George Clarke - pioneer for a better place
by Rodney Jensen
The memory of George Clarke lives on in Sydney and specially in a tiny Paddington precinct hemmed in by Oxford Street and South Dowling Street. On a brilliant winter's morning of August this year the Lord Mayor of Sydney City, Clover Moore paid tribute to George’s contribution to the City and unveiled a memorial plaque. The plaque which includes a graphic sourced from his masterpiece the “City of Sydney Strategic Plan of 1971” sits in a landscaped area within Sinclair Street directly opposite the College of Fine Art Campus and not far from the house where George lived. In her brief address Clover said:
“George was a giant - in his personality as much as his qualities as a planner. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that his planning dreams could have been envisaged let alone achieved by a less forceful personality... George with his typical panache once claimed that trying to plan anything in the City of Sydney was a foolhardy activity and over time it would lead inevitably to psychosis...Despite that and a budget of $100000 they introduced the concept of strategic planning to Sydney.”
I had the privilege of knowing George in the aftermath of the Strategic Plan. His most important legacy apart from the obvious physical manifestations such as Martin Place, and a series of urban design improvements in the City, is to do with the vision, the process and the resultant outcomes of planning.
John Mant, himself a highly influential planning theorist and environmental lawyer, at the ceremony opined to me that George's work lay the foundation for place planning. This is an important acknowledgment of his role and importance. Because place planning lays emphasis on planning improvements according to local social and physical character. It is a process which has fired the imagination of planners in places as diverse as Warringah, Woollahra and Liverpool, since the pioneering work of George Clarke and his planning practice Urban Systems. It is a concept which lives on in an evolutionary way and underpins the City Council's underlying policy plank of establishing urban villages. It is surely no accident that the plaque commemorating the life and work of George Clarke should have been sited in its chosen position. The area surrounding this street closure has become a place with a unique ambience. It is lined with high and and sweeping foliage of Sydney Figs, it contains closely spaced and human scale Victorian style terrace houses, with the odd corner shop where a diverse population drop in for a coffee and a chat. It is notable for the absence of intrusive cars, and traffic noise. It is a place which is the result of George’s work as much as anyone else.
In summing up the important role that George played, his partner Krystina said “Wherever he went George had an indefatigable desire to create better living conditions and to improve the quality of life for people in these areas...He had an insatiable curiosity to understand what motivates people...He had an uncanny ability to identify where self interest lies and why and his understanding of this and how to deal with conflict was why he was so effective. He was also fearless and courageous at great personal cost at times.
He loved to apply these skills in our neighbourhood. He was a great believer in people taking control of decisions that affected the quality of life and to that extent he galvanised this neighbourhood to take an interest in its own future. To care for it and own it and to show how it might be done by example...At the end of his life he thought that in many ways his influence on this neighbourhood was his most satisfying achievement."
It would be nice to think that the lessons provided by George Clarke could be applied more generally in Sydney, but in a twist of irony, current plans of the City Council seem destined to be frustrated by a State Government with an entirely different agenda. Three years after the City of Sydney Strategic Plan was completed in 1971, many precinct studies had been completed under its visionary framework. Sadly very few of them were ever to be implemented, partly because of the lack of an appropriate legal mechanism and partly through lack of resources. Woolloomooloo was one of the exceptions owing much to the intervention of the Federal Government under Gough Whitlam and the State Government.
Fast forward to the present. Place planning has been tried in a few places in spite of the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act gazetted in 1979. The Act has evolved into a monster - a laborious, and legalistic obstacle course designed to frustrate any serious urban design improvement. The only legally constituted place plan established by Warringah Council is now to be dismantled and replaced by a zoning based planning system more than 60 year old in concept fundamentally incapable of addressing the notion of Place. It is, doubtless, for this type of reason that George relatively early in his career elected to leave Australia and work for the United Nations and the World Bank, as his partner Krystina said, “in many ways dispirited by the direction of planning in this country”. I would invite anyone who reads this to take a walk in the precinct where
I would invite anyone who reads this to take a walk in the precinct where George lived and is honoured. It is hard not to be convinced that this is a better way to go than the future ranks of very ordinary suburban streets, that will be the inevitable outcome of State Planning’s “new” zoning system.