Architect, urban planner and current City of Sydney Independent, Councillor HY William Chan, has always been a man on a mission.
In the lead-up to the New South Wales council election on 14 September, I caught up with Chan to find out what’s shifting in the city and how councils can reframe their mission from being seen as primarily “roads, rates and rubbish” to being agents of change for regeneration, resilience and respect.
Chan has never chosen the easy or obvious pathway for his career, venturing into areas of practice including working with informal settlements in the Majority World, engaging in STEM capacity-building with young Afghani refugees and being an advocate for Australian youth at United Nations General Assembly talks and other international forums.
The step to run for election to City of Sydney Council back in 2020 is one he knew would put him on a challenging path.
“You have to be courageous,” he says. “To create change in making sustainable, inclusive cities is hard work and it’s challenging. I am so passionate about working with people in architecture and urban planning … and encouraging people (in the community) and empowering them with agency to be architects of their own living environment.”
Challenges including climate change, solving the housing crisis and ensuring cities have adaptive capacity require immediate effort.
“We don’t have any other choice but to design and create cities that enable communities to thrive. In council we need to not just listen but create solutions, and to move from consultation to participation.”
Being part of the City of Sydney Citizen Jury in 2019 as one of the expert witnesses gave Chan an insight into what being on the council itself might be like. The jury also gave council clarity around what 2050 should look like for the community, and what the “next generations deserve”, Chan says.
“It was a real example of how community representation happens. It was also a time I found hope and optimism, not only in governance processes but in being able to visualise the future of the city.”
Now within the organisation, Chan has a hand in ensuring council delivers real solutions that are the result of “doing the work” that responds to the science, the needs of the community, the research and the data that has been generated over the time of Clover Moore’s leadership as Lord Mayor.
One of the tangible examples of long-term vision translating into regenerative change is the pedestrianisation of George Street. Chan explains the evolution of the project has taken over a decade to become reality.
Underneath the now pedestrianised street with its light rail tracks lies recycled grey water infrastructure, installed during early works and able to supply adjacent commercial offices and residential property, improving resilience and reducing pressure on a drinking water catchment prone to the vagaries of increasingly fickle weather.
New trees and new street furniture are the finishing touches which mark the transformation from being a congested “traffic sieve” to being a welcoming zone for relaxing and eating.
This is evidence, Chan says, of how sound urban planning addresses the city at the human scale, recognising the value of the “spaces between the buildings”.
“George Street shows how if we bring in the right technical expertise, we can show people how they can experience a different way of urban life. That is the power of city-making and policymaking. It requires both urban vision and policymaking willpower.
“It also means cities can’t work to four-year (election) cycles, because city-making takes time for the shaping and the delivering. That time is worth it.”
City governors are also finally reaching the top tables of climate talks.
The Global Covenant of Mayors, International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) – both of which Chan represents – and other networks of city leaders have been some of the early actors in the climate crisis policy space.
As we saw in the 2010s with formal declarations of climate emergency across the country from councils including City of Sydney, City of Melbourne, City of Yarra, City of Fremantle and others, now we are seeing climate adaptation and resilience become mainstreamed in city-level policy, planning and programs.
Internationally, however, the movers and shakers at the COP tables have been slow to usher mayors and other city-level officials into the rooms where decisions are debated.
Last year’s COP in Dubai was the first time when mayors and their representatives were invited into talks. As the leader of Sydney’s delegation for the negotiations, Chan describes it as “historical” for urban leaders to be empowered to participate, after many years of knocking on the doors requesting entry.
The housing crisis is another challenge for cities
Another challenge where council has been charging ahead on positive change is housing. It’s a matter of record that a growing number of citizens are priced out of housing in the city, and that groups including women over 55, youth, Indigenous persons and people from diverse cultural backgrounds are among the worst affected.
Chan led a motion calling on the NSW state government to increase the proportion of affordable housing at Waterloo Estate from 34 per cent to 50 per cent. This succeeded, resulting in an extra 500 affordable social homes in the development.
Council has been using several levers to drive affordable housing, resulting in more than 5000 new affordable homes delivered to date or in the pipeline.
Chan explains that developer levies that apply to all new developments including residential and commercial across the entire local government area, have been a source of finance deployed specifically to affordable housing. Over $390 million has been collected to date.
Council also works with Community Housing Providers (on delivery, to ensure properties are affordable in perpetuity and that changes in council policy in future cannot reverse the affordability status.
Council owned land in target suburbs including Zetland, Surry Hills and Redfern has been sold at a discount on market valuation or at subsidised rates where the land is to be used specifically for affordable housing.
The council’s affordable housing fund also leverages private finance to enable non-government organisations to provide housing for high priority at-risk groups including youth, transgender persons, older women, students and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
In addition, innovative planning controls and individual planning agreements allow affordable and social housing to be developed in areas not zoned for residential, enabling smart infill projects close to public transport, employment, amenities and services.
Chan says there are still many aspects of the housing crisis that need fixing, however.
“It requires all levels of government to work together to ensure a just and inclusive city, so we are not leaving people behind. We still have to tackle the root cause of the issue of why people cannot access market housing.”
The conversation segues back to the human scale of the city, and council’s power to influence the experience of living in inner Sydney.
“Social sustainability is what sustainable development means,” Chan says. “I look at our street parties in the village high streets. They have been a way to empower local business and the community to come together. I see council being a facilitator, to bring the community together in public spaces.
“We can create a slower city, at a more human scale, where we are celebrating a sense of place, the distinct local character, and the publicness of the city.”
Part of this is also ensuring council continues to use every available means to slow the acceleration of climate change and environmental degradation. There is a Net Zero Operational Buildings by 2026 policy that Chan successfully moved in the Council Chambers, with developments currently going in for approval already adopting design approaches that are net zero for energy and emissions. The next big frontier is embodied carbon, with targets and benchmarks being put in place for the acceptable new embodied carbon in materials allowed for developments within the city.
Chan says this is another illustration of council’s power to shape the future.
“This is why (state and federal) governments should listen to local leaders and city leaders – we work collaboratively with the planning and architecture industry,” he says.
“The built environment is Australia’s major source of emissions. This is also why cities being at COP is critical – we’re the ones who are bringing the built environment along to do that work. The community we engage with includes industry, technical people and the necessary expertise. In the past it’s always been developers and architects waiting for someone to go first and waiting for policy, now we are aiming to work together, problem-solve and progress solutions.”