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from: Vanclay, F. et al. (eds) Making Sense of Place, Canberra: National Museum of Australia, pp.229-38.

SENSES OF URBAN CHARACTER

Kim Dovey, Stephen Wood and Ian Woodcock

What does it mean to say that a place has ‘character’? This is a term that is applied to both people and places, often implying an identity with a certain authenticity or distinction. Across our cities, ‘urban character’ is defended in older suburbs and created in new ones, preserved and constructed. In-depth interviews with residents from a range of locations across the Melbourne metropolitan area in 2004 revealed that the experience and discourse of ‘character’ encompasses a range of understandings of place identity.

Camberwe ll is a middle-ring suburb where character is described as: ‘the feeling it creates in you … you walk through an area and you feel comfortable with it ... you get a reasonable continuity of single dwelling homes, leafy trees’.

Fit zroy is an inner-city district with a diverse mix of both people and buildings: ‘It has that “edge” – that people are interesting, that it has a good atmosphere. It has a sort of a seedy side, a sort of an underbelly that is in a way a little bit scary, but also has a community, it has character and it has depth.’

Hedgeley Dene is a leafy neighbourhood that became the subject of a major dispute over the protection of urban character: ‘It was actually about that “character” aspect of the neighbourhood

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… being single dwellings on large blocks … family homes as opposed to multi-unit developments with a transient population’.

Kensington Banks is an example of ‘New Urbanist’ influence with a focus on walkability and new housing types: ‘We find that in this estate particularly there’s not a lot of character ... it doesn’t have that interaction that we’re looking for … there’s not that feeling’.

Beacon Cove is a new waterfront development in the inner city where clusters of housing line a series of ‘greens’: ‘Beacon Cove, although it’s not constructed that way, could be seen to have certain elements of a gated community ... there’s limited access points’.

Carol ine Springs on the urban fringe is a series of ‘villages’ marketed as having a distinct sense of place: ‘Everyone who moves in … has to be willing and wanting to be community minded.’ There is no single perspective to interpret these places. Rather than present them as case studies, we want to explore what urban character means by taking a brief slice across the interview material grouped into nine themes: (1) character as feel and atmosphere; (2) building style and type; (3) uniformity and diversity; (4) covenants and regulations; (5) height and density; (6) community; (7) open space; (8) social class; and (9) ethnicity. As in a play, place-identity or character can be seen as a series of narratives juxtaposed against the imagery of built form. A key interest is the manner in which formal and social experiences and constructions of place intersect

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as we move from built form to social identity. The images do not always support the interviews. As in everyday life, character can pass without comment. One aim here is to stimulate engagement with the differences between quotes and between image and quotes — to raise questions rather than provide answers. One of the keys to understanding urban character is that places are always unclear and unfinished; 'place' is always in contention and embodies contradictions. FEEL AND ATMOSPHERE

(Character is) ‘the feel of a place, what it represents to you – the people, the buildings, the things that happen there – are all part of the urban character’. (Fitzroy)

‘To me, urban character … is actually what’s the general atmosphere, the ambience of an area, which is probably made up of a combination of things, such as types of buildings … vegetation … what’s the actual lifestyle of the area.’ (Camberwell)

‘Just something about it. You know, you drive in some places and it makes you feel at home. And you drive in other places, it makes you feel – I really can’t explain it.’ (Caroline Springs)

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BUILDING TYPE AND STYLE

‘a lot of the people like to think of the area as being almost, even though it no longer is, but almost, as a Victorian-Edwardian … bastion’ (Camberwell)

‘You can’t really beat a row of period homes. You can go into really nice streets around the eastern suburbs, lovely array of period homes together.’ (Caroline Springs) UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY

‘People have said to me ... it looks like a stage set, a film set … well “Legoland” perhaps ... We love living in Legoland!’ (Beacon Cove)

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'I think it does show a bit of the character of Caroline Springs that we’re not all the same, we don’t all want the same… they could have made one area where you could only have your weird houses over there but then it wouldn’t have had the same effect.' (Caroline Springs)

‘I liked (the neighbourhood) because it wasn’t 100 per cent uniform. I liked that it hadn’t been “got at” … we liked the freedom that it gave us at the time. Yeah! We didn’t feel restricted in that sense of a streetscape to keep in.’ (Hedgeley Dene) COVENANTS AND REGULATIONS

‘We are kind of subverting the covenants. Everyone does it to an extent. If we painted the front facades pink, they’d come down on us like a ton of bricks, but they’re not stopping people doing doors.’ (Beacon Cove)

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‘People really complain that covenants aren’t enforced … they get really shitty, this house is letting the whole street down … because that’s the community, that’s what we bought into.’ (Caroline Springs)

‘It’s an insult to modern architecture ... [to] keep in lock step to an idea of attic only upstairs, colours and fences designed to fit in with an area that never existed, only existed in someone’s mind.’ (Hedgeley Dene) HEIGHT AND DENSITY

‘I think you can take some buildings that are three storeys, but eight – no! I think that does start to change the village quality that we historically had about Fitzroy.’

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‘My preference from the point of view of daily living is to be in a low-scale area where I have a sense of my own being and not being dwarfed.’ (Camberwell)

‘This block’s a hundred square metres we’re sitting on and I’ve got a very adequate lifestyle here.’ (Kensington Banks) COMMUNITY

‘You don’t get the sense that people really care what you look like, or what you say, or how you act, because there’s so many different people doing so many different things.’ (Fitzroy)

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‘People came here from … places ... where they weren’t accepted into the character of that area unless they’d been there 30 or 40 years. Because we all came together ... the community feeling was established at a fairly early stage.’ (Beacon Cove)

‘[In] Camberwell, I’m surrounded by PLU’s – people like us. I see that as a comfort zone.’ OPEN SPACE

‘I don’t use it a lot ... but I find it very pleasurable to know that I can go out there at any time. And I glance out, say late afternoon, that’s when it’s in full use. People are home from work, they’ve got their wine in their hands, they’ve got their dogs running around. That to me is lovely.’ (Beacon Cove)

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‘I think you’ve got the illusion of participating, probably without having to … There is a tendency to like having people around and to enjoy that sense of community but without having to actually get involved in it.’ (Kensington Banks)

‘You feel like you’re walking by yourself, not subject to any inspection by anyone else … it’s the feeling of … the false … the false sense of being able to get away from the suburbs in such a small space.’ (Hedgeley Dene) SOCIAL CLASS

‘I don’t say I live in Beacon Cove … I didn’t like it that this little estate was being given a name. I don’t think I’ve ever used the name.’

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‘You feel like you’re stepping up when you come to Caroline Springs.’

‘Most people ... fit in the Camberwell tribe … without sort of standing out too much ... If a guy drives a bright gold … Mercedes or BMW … [people] would walk past and say what a tasteless individual ... and that again I think is part of the character.’ ETHNICITY

‘The houses are very much like each other. I mean different varieties, but you wouldn’t walk past this one and say “Oh, this one belongs to an Indian, this one belongs to a Maltese”. Nothing stands out for me that says that that belongs to a different nationality.’ (Caroline Springs)

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‘Some of these Chinese moneyed people ... they come in and they build this wall to wall thing, no garden, just concrete because they’re not used to gardens in Hong Kong, they’re not. So they change the character.’ (Camberwell)

‘These young Asian tenants up the end here, they got their garage full of all this shit ... they can’t keep their garbage cans in their garage, they leave it out in the street ... and I say to these people: ‘we’re trying to keep the streetscape looking like a mews. [in mock-Asian accent] “Oh! I did no understand!”.’ (Kensington Banks) WHAT IS URBAN CHARACTER? There are many intersections between these different themes on what ‘character’ means. One of our conclusions is that the tendency towards closure in theories of place is one of the difficulties. Too often, the quest to preserve or create ‘place’ leads to a reduction to singular meanings. The desire to protect character in older neighbourhoods, or produce it in new ones, is fraught with difficulty. There is a tendency for these definitions and experiences of urban character to slip seamlessly from physical characteristics of built form to characteristics of social identity. The attempt to protect and construct urban character is often an attempt to locate the social in built form. This is also a reduction of character to a set of characteristics with the attendant danger of turning character into caricature. Place identity, like human identity, is dynamic. It is being produced and performed through the very discourse about what it is. Part of the task in understanding character is that of keeping this discussion, and the senses of place with which it engages, open. We conclude with a return to the dilemma of the idea of ‘character’ as ‘feel’ and some quotes from those involved in the politics of place preservation. First, the lack of clarity is at times seen to be a result of raising the question of character to self-consciousness. ‘Until I really thought about [urban character], I thought I knew what it meant. Does that make sense? And then you think: Geez, what is it?’ (Kensington Banks) It does make sense in terms of the phenomenology of everyday life wherein the experience of place is generally embodied first and conceived second. Yet the desire by residents, councils and professionals to incorporate the concept of character into the planning code brings a more difficult quest for wider agreement.

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If people want an urban character area, then they need to define it very clearly in a way that professionals [understand] … they’re nearly at their wits end trying to work out what it means. So first of all, you need a definition that is very exact and then you need a group of people including the owners who agree with that definition. (Hedgeley Dene) This at times produces a discourse that oscillates between the desire to define and codify the ‘feel’ and the realization that it cannot be defined and codified as ‘feel’. [Character] probably is ‘feel’, but it’s probably not how I would describe it. You see I’d probably think of it more as – yeah, no, it probably is ‘feel’, in which case it’s hard to move. (Fitzroy)

And finally, the ‘feel’ itself is often unstable and can be changed by the quest for character: ‘It’s funny ... when you’ve had to fight for things, and had to analyse it in such a detailed way, I think you get to a point where you think I don’t know what I saw in it in the first place.’ (Hedgeley Dene) ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This study is part of an ARC Discovery project entitled ‘What is Urban Character?: Defining, Constructing and Regulating Urban Place Identity’. The research was approved by the Human Ethics Advisory Group of the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning of The University of Melbourne. All photographs are by Kim Dovey except Figures 5 & 13 by Ian Woodcock.