Eloquent, but uneven, plea for the harbour city

On the other hand, Farrelly’s accumulated complaints are all constrained by a familiar set of binaries common to the romantic imagination: quantification, number, efficiency, industry, development, speed, the masculine, the object and taxonomical thinking are to be derided, while slowness, messiness, art, the feminine, the subject and the human are to be celebrated.

There is, however, little in the way to convince the reader that these oppositional archetypes remain illuminating ways to understand the complex sets of actors that compose the contemporary urban fabric.

Favoured whipping boys of the left such as Margaret Thatcher, Adam Smith, Ayn Rand and Jordan B. Peterson are trotted out for a dressing down. The flaws of the rationales advanced by these figures are deserving of purposeful dismantling and strategic reconstruction. But in this instance it’s the same rehearsed, taken-for-granted arguments about the value of collectivism and society which, for all their appeal, do little to seriously address the question of why significant portions of the population continue to find the myth of self-betterment so enduringly appealing. Are they, like those who happen to love Canberra (a most “unsatisfactory” place in Farrelly’s view), simply addicted to the wrong sauce?

Too often Farrelly takes the easy road of speaking to existing prejudices and convictions, rather than framing a narrative about place and culture that is likely to change minds. The arguments in Killing Sydney would increase greatly in nuance if there were fewer swift, impressionistic caricatures and dismissals of the trusty old bugbears that have preoccupied romantically minded critics since the arts and crafts movement in the late 19th century. A career of being on the receiving end of niggles and gibes from reactionary conservatives and politicians, who have opinions about architecture in the absence of training, might make abstaining from the game harder for Farrelly than it would for most.

She often employs dialectical oppositions. The book’s seven chapters are framed around contrasting forces, which are used to characterise the experience of cities: “Solid and Void”, “Fast and Slow”, “Public and Private”, “Nature and Culture”, “Then and Now”, “Inside and Out”, “Primate and Angel″⁣. In addition to these chapter framings, masculine and feminine archetypes are invoked throughout less as way of defining gender and more as nominal terms on which to hang different theories about space, form and feeling.

It is at times hard to work out exactly what Farrelly aims to achieve by at once highlighting the imprecision of these generic labels, while continuing to use them in her analysis. As she writes in “Inside and Out″⁣, after listing differences in the habits and preferences of men and women: “Gender is, of course, much more complex than this binary view, but I still think it’s a useful diagram.”

This gets at the nub of the problem with the book: the argumentation is too often driven by an adherence to such supposedly useful, often overly simplistic “diagrams”, whether concerning gender, politics or any other foray into cultural theory. There is an evident desire to go beyond generic frames and archetypes. However, in the end there are few attempts at framing problems in such a way that might convince those who haven’t already made up their minds about who to blame and what to like in Australia’s largest city.

Farrelly is at her strongest when making the history of architecture, geography and urban planning feel dynamic and engaging by channelling these city-shaping forces through lyrical accounts of perceptual experience. The “Nature and Culture” chapter, for example, features a vivid, fine-grained digression through eastern and some inner west suburbs of Sydney, which elegantly marries street-level sauntering with impressionistic, though astute, references to history.

Canberra features regularly as a definitively unlikeable place. The poor old bush capital crops up frequently over the course of the book as exemplifying the opposite qualities to those Farrelly values in inner Sydney, Barcelona, London and Venice. Namely, a sense of enclosure or in-ness distributed through openness, and the simultaneous security and surprise that might come with such contrasts.

Gertrude Stein’s often misinterpreted quip of Oakland, California— “there is no there there” — is invoked as though it spoke a truth about Canberra too. Stein, however, was not making a comment about Oakland generally, but of how she felt upon returning to the place of her childhood as an adult, with the sense of life having moved on. No doubt for many people the “there” of Canberra hasn’t moved on at all and little in Killing Sydney is likely to persuade them that a substitute might be found in Surry Hills or Hampstead, two of Farrelly’s favoured haunts.

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The greatest quality of Killing Sydney is the vibrancy of Farrelly’s prose. There is a rhythmic immediacy in the tone of the writing that makes the book read as though the voice of an author is directly there in the ink. The abundance and diversity of information about the historical and contemporary urban development of Sydney is subsumed in an elegant writing style that makes reading a pleasurable drift. The author’s voice exists residually in the mind in the time outside reading the book and it was infectious when I next sat down to write.

Killing Sydney is an enjoyable read, written by an accomplished prose stylist with an agile mind and an archival knowledge of Sydney. It is, however, not a blueprint for the future of the city and not something that is likely help harmonise the increasingly complex, cross-disciplinary, multi-stakeholder, value-diverse entanglements that make up the patchwork of contemporary urban life.

Tom Lee is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building at the University of Technology Sydney. He is the author of Coach Fitz (Giramondo).