Illustration: Edd Aragon
There is a 10-metre section at the centre of the Devonshire Street tunnel where the air never moves.
I formed this thesis one morning after following a fluoro-topped railway worker as he swabbed blood from the tunnel floor. Weeks later, despite the glum hordes who oscillate daily through, the antiseptic reek remained, strong as day one - and no, not through obsessive swabbing, since the blood also stayed.
A city lives or dies on the quality of its public spaces. Be they hard or leafy, accidental or designed, breeze-washed, grimy or secluded, a city's spaces make plain the delights and addictions of its citizenry. Together, the rhythms, pace and texture of this connective tissue frame the dance of the demos.
Public space is also a form of tax; redistributing the goodies.
Yet the Devonshire Street tunnel, more used than the Opera House, is like some chain store brandy snap. Cream goes in both ends but never quite reaches the middle. What does that say about us?
A wonderful new book, Public Sydney: Drawing the City by Peter John Cantrill and Philip Thalis commemorates, in passing, the expedient birth of this ''miserable pedestrian tunnel'' from the 1906 collision of the new Central Station with our main east-west street.
A century on, but just metres away at Darling Harbour, the government writes a billion dollar cheque to repeat the same expedient errors while, up the road at University of Sydney, architecture students revolt against the same costly mediocrity.
Public Sydney is the first-ever collection of scale drawings of Sydney's public spaces. Our equivalent of Nolli's map of Rome, it grew from a decade's painstaking research with UTS architecture students. It is a love-song to Sydney, not as harbour adjunct, but as a made thing, valuable in itself.
It is the greatest work of public-space scholarship seen in this country. Yet in 2006, like Macquarie in 1822, Cantrill and Thalis were unceremoniously sacked for their troubles by UTS. Seems public-mindedness, of the space-making kind, is as tidal as that old tunnel, coming and going with the left and right of political fashion.
As a child I was fascinated by a futuristic MAD magazine I found under the bottom bunk in a borrowed lake shack. In it, two bell-bottomed, peacenik parents, now middle-aged, bemoaned the law-abiding, mortgage-paying habits of their young-adult offspring. Where, wailed the parents, had they gone wrong?
It was my first taste of satire and, naturally, it hid a moral point. We assume that progress is always forward. But here was the suggestion - shocking to my eight-year-old head - that things, big things, could regress.
I had only the vaguest idea of what a hippie was, yet it was clear that the shift being lampooned was not just style. It was the difference between belief in collective creativity - publicness - and selfishness.
Yet now it seems the pendulum swings again. Not only are Janis Joplin, Mick Jagger and the always-excruciating Deep Purple gargling at us from every hipster boutique. Not only are bell-bottoms and aviators back. There is a discernible shift towards public spiritedness, a recognition that we're all in this together. There's even student rebellion.
In the '60s you weren't a genuine student unless you'd jeopardised your future with at least one sit-in or exam boycott. Now, such events are rare - until last month, when Sydney University's architecture students staged a build-in.
''Claiming the ownership of space,'' Design, Construct, Protest built a number of marginally functional installations in the courtyard. Their beef? Not 'Nam. Not the right to hallucination as a study method. They wanted to be taught properly, taught enough, in studio.
Studio is the core of all design teaching. Other things - history, structures, lighting - can be taught in lectures. But design, into which everything else feeds, must be taught in studio. You have to sit around and draw ideas.
It's expensive, because it requires head-to-head connection. But there is no other way to learn to translate idea into form.
As students, we had three-hour studios, four days a week; twelve hours, officially. Unofficially, we ate and debated in studio, studied and drank there, built domes and yurts, painted everything matte black then tiger-striped, and did all-nighters there. Studio was centre of existence.
These students have half that, six hours a week; all they demand is no further cut. Yet 38 per cent cuts have been made. That brings six to four. Sometimes whole weeks pass with no studio scheduled. The students are so desperate that they have started running their own studios, teaching each other.
The dean John Redmond says it's for the students' good. ''We are reducing students' expected workload to enable those with … other responsibilities to complete their … education in an equitable way that does not disadvantage their academic performance …''
Very less is more. You hike the fees then shrink the product so they can earn enough to pay. Perhaps the university would like to cancel teaching altogether?
As if that weren't private-sucking-of-public-realm enough, consider Darling Harbour, where billions of public dollars and land are deployed to repeat past errors.
They say it's essential to Sydney's future, but so little changes. Three massive buildings - convention, exhibition, entertainment - will replace convention, exhibition, entertainment. There's an extra hotel at the north and some student housing at the south where, at least, streets are extended. Otherwise, same.
The net gains, across a 50,000 square metre development, are a bigger banquet space and a 20 per cent increase in exhibition. Otherwise, same size, same parvenu aesthetic, same blasted public realm, same cold-shoulder to Ultimo, same disdain for public space.
I'm no Darling Harbour fan but honestly, why break so many eggs just to make the same old omelette?
Twitter: @emfarrelly
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