Sydney’s recent development has been characterised by a series of large scale urban projects on brownfield sites. Sites such as Zetland, East Darling harbour, or the former Carlton United Brewery are the venues for public debate over density, sustainability and the nature of public space in the city. White Bay is one of the last under-developed sites on Sydney Harbour near the CBD. At 80 hectares, bordered by established neighbourhoods, bisected by a major road, in the shadow of the Anzac Bridge, the site presents major challenges for the urban designer. Though there are no impending plans to develop the site, whatever is eventually built here will be extremely visible, and will inevitably speak volumes about the nature of Sydney’s urbanism in the twenty-first century.
White Bay Eco City was designed as part of the Open Studio at the University of Sydney, Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning. The project was a collaboration between twenty senior students and Dr. Rafael Pizarro, the faculty’s lecturer in sustainable urban planning. The brief was simple: design a carbon neutral city for 15,000 residents. While the project’s aim was to speculate about how cities would change response to global warming, the brief also recognised that such prime foreshore land is extremely valuable and that a certain density of development was inevitable.
Part of the Masterplan for the White Bay eco-city
Transport was the first critical issue. As a major new development near the CBD, the design had an obligation to incorporate infrastructure improvements which would benefit the entire Sydney region. An Inner West Metro rail connects the site to the centre of Sydney and west through to Parramatta. The metro rail stops at a new transport hub within the spectacular shell of the heritage listed White Bay Power station. From there, an internal tram links the five precincts of the Eco City.
Within the site, eliminating the private car invited the opportunity to design new types of urban spaces. Bicycles and GPS-guided stackable mini-cars developed by MIT’s media lab provide flexible transport options within the site. The street takes on a whole new meaning once traffic is eliminated; “streets” can be narrow or wide, promenades or laneways, lined with canals and trees, merging into parks and plazas. In a zero carbon city the module of the automobile no longer defines the dimensions of public spaces.
The site divides naturally into five precincts: a CBD, a semi-industrial working harbour district, an institutional hub, a quiet neighbourhood adjacent to the existing suburb of Balmain and an area devoted to urban agriculture. Most buildings are mixed use, ranging in height from 12 storeys near the Anzac Bridge to two or three storeys closer to the harbour foreshore. Passive solar design determines built form throughout the Eco City, with northern orientations and narrow floor plates for cross ventilation. Roof gardens alternate with photovoltaics to supplement the food and energy produced elsewhere on site. Rainwater is collected for reuse block by block while grey and black water are processed in large central plant in the agricultural precinct at the southern end of the site.
While the technological implications of the zero carbon city were of great importance, the students also sought to imagine what the experience of daily life would be like in such a place in decades to come. The project is a celebration of what sustainable urban living on SydneyHarbour could be. In the CBD of the Eco City, pedestrianised streets alternate with canals. There are houseboats, an Olympic swimming pool and an amphitheatre for 3,000 people looking back at the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Where else in Sydney would you find a sail-in movie theatre, with Casablanca projected onto a sandstone cliff? A sculptural solar tunnel over Victoria Road provides most of the site’s power. The enormous silos, currently plastered with billboards, become a glowing barometer measuring the site’s energy and resource use for all to see. In the working harbour district, pedestrians get a close up view of diverse maritime industries.
On site food production and wastewater recycling is a critical part of designing the self-sufficient, carbon-neutral city. While most of the site exemplifies the kind of fine-grained mixed use urbanism advocated by Jane Jacobs and others, the agricultural precinct is a uniquely twenty-first century creation. The area incorporates water treatment and food production for the entire site, with surplus for surrounding areas as well. The precinct cleverly uses the natural flow of water to take advantage of a difficult site. At the southern end, an existing canyon is dammed to store runoff from surrounding areas. This water then runs a small hydro electric turbine to provide energy and is recycled for irrigation in eleven vertical farm towers. These vertical farms are a new typology based on current research into urban agriculture and are perhaps the most spectacular manifestation of the Eco City’s self- sufficiency.
As an equal collaboration between twenty students, the project also models a new mode of urban design practice. Collective decisions were the result of spirited discussion and consensus. Working together meant that the project could be resolved and presented in a fairly comprehensive way even after only two and a half months work. A public presentation incorporated drawings, statistics, a 3.7 x1.2 metre model, and a 17 minute film on “A Day in the Life of the Eco City.” A proposal such as this brings much needed specificity to the debate over cities and climate change, a debate in which design students -- as tomorrow’s practitioners -- will play an important part. Students are well positioned to speculate freely about the future of cities. White Bay Eco City is the kind of “plausible speculation” which will be required in coming years if the world’s cities are to meet the challenge of global warming.
The students with the model of the White Bay eco-city