Charting a Changing Waterfront: A Review of Key Schemes for Perth's Foreshore

Abstract

Twenty-one years have elapsed between an international design competition held for the redesign of Perth's Swan River foreshore and the commencement of construction of a small, but significant, section of the this river's edge. This extended period of design proposition allows an opportunity to reflect on trends in waterfront design in Perth, and shifting notions of what Perth is, and could be, as expressed by the proposals. Trends identified include a growing appreciation of urban values, increasing aspirations to produce symbolic capital, increasing production of stylized urban imagery and the corresponding dominance of the architectural discipline. Perth's foreshore has been until recently a vast expanse of typically unoccupied, turfed parkland. Analogous to a scaled-up suburban ‘front yard’, its role has been typically symbolic rather than functional. As such, schemes for the redesign of this foreshore, and subsequent public reactions, also tend to reveal aspects of Perth's collective identity. While the 1991 competition-winning scheme recreated a naturalistic landscape on the foreshore, later state government-endorsed schemes in 2008 and 2011 proposed the urbanization of the foreshore at significant densities. These recent schemes reflect, and have forged, a growing desire for urbanity in Perth.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Geoffrey London, Nigel Westbrook and two anonymous reviewers for providing insightful and useful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks also to Jill Penter for her ever patient copyediting; and to Dinis Candeias and Rosemary Halsmith for assistance with the images.

Notes

In this paper Perth's foreshore will refer to the broader landscape delineating Perth's relationship to the Swan River. The Perth Waterfront site is a smaller defined site that is currently under development.

^2. In a 2008 survey, of 1300 people, 67% of comments regarding the scheme were positive, 20% negative, and the rest either neutral or unrelated (Hatch and Jerrard 2008, 17).