Newcastle is undergoing a “transformation on a scale that we haven’t seen since we stopped driving horses and carts down Hunter Street”, according to prominent Hunter property developer Hilton Grugeon.
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The catalogue of major developments under way in inner Newcastle is unprecedented: the light rail line; a new university campus; the 500-unit mall redevelopment; 30,000 square metres of office space across three buildings in Newcastle West, one of them the tallest structure in the city; two hotels; three Honeysuckle apartment blocks; and hundreds of other apartments scattered from the east end to Wickham.
The NSW Department of Planning and Environment estimates that the Newcastle local government area will grow by 32,000 people in the next 18 years, and Lake Macquarie by 24,000.
The effects of that population growth are already being felt in increasing pressure on traffic, parking, schools and house prices as Newcastle becomes more city and less big country town.
But opinions are varied on what this transformation means for the city. Is it a long-overdue urban renewal providing much-needed jobs, a developer-driven threat to Newcastle’s laid-back lifestyle, or somewhere in between?
Newcastle’s Steve O’Connor is the president elect of the Planning Institute of Australia, the first town planner from outside a capital city to lead the profession’s peak national body.
Mr O’Connor worked for 15 years at Port Stephens Council, has been in private practice for 25 years and sits on the NSW Independent Planning Commission.
The Herald spoke to him recently at a cafe – sandwiched between light rail work in Scott Street and Iris Capital’s mall redevelopment site – to talk about how Newcastle is settling in to its new skin.
A city with a skyline of cranes is a very healthy sign.
Newcastle Herald: Can you put what’s happening in Newcastle in some kind of broader context?
Steve O’Connor: This change is happening from a manufacturing base, with BHP being the anchor, to life without BHP, a totally different service-industry perspective, and a great future going forward.
You do hear about great manufacturing cities in the UK like Manchester and Liverpool, and then over in the US, places like Chicago and Detroit, that have been through really tough times, and I’d be surprised if they’re bouncing out of that transition from a traditional manufacturing base into the 21st century anywhere near as well as what Newcastle is.
Newcastle is the seventh largest city in Australia, and the largest with a strong manufacturing base that’s not a capital city. I don’t think there would be a parallel. Wollongong, they’ve also gone through a significant transition. Maybe Geelong – I think there’s been some good things happening down there – but I still think they’d be struggling to do what Newcastle has done and is achieving.
NH: Can you make that shift out of manufacturing without disruption?
SO: It’s not possible to live in the western world in the 21st century without disruption. Digital disruption is happening to us all the time, things like airbnb and Uber. Whether you like it or not those things are happening all around us and interrupting the way you used to do things.
The whole shared economy is just a huge thing that’s happening and is going to happen more and more, and people are just going to have to get used to it and adjust.
I guess there’s been more physical disruption here with the building works, but a city with a skyline of cranes is a very healthy sign. It means it’s a city that’s making that transition; it’s going places; people have got the confidence to invest in it; there’s going to be a future; there’s going to be jobs. It’s got all the essential ingredients.
I think Sydney’s in exactly that situation where there’s a lot of investment happening in infrastructure and it’s causing a lot of inconvenience and pain, but people hopefully can see the end goal, that it will result in a more efficient and more liveable city and more sustainable city. You’ve just got to go through that pain and anguish while it happens.
NH: Do you see debates about rail lines, parking and the like as relatively minor skirmishes in a broader war that the city is winning?
SO: I think that’s a pretty good analogy to make. They’re just the inevitable consequences of making what is a very desirable transition. Just looking around where we are now, seeing the effort they’ve gone to to retain those heritage facades, it’s great that there’s still something there of the old Newcastle to remember, but it’s going to be a very different Newcastle to what it is today or what it has been in the past.
NH: Do the older buildings lend warmth to a city that might otherwise be turning into glass and concrete?
SO: It’s not just the materials. The scale people can relate to a lot better, the human scale of the old buildings, as opposed to the modern skyscrapers.
NH: Autonomous vehicles could transform building design, roads and public transport, and some people in the industry expect this disruption within a decade. Are we doing enough to plan for this now?
SO: You’re dead right. It does change things radically. It has the potential to reduce the need for inner-city car parks, for example, and other areas like large road reservations that you can turn into park land or for low-cost housing or some other community benefit.
So it does raise all sorts of possibilities, but I mentioned the shared economy: there’s a need to see those two things go hand-in-hand. If everybody owns a driverless vehicle and they all have the same mentality about how we travel to work and how we get around, we’ll have all these vehicles circulating around in the city waiting for their client to be needed. The traffic will actually get worse. We’ve got a lot of thinking to do around how we adopt that new technology and be smart about it.
I can tell you that with the planning that’s being done, there’s always mention of the new technology, but having a full understanding of it and knowing exactly how you would do things now given what it’s going to be like in 10 years’ time is quite difficult, and those technologies are changing all the time. They might look back in 10 or 20 years’ time and say, ‘Oh, they didn’t see this coming,’ but it’s not exactly clear how it’s going to crystallise.
NH: Inner-city apartments capture most of the headlines, but there’s plenty of development happening on the edges of the city in what some call urban sprawl. Is this a bad thing?
SO: There is a need to have a diversity of housing options, so some housing on the fringe is perfectly acceptable, but I think you’ll find the type of housing that’s going to be provided in those new estates is going to be different to what we’ve seen in the past.
There’ll be a sprinkling of medium density. Even the standard blocks with a single dwelling are going to be smaller lots. They’re going to have efficiencies with water tanks and solar panels – quite a different concept.
Just with the way things are changing with technology, the number of people who will have to travel to work in the future will be significantly reduced. There’ll be home offices. Working remotely will become much more commonplace.
NH: We’re hearing anecdotal evidence of more people in Newcastle starting to think about public transport options when choosing where to live, as they do more readily in Sydney. Will we continue to see more of this in Newcastle?
SO: I have no doubt about that. Public transport hubs will become bees to a honey pot. They’ll be really popular places, there’ll be a lot of activity around them. The redevelopment of the old Store building will have a bus terminal, two towers with 380 apartments, office buildings, right next to the light rail and train interchange. That’ll be a great example of a transport hub right in the heart of Newcastle.
NH: Will the light rail achieve what it was designed for?
SO: I think inevitably it will because there is no doubt the heavy rail was a physical barrier between the heart of the city and its port, which is such a natural and attractive feature of the city and has a long maritime history as well. The instant the heavy rail line ceased and those fences came down then we did get better connection. It’s not as attractive as it’s going to be because there’s large parts of it under construction, but I think without a doubt it’s going to achieve its goal. It’s such a short distance to walk from Hunter Street to Honeysuckle. It’s a matter of minutes, and it’s dead flat. It’s not arduous. It’s going to work, for sure.
NH: We’re seeing evidence of oversupply of apartments and falling prices in some capital cities. Is that a danger in Newcastle?
SO: We’re growing as a nation at a rate of about 1.8 per cent per annum. That’s the highest in all OECD nations above 10 million population. If we’re going to continue with that level of population growth, then we’re going to need to be producing housing at that rate. There might be short-term oversupply, but I think that will soon disappear.
NH: Do you see all this development rolling on for the next 10 or 20 years.
SO: I do see it continuing. I don’t think it’s a bubble that’s about to burst. But some of the fundamental things that will impact on it are the immigration rates in Australia. The federal government can alter those levers at any time and change some of those fundamentals. There has been a push for a smaller Australia. People like Bob Carr have come out strongly against those immigration rates.
We’ve also got to take into account the ageing of the population. That’s going to have a huge impact on the type of housing that we need, and accelerate that move away from the detached dwelling sitting in an outer suburban area and more demand for the sort of stuff that’s closer to transport networks and hospitals and education facilities.
NH: What could we be doing better as this transformation continues?
SO: I think probably the quality of urban design, and particularly architectural design, so these new buildings, this concrete and glass, just making sure they’re as distinctive and reflecting the local character as much as possible, rather than just some bland thing that could be in any city around Australia or around the world.
There are certain things in place to try to improve that, but there’s probably more we could be doing and putting a bigger emphasis on that. Some developers just have a cookie-cutter approach and just churn them out and move on to his next project, rather than stopping and thinking that this is going to be here for the next 100 years, what should it look like, how should it interact with its local community.
NH: Plenty of Newcastle people move to Sydney then come back, but are we now seeing people arrive who have never lived in Newcastle before?
SO: Yes. It’s a totally different dynamic. And a colleague who has moved from Sydney said it was fantastic to finish work at five o’clock on a Friday and he and his wife were down at the beach in 10 minutes. That’s unthinkable in Sydney. You’ve got the train network clogged, buses and public transport very difficult.
The unaffordability of Sydney is driving Newcastle’s growth, and I can’t see that changing dramatically. It’s the second or third most unaffordable city to live in in the world. Even if it came down a few pegs, it’s still going to be unaffordable for most people.
People still have an archaic version of Newcastle in their mind. But a lot of young people who are looking seriously at trying to get into the property market are realising there’s great opportunities here, and there’s a great lifestyle to go with it; it’s not just a great investment opportunity. I think over time we will make that full transition. It’s not just attracting an old population looking to retire.
NH: Do Newcastle people have to get used to the fact that they’re living in a city and that it’s going to keep growing?
SO: If we just use the example of the University of Newcastle and their second lot of buildings in the city, people might be thinking, ‘Oh, well, they probably won’t want to build any more campuses in the city centre, so that phase may come to an end.’ I think there’s every chance other universities are going to want to have a presence here, and we may well see a continuation of that trend, even if it’s not the University of Newcastle. I think we’re going to see more of what we’ve seen happening, not just a very short-term thing.
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