Sydney's SoHo Syndrome? Loft living in the urbane city

Cultural Geographies

Volumn 13, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 182-206

  Shaw, Wendy S ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CENTRAL BUSINESS DISTRICT; CULTURAL LANDSCAPE; URBAN DEVELOPMENT; URBANIZATION;

AUSTRALASIA; AUSTRALIA; NEW SOUTH WALES; SYDNEY;

EID: 33746686839     PISSN: 14744740     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1897/05-243R.1     Document Type: Article

References (154)

1. J. Collins, Architecture of excess: cultural life in the Information Age (New York, Routledge, 1995), p. 93.
2. Apartments in Australia are 'home units' in high-rise buildings, which are similar to condominiums in North America, and can be owner-occupied or rented by a tenant from a landlord. For the purposes of this essay, 'apartments' refers to lofts/loft apartments.
3. S. Watson, 'Gilding the smokestacks: the new symbolic representations of deindustrialised regions', Environment and planning D: society and place 9 (1991), pp. 59-70;
4. D. Crilley, 'Architecture as advertising: constructing the image of redevelopment', in G. Kearns and C. Philo, eds, Selling places: the city as cultural capital, past and present (Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1993), p. 231;
5. P. Jackson, 'Manufacturing meanings: culture, capital and urban change', in A. Rogers and S. Vertovec, eds, The urban context: ethnicity, social networks and situational analysis (Oxford, Berg, 1995), pp. 165-88.
6. P. Redfern, 'A new look at gentrification: 1, Gentrification and domestic technologies', Environment and planning A 29 (1997), pp. 1275-96.
7. House prices in inner Sydney increased by 19% between 1993 and 1996 (compared to 9% and 8% in middle and outer city zones), and units/ apartments increased by 24% over the same period (compared to 3% and 4% increases for middle and outer city zones): M.T. Daly, 'Reshaping Sydney: the inner city revival', Urban policy and research 16 (1998), p. 60. According to the Reserve Bank of Australia (2002), 'house prices increased at a rate of over 9 per cent per annum nationally over the past five years, and by 17 per cent over the past year'.
8. S. Zukin, Loft living: culture and capital in urban change (London, Johns Hopkins Press, 1982).
9. Watson, 'Smokestacks';
10. M. Goodwin, 'The city as commodity: the contested spaces of urban development', in Kearns and Philo, Selling places;
11. P.L. Knox, ed., The restless urban landscape (Upper Saddle River, NJ, Prentice Hall, 1993);
12. J.R. Short, L.M. Benton, W.B. Luce and J. Walton, 'Reconstructing the image of an industrial city', Annals, Association of American Geographers 83 (1993), pp. 207-24.
13. P. Hubbard, 'Urban design and city regeneration: social representations of entrepreneurial landscapes', Urban studies 33, (1996), pp. 1441-62;
14. M. Keith and S. Pile, 'Imaging the city', Environment and planning A 28 (1996), pp. 381-87;
15. J. Goss, 'Representing and re-presenting the contemporary city, progress report', Urban geography 18 (1997), pp. 180-88.
16. N. Thrift and D. Walling, 'Geography in the United Kingdom 1996-2000', Geographical journal 166 (2000), pp. 96-124, for review.
17. For Sydney, see Post occupancy survey of new residents in Ultimo Pyrmont (Sydney, Department of Urban Affairs and Planning, 1996).
18. S. Zukin, 'Gentrification: culture and capital in the urban core', Annual Review of sociology 13 (1986), p. 129.
19. Crilley, 'Architecture as advertising';
20. P.W. Daniels, Service industries in the world economy (Oxford, Blackwell, 1993);
21. M. Pryke, 'Urbanizing capitals: towards an integration of time, space and economic calculation', in S. Corbridge, N. Thrift and R. Martin, eds, Money, power and space (Oxford, Blackwell, 1994);
22. Collins, Architecture of excess);
23. J. Eade, ed., Living in the global city (London, Routledge, 1997);
24. Clark, 'World urban development: process and patterns at the end of the twentieth century', Geography 85 (2000), p.
25. D. Ley, 'Transnational spaces and everyday lives', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 29 (2004), pp. 151-64.
26. These draw on G. Simmel, 'The metropolis and mental life', in P. Kasinitz, ed., Metropolis: centre and symbol of our times (New York, New York University Press, 1995);
27. L. Wirth, 'Urbanism as a way of life', in Kasinitz, Metropolis;
28. W. Benjamin, 'Paris: capital of the nineteenth century', in Kasinitz, Metropolis;
29. See also D. Harvey, Society, the city and the space-economy of urbanism, (Washington, DC, Association of American Geographers Resource Paper, 1972).
30. D. Clark, 'World urban development: processes and patterns at the end of the twentieth century', Geography 85 (2000), p. 17.
31. After Ley, 'Transnational spaces'.
32. M. Davis, 'Fortress Los Angeles: the militarization of urban space', in Kasinitz, Metropolis, p. 2.
33. M. Dear and S. Flusty, 'Postmodern Urbanism', Annals of the Association o American Geographers 88 (1998), pp. 50-72;
34. M. Dear, The postmodern urban condition (Oxford, Blackwell, 2000).
35. Which, as revealed in Fig. 3, includes conflations of loft living imaginaries with a host of Manhattan/New York attributes, including neighbourhoods and buildings.
36. P. Bourdieu, 'The forms of capital', in J. Richardson, ed., Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York, Greenwood Press, 1986), pp. 241-58.
37. J. Podmore, '(Re)Reading the loft living habitus in Montreal's inner city', International journal of urban and regional research 22 (1998), pp. 283-302.
38. C. McGuigan, S. Katz, P. King and M. Miller, 'The SoHo syndrome: artists are revitalizing city neighbourhoods', Newsweek (22 Sept. 1986), pp. 80-81,
39. cited in Podmore, '(Re)Reading the loft living habitus'.
40. Ibid., p. 284.
41. Ibid.
42. D. Cole, 'Artists and urban redevelopment', Geographical review 77 (1987), pp. 391-407;
43. Jackson 'Manufacturing meanings';
44. A. Bowman, 'Reshaping the city', in J. Walter, H. Hinsley and P.S. Pearritt, Changing cities: reflections on Britain and Australia (London, Sir Robert Menzies Institute of Australian Studies, University of London, 1995), p. 138.
45. Simmel, 'Metropolis'.
46. W.S. Shaw, 'Ways of whiteness: negotiating settlement agendas in (post)colonial inner Sydney', PhD thesis, Department of Geography, University of Melbourne, 2001; http://eprints.unimelb.edu.au/archive/00000242/01/Shaw.pdf
47. Simmel referred to this protection process as the production of a 'protective organ', in 'Metropolis' p. 31.
48. Crilley, 'Architecture as advertising'.
49. C. Simpson, SoHo: the artist and the city (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1981);
50. Zukin, 'Loft living'.
51. Cf. H. Lefebvre, Everyday life in the modern world (New York, Harper & Row, 1971);
52. J. Eyles, 'The geography of everyday life', in D. Gregory and R. Walford, eds, Horizons in human geography (Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1989).
53. For Sydney see G. Waitt and P.M. McGuirk, 'Marking time: tourism and heritage representation at Millers Point, Sydney', Australian geographer 27 (1996).
54. A prescriptive form of urbanism, 'new urbanism', has also entered the discourses of planning and architecture. This 'outcome-based view of planning based on a vision of a compact, heterogeneous city' (S. Fainstein, 'New directions in planning theory', Urban affairs review 35 (2000), p. 451) is distinct from kinds of urbanism that are attended to in the recent surge of interest in urbanism in geography.
55. Cited in Ley, 'Transnational spaces', p. 162.
56. W. S. Shaw, 'Ways of whiteness: Harlemising Sydney's Aboriginal Redfern', Australian geographical studies 38 (2000), pp. 291-305. As with the 'A' in Aboriginal, the 'I' in Indigenous is capitalized in accordance with Australian Aboriginal protocols.
57. M.C. Boyer, The city of collective memory: its historical imagerv and architectural entertainments (Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 1998).
58. P. Jackson, 'Manufacturing meanings', p. 181.
59. 'Manhattanism... [is] an unformulated theory... program [is] to exist in a world totally fabricated by man [sic], ie to live inside fantasy... Manhattanism... [is] an explicit doctrine that can transcend the island of its origins to claim its place among contemporary urbanisms': R. Koolhaas, Delirious New York: a retroactive manifesto for Manhattan, New York (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 7.
60. M. Crang, 'Qualitative methods: the new orthodoxy?', Progress in human geography 26 (2002), pp. 647-55.
61. E.g. data was gathered from the Newtown Times and several street magazines, including the now defunct On the street; website, http:// mdcm.students.arts.unsw.edu.au/click/alpha_house/preview.html and CD-ROM;
62. liner notes from Freaky loops, CD, Sydney: Cryogenesis/2SER/MDS (1998);
63. 'The sultans of spin', http://smh.com.au/articles/2002/06/23/ 1023864527278.html?oneclick=true
64. Quantitative data was used to establish statistical trends about population increases and demographic characteristics (Australian Bureau of Statistics reports). Property price changes for the inner city of Sydney (1997-2001) were established by tabling prices, published weekly in Sydney's main broadsheet newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald. These were checked against the Real Estate Institute's reports on trends.
65. An archive of advertisements in the Sydney Morning Herald (newspaper and internet-based sources) for Sydney's loft apartments was started in 1997, and contributions continue to this day. I used content and discourse analysis techniques on documents and texts.
66. Rather than use a large-scale survey of a statistically representative area, I used a combination of non-directional interviews/informal surveys (with residents of inner Sydney who volunteered through a process of targeting every third household within the specifically affected area of Darlington, Chippendale and Redfern in inner Sydney), and collections of media-generated texts, newspaper articles and advertisements for 'lofts', and any written materials generated by events such as council meetings about a proposed development (council documentation, press releases, newspaper articles).
67. In 2001, every third apartment in newly occupied loft apartment buildings in the Darlington, Chippendale and Redfern area, as well as several buildings in the Central Business District of Sydney (most were under construction therefore few were as yet residentially occupied), were canvassed for interview participants. The interviews provided personal stories about loft living in Sydney - the 30 interviews do not constitute a statistically representative sample. Quotes, and some content analysis of the interview material, provided the data for a paper titled 'GISc and cultural applications: social polarization and spatial co-incidence' by B.G. Lees and W.S. Shaw, presented at the Association of American Geographers annual meeting in Los Angeles in 2002.
68. P. Murphy and S. Watson, Surface City: Sydney at the Millennium (Australia; Pluto Press, 1997) on urban and suburban homosexual spaces in Sydney,
69. and L.N. Costello and S. Hodge, 'Queer/clear/here: destabilising sexualities and spaces', in E. Stratford, ed., Australian Cultural Geographies (Sydney, Meridian, 1999).
70. J. Roseth, 'Residential conversions in Sydney', RAPIJ (May 1981), pp. 76-78.
71. The state of New South Wales.
72. R. Horvath and B. Engels, 'The residential restructuring of inner Sydney', in I. Burnely and J. Forrest, eds, Living in cities: urbanism and society in metropolitan Australia (Sydney, Allen & Unwin, 1985), p. 146.
73. S. Coombs, Sex and anarchy: the life and death of the Sydney Push (Australia, Penguin, 1996), p. viii.
74. Zoning regulations in South Sydney and Sydney City Councils changed to enable warehouses and old office blocks to undergo residential conversion, and many industrial/business zonings changed to Zone 2b, 'medium density residential', and Zone 10, 'mixed use'.
75. Roseth, 'Residential conversions', p. 77.
76. J. Vipond, K. Castle and R. Cardew, 'Revival in inner areas', Australian planner 35 (1998), pp. 215-22.
77. Ibid., p. 216.
78. Sassen-Koob, 1985;
79. Daly, 'Reshaping Sydney'.
80. Roseth, 'Residential conversions'.
81. Ibid., p. 77.
82. Ibid.
83. Ibid. (emphasis added).
84. Zukin, 'Loft living';
85. Podmore, '(Re)Reading the loft living habitus'.
86. Margaret Rapis, a media and communications student at the University of NSW, produced a CD-ROM memento of Alpha House. According to Rapis, Alpha House, 'once a haven for the creative, is one of the wounded prey of the economically rational status quo'. (http:// mdcm.students.arts.unsw.edu.au/click/alpha_house/preview.html). The new 'loft apartment' development has retained the Alpha House name.
87. My personal favourite was the gothic-vampiric occupation and multiple uses of the cavernous Xerox building in the early to mid-1980s; and the Anthony Hordens building hosted an event of epic proportions, which included what was at the time a prestigious line-up of local bands, the night before demolition.
88. I lived in the shadow of this building in a terraced house, and was involved in resident activism to save the building from conversion.
89. This building was just down the street from where I had lived, and I followed the process of its transformation long after I had left the area.
90. From discussions with warehouse survivors about (our) personal experiences of 'the Slaughterhouse' in the mid- to late 1980s and again in the early 1990s, which included reminiscences about the characters and bands that practised and performed there. For a list of Australian bands from that era see http://www.innercitysound.com.au.
91. The property developer was Ivanhoe Pty. Ltd., and the plans to convert Beta House into apartments were sighted at (the former) South Sydney City Councils Planning and Building Department.
92. Robmet completed the development of 66 apartments in 2001.
93. From the late 1980s to 1995, the Sydney 'rave' scene also used these warehouses. See S. Chan, liner notes, Freaky loops: Cryogenesis/2SER/MDS (1998),
94. and C. Gibson and R. Pagan, 'Rave cultures in Sydney, Australia: mapping youth spaces in media discourses', in M.A. Wright, ed., Dance culture, party politics and beyond (London, Verso, 2000).
95. http://mdcm.students.arts.unsw.edu.au/click/alpha_house/preview.html
96. Sun Herald (15 Aug. 1982), p. 18.
97. Personal communication, Newtown Times.
98. Research interview, 29 Apr. 1998.
99. Roseth, 'Residential conversions', p. 77.
100. Vipond et al., 'Revival in inner areas'.
101. Sydney Morning Herald (27 Feb. 1999), p. S1.
102. The Statue of Liberty is an icon of New York. Although it is associated with Manhattan, it is not on the island itself. The (silver) human statue reappeared (gold version) in 2003.
103. Jahn, Sydney Morning Herald (3 Feb. 2001), p. 4A.
104. Glebe & Inner Western Weekly (3 Sept. 1997).
105. Not to be confused with the newer Central Park Apartments, in Chippendale (promoted in Sept. 1998).
106. In this section, all quotes about the developments are taken from their promotional materials.
107. This list exemplifies the kinds of advertisement that dominated the discourses for selling Sydney's loft living from 1997 until 2000 (with the exception of the Watertower, which was converted to apartments in 1982).
108. For discussions see Davis, 'Fortress Los Angeles';
109. M. Sorkin, ed., Variations on a theme park (New York, Hill & Wang, 1990);
110. J. Hillier and P. McManus, 'Pull up the drawbridge: fortress mentality in the suburbs', in K. Gibson and S. Watson, eds, Metropolis now (Sydney, Pluto Press, 1994);
111. E. McKenzie, 'Trouble in Privatopia', Progressive 57 (1993), p. 30;
112. G. Morgan, 'Acts of enclosure: crime and defensible space in contemporary cities', in Gibson and Watson, Metropolis Now;
113. E. Soja, 'Heterotopologies: a remembrance of other spaces in Citadel LA', Strategies 3 (1990), pp. 6-30.
114. Paddington is the benchmark suburb for Sydney's gentrification.
115. Sydney Morning Herald (Apr. 1997).
116. Ibid.
117. Ibid.
118. Ibid. (June 1997).
119. Ibid.
120. Glebe & Inner Western Weekly (3 Sept. 1997).
121. Sydney Morning Herald, (Nov. 1997).
122. Ibid. (Sept. 1997).
123. Ibid.
124. Inner Western Courier (7 Sept. 1998); capitalization taken directly from advertisement.
125. Real Estate Agents L.J. Hooker letter-box drop, (Mar. 1998)
126. Sydney Morning Herald (11 Apr. 1998).
127. Inner Western Suburbs Courier (17 Sept. 1998).
128. Sydney Morning Herald (Mar. 1998).
129. In Australia, the number of people living in high-rise units rose from approximately 129 000 in 1981 to around 334 000 in 2001, with more than half (68%) of all high-rise residents living in New South Wales: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australia now, 2: Australian social trends, highrise living report (15 June 2004). Between 1994 and 1999, 12 970 Development Applications (DAs) for 'residential projects' (apartment buildings) were approved for construction in the City of Sydney Local Government Area, with 7 330 completions. Between 1999 and 2004, 6 329 DAs were approved, and there were 7 257 completions (City Residential Monitor, City of Sydney, 2000, 17, p. 3; 2004, 35, p. 3).
130. P. Bourdieu, Distinction: a social critique of the judgement of taste (London, Routledge, 1984).
131. Research interview, Nov. 2001.
132. Other examples include: 'Fabulous homebodies: marketing the urban dream', Sydney Morning Herald (19 June 1999);
133. 'Step up to life in the Style Zone', Sydney Morning Herald (17 July 1999);
134. ibid. (20 Apr. 2000);
135. 'Moveable modernism: a Sydney design duo creates a buzz from New York', Sydney Morning Herald (20-26 Apr. 2000);
136. and the more recent warning of loss of local amenity and culture in 'Too much sacrificed at The Cross', Sydney Morning Herald (27 May 2003).
137. Research interview, Nov. 2001.
138. Ibid.
139. These locational themes dominated the research narratives: Lees and Shaw, 'GISc and cultural applications'.
140. Research interview, Nov. 2001.
141. Ibid.
142. 'The Bronx' is a reference to the infamous Aboriginal community in Redfern. See Shaw, 'Ways of whiteness'.
143. For most of the residents of luxury apartments interviewed in 2001, local-scale issues were subordinate to the broader economic/geographical issues, such as cost of property versus convenience/access to the CBD.
144. 'Redfern' is also known as 'Aboriginal Redfern', 'The Block' or 'Eveleigh Street'.
145. Shaw, 'Harlemising Redfern'.
146. Research interview, 4 Feb. 1998.
147. Research interview, 27 July 1998.
148. N. Smith, The new urban frontier: gentrification and the revanchist city (London, Routledge, 1996).
149. Simmel, 'Metropolis', pp. 35-36.
150. Research interview, Nov. 2001.
151. J. Goss, 'Representing and re-presenting the contemporary city', p. 181.
152. Jackson, 'Manufacturing meanings'.
153. Zukin, 'Loft living'.
154. R. Fincher and J.M. Jacobs, eds, Cities of difference (New York, Guilford Press, 1998).