At the University of Technology Sydney there’s a collaborative workshop underway trying to figure out what to do with all the empty office space in the Sydney CBD. It’s a global problem and some of the ideas emerging dig deep into the innovation that magically appears when there’s a significant need.
What is it about Melbourne? It suffered most during the pandemic and was slowest to go back to work.
Today, sure it’s got its TWATs, the people who come to their CBD offices just on Tuesdays Wednesdays and Thursdays, but it’s also buzzing from Fridays and through the weekends with people strolling, eating out and just enjoying the ambience of the city.
They might pop in to see what Rone is up to.
Rone is a local artist who’s hired the ballroom at Flinders Street Station and created an exhibition like no other.
He’s filled the room with what could be a flash back in time. Rows and rows of typewriters – think the typing pools of times gone by. There might be a cardigan draped over the chair and some handbags scattered here and there. The kind of scene that will set people reminiscing, wondering how much things have changed in just a few decades.
But lest you think cobweb slow dusty space with one or two people milling around, think again. This exhibition which started before Christmas and lets in just 50 people at a time – for just one hour – from 10 in the morning to nine at night has already racked up $1.4 million in ticket sales alone.
And that’s before people buy Rone’s book about the exhibition or his other products.
Telling this story is Professor Sara Wilkinson from the University of Technology Sydney [was this in February?]
Wilkinson claims even more funds are flowing from the shop the artist has set up where he sells his other work and even more interestingly the work of other artists including those who he employs to help run the exhibition.
What a boon for struggling emerging artists, says Wilkinson. “Imagine the improvement in the sense of worth and value.”
A nice spinoff is that the cafes and shops in the area are also doing well out of the gig. “They get an uplift in business, because there’s a 500 people a day wandering in and out.”
It’s this kind of response to the unprecedented set of circumstances that flowed from the pandemic that Wilkinson and a team from UTS are attempting to stimulate with an engagement program that brings together a range of property industry professionals in the Sustainable Temporary Adaptive Reuse or STAR project.
Its most recent workshop in late February drew 30 members of the group including Business NSW, Arup, Investa, Lendlease, Charter Keck Kramer, Urbis and PwC. The idea was to work out how a focus on social impact could help shift the vibe in the empty spaces of a hollowed-out CBD. As David Harding, executive director of Business NSW said in a challenging lead presentation, it’s about extracting the maximum value from the massive infrastructure investment that we’ve already made in our CBDs.
Melbourne’s arguable claim as the nation’s most interesting ideas factory also featured in a presentation from Schoolhouse Studios at Coburg in Melbourne’s northern suburbs.
The thriving community-focused artists’ studios and events enterprise were happily using a disused supermarket donated by Coles, said Bron Belcher, its newly appointed director.
Did Coles seek to capitalise on its largesse? Belcher was asked. Nope. In fact it was hard to get the supermarket chain to answer emails, she laughed. Instead the local Merri-bek council was an active supporter of the group with a view to possibly moving offices to this secondary supermarket site that Coles, actually, was keen to keep out of the hands of competitors.
In Sydney, there’s an abundance of ideas that the group enthusiastically shared on the day, but with action slow to get off the ground.
This was the motivation for originating the workshop, Wilkinson later told The Fifth Estate.
The program kicked off when Wilkinson reviewed a PhD thesis by Gill Armstrong now a researcher with UTS and senior project manager, buildings at Climateworks Centre, and then bolstered with long term collaborator and fellow member of the UK based Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors Mark Willers, director of Charter Keck Cramer, Professor Jua Cilliers of UTS, Rupert Fleck of UTS and Dr Kusal Nanayakkara of RMIT.
Armstrong’s work captured Wilkinson’s imagination she said with its focus on “meanwhile use”. Perfect for what the CBD of Australia’s major cities faced after the pandemic and the widespread work from home trend.
The key factor with Covid, Wilkinson said, is that it doesn’t take long for new behaviors to became embedded. In the case of the huge infrastructure investment that the CBDs represent, that’s problematic.
So a change in the usage of the CBDs, needed to be part of the solution.
This latest workshop aimed to build a tool that could foster and measure social impact through new uses. Including their ripple effect on the wider economic environment.
But this is not going to be an easy quick fix.
It’s such uncharted territory,” Wilkinson says. “Nobody’s experienced anything like this in our lifetime. (And not everyone is gifted with a Rone in their midst.)
An evolving city
In a vibrant presentation that did not pull any punches, David Harding shared some blunt truths that activated a lively discussion and yielded a plethora of ideas from the floor.
Change and in fact, a kind of evolution of the city, would not come easily, Harding said. It needed the kind of collaboration we demonstrated we were capable of during Covid.
But while these emerging trends seem radical, they are not new.
The changes, he said, “happened gradually, and then suddenly.” What is happening now is the result of “much, much, much bigger social and technological movements that have been around for a long time”.
Wealthy people have long skived off to their place up the coast or in the country on a Thursday to keep working, he said, enabled by expensive communications technology at first and were later joined by middle managers who soon realised that the iPhone gave them the same flexibility.
As early as 2012, transport data started to show the growth in daily journeys flattening out in major cities.
“From the middle of that decade onwards, we saw the growth of online communities, we saw gaming, proving the fact that communities could engage and become very powerful online.”
The work his organisation has produced shows that occupancy globally will come back to between 50 and 60 per cent of office space.
Sydney is no different from that, he said. The big question is what to do with that excess space.
“How do we fill it with life? How do we fill it with the laughter of children? How do we fill it with things which are socially useful?”
In parts of the CBD, food and beverage business are booming in ways not seen since the Olympics.
“But it stops on G [ground floor] plus two.” Activity trickles off as you head higher; the towers languishing above.
“The premiums and the premiums are sucking in those who could only afford to live in Bs, and As [graded buildings] before and so it goes on down the chain but it is going to leave a really significant amount of properties which are valued at zero or less than zero – they might be negatively valued.”
Start-ups are not the answer. Instead, these fledgling outfits are setting up in places such as Liverpool, Parramatta and Leichhardt.
Occupancy data from the City of Sydney shows poor fundamentals, he said.
The big crunch will come when the current crop of pre-Covid five-year leases come to an end this financial year and next, he said “and that’s really where the cracks will start to appear …particularly in the lower grades.”
“We’ve got residential [space] here at about 5 per cent and car parking, it’s 11 per cent and our CBD.” So “twice as much space for parking as a place to lay our heads”.
But there’s now a nexus of opportunity. The organisation’s survey of its 100,000 or so business members in NSW, reveals that among the top two or three concerns is housing.
It’s a crucial economic problem for NSW that we don’t have affordable housing close to where we work, he told the group.
“What we’re doing is driving our young people out of Sydney; they’re going to Melbourne they’re going to Wagga, they’re going to Albury and good luck to them because they can get in Melbourne, you can get an apartment for between three and 400 bucks a week in the CBD. Here, you might be lucky if you get a share house.”
The CBDs need a much stronger sense of place, more green spaces, more late openings, he said.
It also needs true diversity within that piece of our city.
“You can’t legislate people to use a city in a diverse way”, he said, but you stimulate this by making affordable homes, and places that create the memories of childhood.
“Because this is a huge opportunity for what is not only a social problem and economic problem in terms of in terms of the imbalance for our CBD, but also it’s a trillion dollar asset, which is probably worth less than half of what it used to be when we last valued it.
“We’ve denied its usage to many of the over 200 different nationalities that make up the state of New South Wales. And we’ve driven it towards the demographic of between the 20s and late 50s. And kind of ignored everyone else,”
What is possible
There are huge barriers to change and the need is for infrastructure and patient capital. The trade-off will be greater resilience to shocks.
Bringing more residential use into the city will be expensive. Looking after people who live 24/7 in a location is much more costly than if they only use it between nine and five days a week.
Harding called for reforms and regulatory reviews, to inspire change “without knocking down all those towers that we’ve got.”
The engineering to convert use was very possible, he said.
And it’s being done in other places around the globe.
Singapore is leading the way, he said.
There’s a government review of more than 6000 towers, “looking at all of them on their own merits as to how they can be upgraded to a more ecologically sustainable and socially sustainable way.
“But mainly, they’re putting a ban on knocking them down, which is a good way to start.”
“You have to really argue the case and knock them down.”
But it’s no good saying it’s just developers who have to do the work, it needs a collaborative effort.
We managed a massive collaborative effort during Covid, he said.
We can do it again.
