Lost opportunity... Adrian McGregor at the Green Square site. Photo: Wolter Peeters
The vision for Sydney's Green Square may be lost in the crowd, writes Matthew Moore.
ALMOST every major city in the world has a public square and when planners approved a European-style piazza at the heart of the Green Square redevelopment, Sydney finally looked set to join them.
But developers of the biggest urban renewal project in the country have submitted new plans that include breaking up the proposed square, that the City of Sydney ticked off three years ago, promising changes to ''provide increased diversity and a greater variety of public spaces and experiences''.
A decade ago the landscape architect Adrian McGregor won a NSW government-sponsored international design competition with his masterplan for the town centre at Green Square.
He says the changes now proposed destroy his vision for a square lined with cafes that would be big enough for demonstrations, public gatherings and simply to walk around.
He wanted a 3000 square metre civic plaza similar to Melbourne's Federation Square, a sun-filled space that could hold 2500 people. Under the new plans pedestrian areas will be replaced with roads and his plaza will shrink to 820 square metres, space enough for only 400 people who he says will be in shadow during winter because surrounding buildings will increase in height.
''They put a road through it, put shops in it, put extra streets in it, they have chopped it up,'' he said.
Mr McGregor, managing director of McGregor Coxall, always believed a large public space was vital to bring pedestrians and life to the town centre planned for the 280-hectare disused industrial site that will, by 2031, be home to 40,000 people and a place for half that number to work.
Robert Sullivan, general manager of corporate marketing with Landcom, the NSW government agency that is developing the site with Mirvac and Leighton, said the changes retained ''key principles'' of Mr McGregor's concept but made it more ''intimate''.
The aim was to break this large space up into three separate ''rooms'', each with a different and individual character, he said.
They include adding a high street with shops, providing a transitional ''eco space'' and a laneway area providing smaller scaled urban spaces in keeping with the vision of creating smaller ''village like'' neighbourhoods, he said.
Mr McGregor dismisses that and said the changes ''fill up the public space with shops that make money for the developer''.
Talk of an eco space was nothing more than ''greenwash''.
''The new scheme breaks plans for two plazas into three by introducing roads that split the public plazas into leftover pieces,'' he said.
''There is no longer any hierarchy of public spaces. The original civic and neighbourhood plazas were scaled as a large meeting/events place and an intimate space. These are replaced with five spaces of equal size.
''The spirit of a grand civic place is lost to five equally sized places of little differentiation.''
What irks him even more than the changes to his scheme is the process that has seen approved plans remodelled to suit the interests of commercial developers.
After winning the NSW government's design competition in 2001 for a masterplan for the site, Mr McGregor was commissioned by Landcom and the City of Sydney to design the public domain and community building in the town centre.
For more than six months he consulted with the local community about his proposals, which won a planning award from the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects and were then approved by the City of Sydney in 2008.
In the following year, Leighton and Mirvac joined with Landcom to develop the site and began the task of transforming plans into reality. With the global financial crisis, they said the only way to make it pay was to increase density by 38 per cent, and they submitted new plans seeking approval for bigger buildings and a redesigned public domain.
While increased density now being considered by the city does not trouble Mr McGregor, he said it must not reduce amenity and quality of the public space. When the consortium redesigned the public areas they did not consult him, preferring instead to work with renowned Danish urban designer Jan Gehl.
Mr McGregor said that was similar to what happened at Barangaroo, where winners of an international design competition were sidelined soon after their victory and their plans discarded.
''Why were the developers' consultants given carte blanche to redesign an approved development application that had been rigorously workshopped with all stakeholders and the community?'' he said.
Jane Irwin, president of the Institute of Landscape Architects and a member of the team that won the Barangaroo competition said she was troubled that developers rather than governments were increasingly given the right to design public spaces.
''The developer should not have control over the whole area. I think public space should be delivered by public authorities,'' she said.
''One should look at the the impact of the buildings on the public domain, not the other way round.''
If the City of Sydney approves the revised plans for Green Square in coming weeks, Mr McGregor reckons Martin Place, closed to traffic in 1971, will remain the closest thing Sydney has to a pedestrian square.
''The project is called Green Square but the square has been lost,'' he said.
