The COVID-19 pandemic of the last year has reminded cities all over the world of the need to provide ample public and open spaces for their citizens, given the urgent requirements of physical distancing. But more importantly than that, there is the recognition that these spaces play a much deeper and important role in all our lives as inhabitants of the city — as places of recreation, culture, democracy, and community.
Accordingly, the NSW Government launched its $15 million Streets as Shared Spaces Program in May 2020, encouraging local councils to scope out the potential for and to pilot improvements to their streets and public spaces.
Campbelltown has, in recent months, been seeking to take advantage of this program to revive the faded glory that is Queen Street, Campbelltown’s main street.
I say ‘faded glory’ because this particular street has been in decline for years, if not decades. Even in my primary and high school days (which admittedly aren’t that long ago), Queen Street has never been a particularly bustling place for a city of Campbelltown’s size and stature in Sydney’s south west. Despite occasional pockets of hub and activity around popular food joints and during festivals such as Fisher’s Ghost, Queen Street is, for the most part, a barren and desolate shell of a public space.
Queen Street is not an isolated case. It is part of a much more widespread trend across Australia and the United States, born in the mid-1900s with the rise of the suburban shopping mall which has sucked the life and vitality out of main streets over the past half century. Other urban centres in Sydney exhibit the same malaise, with Liverpool and Parramatta leaving their respective main streets Macquarie Street and Church Street in the dust as their communities opt for the more attractive and appealing air-conditioned retail boxes of Westfield shopping centres.
Likewise, Queen Street has lost its retail core and all its urban vitality to the shopping mall. A quick walk to the southern end of Queen Street leads to Campbelltown Mall, where there is a noticeable increase in pedestrian activity. Yet this is nothing compared to the other retail giant that is Macarthur Square, having established itself as the major shopping centre destination for south-west Sydney, and thusly is brimming with activity day in and day out.
Of course, there are many other factors that have contributed to the death of Queen Street, especially from an urban design perspective. Not least of which is the fact that the city centre aligned along Queen St is separated from the nearby Campbelltown Station and surrounding residential areas by an ugly sea of parking spaces — an issue which warrants its own lengthy discussion, but the gist of which emphasises that free and abundant parking is an extremely inefficient use of space, is unappealing and discourages pedestrian activity, contributes to increased car dependency, induces urban sprawl and lower densities, and ultimately comes with a high financial and social cost for everyone.
In an effort to revive Queen Street, Campbelltown City Council has launched its On Q activation program as part of Streets as Shared Spaces, which is currently trialling street installation ideas to activate the space.
These street installations include parklets, which repurpose on-street parking bays for amenity such as mini-parks and seating — in effect extending the sidewalk and reclaiming car space for people.
For a city and a region that has continued to dig itself deeper and deeper into car dependency and sprawl, it is a nice change of pace to see them pursue a project that will benefit the community at a human-scale by downgrading the place of the automobile in the street user hierarchy.
However, it is my opinion that such interventions can only address surface symptom-level issues with Queen Street. Unless there is something here to address the underlying roots of its malaise — among others, the fact that the nearby shopping centres have appropriated the retail and community function of the main street — Queen Street will remain a faded glory to the detriment of Campbelltown as a future successful urban centre.
