From setting up a laboratory to experiments

This chapter has described how Sullivans Cove became an urban design laboratory and what this laboratory is made of. This includes design professionals, discourses and documents, ‘the people’, attachments to place, wharves, walls, authenticity, technology, nature and the built

224 _{A print that had been made for one of the statutory planners of the Cove illustrated each building represented}

by a differently patterned sofa. The print was titled ‘Sofa so good’.

225 _{I was given plenty of advice about other places, where to travel, what to see and the best times and angles for}

photographing various part of the Cove.

226 _{Recently Danish Designer Jan Gehl has been consulted by the Hobart City Council, and in 2007 Danish}

landscape architectural firm Aagaard Andersen won the International Design Competition. Both were authorised through an internationally laden project profile.

227 _{Design Consultant B.}

228 _{This was a common practice at}

191 environment. The urban design professionals each have a longstanding interest and enduring record of practice in the Cove. They are variously entangled with the University of Tasmania Department of Urban Design that used to be located at the campus in the Cove and it was here that lessons in urban design and architecture were distributed. Then the lengthening material relations then extended beyond teaching and learning, towards establishing an urban design programme for the Cove. The Sullivans Cove Planning Review (1991), then the Sullivans Cove Planning Scheme (1997) and an act of parliament, and finally the Hobart Waterfront Urban Design Framework (2004) were outcomes of this. They themselves

assembled together a new set of actors: a mountain range, flat reclaimed land, a connected up ‘outside’ and an original shoreline translated by a wall.

When these were added together durable relations were formed because they involved and were distributed among multiple actors; and also because they were attached to ‘heavy

things’ like a mountain range and ‘hard things’ like a science of geomorphology.229 However, to be a truly effective laboratory it must produce results and this means it will inevitably negotiate with developments and interpolate the public. As ‘implementation’ starts to happen, the laboratory is put to the test. One of these experiments was a tourism development Zero Davey.

That the laboratory does not anticipate tourism is evidenced by the lack attention it is given in this chapter. The urban design laboratory starts from a concern about what makes Sullivans Cove itself unique in order to maintain these characteristics and design any future

development to be complementary. In this way the laboratory does not not anticipate tourism since achieving a ‘unique place’ is not incompatible with tourism development. Nevertheless in the case of Zero Davey the urban design laboratory acted to obligate the building without taking much account of whether it imported tourism or not.

192 Urban Design: Postcard from an urban designer about how fish and chips work

The fish punts along the edge of Constitution Dock are there and they’ve emerged from boats that used to sell fish from them. So it used to be boats selling fish directly and then someone had the idea ‘well maybe you could cook them’ and then that gave rise to a variety of these little punts that are there and that’s part of the character of the City and the Cove. However, the size of those fish punts is dependent upon them being able to be floated into Constitution Dock. And the reason that they had to float in and float out was firstly, obviously they’re vessels and need maintenance, but the other reason is that they had to be moved for an event once a year – the Sydney-Hobart Yacht Race. So the dock always had to be cleared for the Sydney-Hobart Yacht Race and it’s a great annual ritual. Since the Sydney-Hobart yachts have become bigger, taller, larger and deeper, the bigger ones can’t get into Constitution dock and with the marina that has been developed beyond Franklin wharf into the harbour the demand that the fish punts be moved at the end of each year to clear Constitution dock has less relevance. My concern as a designer who is concerned about consistency of layers of meaning ascribed to urban place, and particularly to the function of those docks and how Sullivans Cove operates, is that if those fish punts don’t need to be designed to be moved out, will they become a permanent built edge to the dock? So the scale and character and how edges work and what the function of a dock is as distinct from a street, as distinct from, in this instance, a concrete apron between the docks will change. That edge is getting harder and harder to keep as ‘working’ because of the pressure for it to be a heritage site with heritage objects within it, as distinct from a working edge. What I fear is the loss of the function of the space that gives identity, definition and meaning, and spatial logic. And that may occur by filling Constitution Dock up with historical boats. It’s an example that I think is important.

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