The world of Caroll’s Jabberwocky is plagued by mystery and danger. It is a landscape mustered through a myriad of nonce-words and neologisms, “slithy”, “uffish”, “vorpal”, and filled with fantastic mythical creatures, the “Bandersnatch”, the “Jubjub bird” and of course the “Jabberwocky”. The words, like the woods, have a dark, ominous, niggling and imperceptible mystery around them.
The words have an assumed hostility. And in a sense it’s the mere thought of ‘woods at night’ which conjure up years of repressed nursery tales, images of storms, owls, wolves wild and rampant, danger, fear, insecurity and vulnerability. But it needn’t be woods. Popular myths of the night define other public spaces as well, one which we often find ourselves very fearful of indeed, ‘the city at night’.
At the core of all these nocturnal mythologies is the assumption that public space, particularly public space in a high density area, is untrustworthy and risky, that just like the Big Bad Wolf watching Little Red Riding Hood from behind a tree, around the base of skyscrapers lurk numerous and polymorphic Jabberwockies.
While it’s a different story by day, where the same empty alleyways are flooded with crowds, some of that nighttime paranoia subconsciously trickles over into the minds of the city’s residents. And so this carried over sense of danger into daylight perpetuates the vast untrustworthiness of public space in the inner city. It is read with wary eyes and confined to the nervous streetbenched lunchbreak, the ritual smokebreak, the blinkered jog, the destitute’s toilet, a dirty gritty harsh and concrete world, at the very sinks of the moats of glass castles where serf and skater dwell. This is of course hyperbole, but the point is still true. Public space in the inner city is victim to an assumed hostility, and subsequently perpetuates its own undesirability.
Sydney’s inner city public spaces are often critiqued. Streets are used almost exclusively as traffic corridors, pedestrians are marginalised and squashed against narrow footpaths. The streetscape is dominated with huge highway-supporting concrete pylons and monorail tracks. These notes, and many more, come from a 2007 report conducted by Jan Gehl of Gehl Architects, commissioned by the City of Sydney Council itself.
“Tall buildings are often designed as beautiful objects, where much has been done in designing the way the tower meets the sky. Little attention has been paid to the interaction with the area and the city they are placed in. The result is oversized, closed and passive ground floor frontages incapable of interacting with people at street level. The northern part of the city is thus being influenced negatively by big closed office buildings which is rather unfortunate since this area is the link between Circular Quay and Town Hall. The attractiveness of walking here in the daytime is minimal and the perception of safety drops at night since there are too many blank walls and too little going on.”
Sydney is lined with narrow, blank, shadowy, windswept, traffic-clogged streets. What’s more, Gehl illustrates how the undesirability of Sydney’s public spaces actually has an impact on limiting local economic activity.
“[We studied] the facilities that are open during the evening hours (after 9pm) on a normal summer weekday within the study area. The recording shows that most of the city is relatively quiet in the evenings, with the main entertainment and night activity areas confi ned to a small area of the city, the fun district with the main activities as bars, clubs, cinemas, restaurants and retail. The activity is highly concentrated on George Street and spills out onto the side streets, especially side streets down towards Chinatown.
It is striking that the northern part; consumer district and working district are devoid of evening activities to such an extent that practically nothing is to be found in these streets after 9pm. It is very important to strengthen the retail district and working district as places for evening activities as they make up an important pedestrian link to Circular Quay.
To achieve a more even spread of evening activities throughout the city and to improve the public perception of safety it is recommended to develop and implement a policy that will promote evening activities throughout the city centre.”
A full copy of the report can be read here (50mb PDF).
This suggests the need to rejuvenate the real estate of Sydney’s public spaces, its squares, streets, walks and parks and convert them into viable economic surfaces. But with the already crowded city, narrow streets, certain limitations arise for the short-term renovation of public urban space. One of Gehl’s recommendations is in the use of lighting to illuminate and reanimate these environments.
“Security is an important factor for the development of public life. People need to feel safe during the day and at night to keep visiting the city and to bring their children. Experienced security and real security might not be identical phenomena, so making streets feel safe has much to do with creating a friendly environment that people fi nd inviting. Residents and activities in the city generally assist to the feeling of security. Lights in windows – a symptom of eyes on the street – give visitors the feeling that help is close by if trouble should arise. The scale and detail of buildings is also important at night, as well as transparency and light from window displays. Furthermore, sufficient light to find your way and to be able to recognise the faces of passers-by assist to a general feeling of safety”
With this in mind, light projection comes to the fore as a quick and efficient (as well as relatively non-invasive and inexpensive) method to revamp Sydney’s nighttime streetscapes. Over the next year, this is what I will be working on with the University of New South Wales. As an emerging and somewhat untapped field, I will be looking at public projections more intensely, with more emphasis, research and production on creating interactive projections able to erode the assumed hostility of public urban space, welcome interaction and residency and invite economic activity.
While projection has been played with in Sydney, I feel more can be done. And the projections needn’t be anything grandiloquent set aside for a special event like Vivid festival. They can be small, quirky, humble and refreshing, and can be trickled through streets like streetlamps. After all, the mome raths outgrabe until the Jabberwocky is slain..
