in this case was to move the practice of urban regu-lation out of the framework of democratic planning and into the control of the judi-ciary.7 Slippages between social and physical aspects of character tend to confound at-tempts to operationalise it as a code of urban regulation and this very slipperiness becomes attractive to proponents of ‘deregulated’ and ‘fl exible’ planning systems. Many aspects of ‘character’ become discursively constructed in the fi eld of politics where character comes to mean what different interests want it to mean. Carroll [as Alice] put it in a different context: “The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things”. Or, as Humpty Dumpty responded: “The question is which is to be master—that’s all” (Carroll, 1871, ch. VI).
While planning codes and consultants’ studies generally try to reduce character to a set of formal elements, the ways it is experi-enced in everyday life tend to resist attempts to separate the social from the physical. Strug-gles to prevent the wrong kinds of building can easily slip into the exclusion of the wrong kinds of people. It is the tendency to presume that urban or neighbourhood ‘character’ is somehow embedded in built form, waiting
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to be defi ned, fi xed and protected that needs to be rethought. The pursuit of it is akin to Carroll’s (1876) Hunting of the Snark
They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;They pursued it with forks and hope;They threatened its life with a railway share;They charmed it with smiles and soap.’
Just as the pursuit of the ‘snark’ slides between ‘thimbles’ and ‘care’, ‘forks and hope’, ‘smiles and soap’, so the pursuit of urban character slides between such ethereal and corporeal categories (Deleuze, 1990), between ‘feel and form’. In this case, they threatened its life with a cheesegrater, yet a more serious threat to character may lie in the desire to reduce it to a series of fixed features which turn character into caricature.
Notes
1. The project was then marketed ‘off the plan’ but did not sell and was abandoned for 3 years until a new developer purchased the site along with the plans and development rights. The building shape was retained with a new interior layout geared to a different market. Construction commenced in 2009.
2. This work is part of Australian Research Council project (DP0344105) entitled ‘What is urban character?’ (2003–06). The project comprised six case studies which included both the protection of existing character and the instant creation of character in new suburbs. For other case studies see: Wood et al. (2006) and Dovey et al. (forthcoming). For comparative studies see: Woodcock et al. (2008), Dovey et al. (2008) and Dovey (2009, ch 5).
3. The work of urban theorists such as Jacobs (1965), Lynch (1972) and Alexander (1979) from the 1960s and 1970s was supplemented by the phenomenology of Relph (1976), Tuan (1977), Norberg-Schulz (1980) and Seamon and Mugerauer (1985) and the environmental psychology of Altman and Werner (1985), Canter (1977), Rapoport (1982) and Altman and Low (1992). An international research
conference in Melbourne in 1985 was focused on the theme of ‘Place and Placemaking’ where both Relph and Rapoport were keynote speakers.
4. For a more complete account of the rise of urban character discourse in Victoria, see Woodcock et al. (2004).
5. A total of eight interviews with residents and one with the architect/developer were con-ducted of 1–2 hours each. Interviewees were contacted through the Fitzroy Residents’ Association; this is not a random sample of local residents but is designed to understand the conceptions of character that were driving resident resistance. All interviewees were pro-fessionals, including males and females aged from 30s to 60s. All interviews were conducted in 2004, after the proposal was approved and before it collapsed. Additional interviews with an urban planner from the local authority and the planning consultant who conducted the Urban Character Study were used for background only.
6. Case study methods can be peculiarly perti-nent to theories of place both because they have the depth to explore the nuances of socio-spatial reciprocity and because differences between places are central to their defi nitions—places are cases. While case studies may lack generalisability, they draw their lessons from senses of place that may be missing from the distant geographical gaze.
7. VCAT occupies a very low rung on the judicial hierarchy with correspondingly low levels of independence. Tribunal members rely on political capital to secure and maintain appointments.
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