By Rachael Dexter
It looks like a scene from a classic whodunnit murder mystery. There’s fluoro orange tape plastered around the kitchen, red string pinned across walls littered with maps, photos and newspaper clippings.
But this isn’t a traditional crime-scene mock-up. Instead, it’s an exhibition – part urban planning, part art installation – inside Melbourne architect Paul Van Herk’s Parkville apartment.
Architect Paul van Herk and master’s student Gabriela Amstalden Martins with their RMIT-backed exhibition.Credit: Penny Stephens
The title is What Killed Fishermans Bend?
Like many of his generation of local architects, when Van Herk graduated, one of his first projects was designing developments in Fishermans Bend – which is still officially billed as Australia’s biggest urban renewal project, where 80,000 people are expected to live and work by 2050.
“About 10 years ago, it was really hyped and really like the next big thing,” said Van Herk, now 36.
But more than a decade after the area was controversially rezoned by then-Liberal planning minister Matthew Guy, much ink has been spilt over the failure to materialise the full Fishermans Bend vision.
A tram line promised by 2025 has been abandoned for the foreseeable future. A fraction of the promised housing has been built and it’s mainly isolated to an area near the existing tram line. The only substantial commercial development to emerge since the rezoning has been a Woolworths supermarket.
Meanwhile, the state government has had to retroactively buy land for public infrastructure in the area. Earlier this week it announced it had acquired land for a new primary school.
Officially, the exhibition is billed as a “cacophonous collection of news clippings, photography, expansive historical research, architectural drawings and spreadsheets; assembled by an obsessive hermit trying to solve the murder mystery with what is at hand”.
Van Herk has spent a year on the project with research assistant and architecture student Gabriela Amstalden Martins. The result is a mystery, with each room of the apartment dedicated to a tongue-in-cheek interrogation of the Utopia-style buzzwords – innovation! activation! – around the grand visions for the suburb.
Martins says the power of the exhibition is cutting through the nonsense. “That voice that is able to say things frankly, you can’t really find that – at least in architecture,” she said.
Van Herk says that since the exhibition opened, several planners have visited it, including those from the state government involved in plans for Fishermans Bend.
“They’re sort of trying to understand their discipline through the lens of the failure as well,” he said.
The exhibition highlights the obvious guff in many of the historical master plans and visions for Fishermans Bend – it was once touted as a coastal place when it is mainly cut off from the water. But it also has an affection for the place as it is, its history, and suggests there are “clues” to how the area will realistically develop.
“The Woolworths that’s been built there – it’s the main new provider of jobs, but it was not the plan,” said Van Herk.
He says while many things that were envisaged have not yet come to fruition – the area has successful and busy industrial parks.
“This isn’t empty and it’s not a failure. It’s just doing it in a different way.
Part of Fishermans Bend from above in 2023.Credit: Joe Armao
“The idea of maximising value capture on apartments and offices is the imposition that fails. There’s all this other stuff that’s quite unique to that place that keeps getting pushed out of other parts of the city that does quite well.
“It’s actually really precious what’s there now, and it’s more valuable than just giving developers free rein.”
What Killed Fishermans Bend? is part of Melbourne Design Week which ends this Sunday.
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