Marea With an E

Can’t we get it right … just once?

It seems you can’t please anyone when it comes to building something in this city. From Barrangaroo to brewery site to bridge (of the Spit and Iron Cove varieties) there seems to be no way that planners, developers, architects and the community will ever be happy. Just once it should be possible for the collective intelligence to come up with a development that is well designed, has open space, won’t turn into a ghetto or wind tunnel and where people want to live and work. Then I could wake up one day to the headline “Development gets green light:everybody happy” instead of the usual whingeing and whining from one side or the other. It’s just the predictability of it all that gets totally annoying and the negativity. There’s a good story for to be had in reviewing the contentious developments of the last 10 years and interviewing the stakeholders to see what they think of the result now. Was it worth the lobbying and jostling and the down and dirty politics in the end? Was the result so bad afterall - success or unmitigated disaster? Remember the “Toaster” and the who-ha that surrounded that building. There’s not much comment about it today. The Monorail? Well mostly people still hate it I guess but it certainly hasn’t caused the city to stop functioning. What we really need are planners and architects with vision and verve and politicians with the guts to really listen to the community and deliver the goods. I think we have some good architects but I’m not so sure about the other two.