Elizabeth Farrelly

Sydney

Writer, broadcaster, city-lover. Founder & presenter of The Sydneyist @eastside89.7FM. Founder & Director of https://t.co/PABkaNkEe2

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Articles

The case for a wall against sprawl

1 month ago | architectureau.com | Tom Grant |Elizabeth Farrelly

Stopping sprawl? It’s a no-brainer. We’ve known this for half a century or more, yet no one will say it. Even professionals are wary of the topic while, for a politician, being photo-opped with an “end to sprawl” placard would be seriously brave, and not in a good way. You can imagine the pile-on. “End of the Australian dream,” headlines would shout. Then again, with the great Australian dream fast becoming a nightmare – unaffordable, unsustainable, inequitable – maybe the time has come?
Meditations on the cross

1 month ago | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Elizabeth Farrelly

Each Easter my local bakery sells Not Cross Buns in sixpacks. They look slightly naked, sans the traditional embossed pictogram, but they’re delicious. With every bite, though, I’m conscious that the messaging – no doubt intended as a badge of the secular pluralism that largely defines my tribe – is also a loss. We live in the world of things, but to shear those things of their numinosity, even for all the right political reasons, is also to sacrifice spiritual and imaginative depth.
Funeral rights: Empires of the dead or circle of life

2 months ago | architectureau.com | Tom Grant |Elizabeth Farrelly

What, exactly, are the rights of the dead? In particular, what rights do they have to occupy space on a shrinking planet? What claim should they have on our place-making? We think of death as an absence – at least from this world. Architecture, on the other hand, is about the living, the present.
A Citizens’ Assembly for the Northern Beaches?

Mar 26, 2025 | thetawnyfrogmouth.com.au | Elizabeth Farrelly |Iain Walker

Paradise on earth? Our recent What’s Next? forum in Mona Vale almost had us convinced that, as several speakers insisted, the Northern Beaches is pretty much it. Even here, though, housing is becoming unaffordable, public transport is difficult, climate change increasingly threatens coastal erosion, storm surges and fire. So change must come. We think the best way to shape that change is to access the deep popular wisdom via a Citizens’ Assembly. What is a Citizens’ Assembly?
Big house, small life

Mar 25, 2025 | architectureau.com | Tom Grant |Elizabeth Farrelly

The TV shows a young couple standing outside a crisp inner-city terrace (“Whether you’re buying your first home…”), before transitioning to a blousy suburban McMansion (“…or housing a growing family…”). It’s an ad for some insurance company, but the unquestioned subtext is: it’s all about growth. If some is good, more is better. Is it, though? Just how out of touch can a cultural propaganda meme be?
‘Country’ is a learning needed in Australia’s urban planning

Mar 14, 2025 | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Elizabeth Farrelly

Fires and floods. The message is getting harder to ignore, assiduously as we try. It is increasingly evident that nature has something to tell us. Something urgent. Basically, we’re not on top. In Australia, whose edges we cling to like ants fleeing a hotplate, we’re hearing calls for a “managed retreat” from the coast. At the same time, increasingly destructive bushfires advocate a similar withdrawal from the bush. Then there’s all the floodplains we’ve approved for development in recent years.
Brutalising brutalism

Feb 25, 2025 | architectureau.com | Tom Grant |Elizabeth Farrelly

Just when you thought modernism’s Great Man theory of architecture might be safely entombed with the rest of that wildly destructive century, out pops a film like The Brutalist. Not since the 1949 film of The Fountainhead has an architecture flick been more seductive – nor more self-aggrandising, sententious and just plain wrong. Both films promote the misunderstood architect-hero.
The duty to jaywalk

Jan 20, 2025 | architectureau.com | Tom Grant |Elizabeth Farrelly

My favourite street sign reads “Beware. Pedestrians.” I love the implied image of pedestrians as fierce and ravening hordes that might attack some hapless car and devour it, bloodily, no questions asked. Yes! I think. Guerilla pedestrians! Those we need more of. Of course, the sign actually intends the opposite of this, a paternalistic protectionism that casts pedestrians as a victim class, deserving tolerance but not respect.
Architecture and morality

Nov 26, 2024 | architectureau.com | Tom Grant |Elizabeth Farrelly

Anyone who’s been apartment-hunting lately knows that the despised ’70s redbrick walk-ups, though considered mean at the time, generally offer more protective benevolence – more sense of home – than anything built this century. Not only are they more solidly built and reliably waterproof, but their more generous space standards also typically come with such old-school luxuries as separate kitchens, laundries, toilets and linen cupboards. And true, some of this bespeaks regulatory or policy change.
Could Plato’s ideal city exist today?

Nov 15, 2024 | thesaturdaypaper.com.au | Elizabeth Farrelly

The ideal city – can we even imagine such a thing? Two-and-a-half millennia ago, about 375BC, Plato did exactly that. His Republic described a city shaped by absolute beauty, truth and, above all, justice. This may seem absurd now, but maybe that’s why our cities are riven by ugliness, distrust and inequity. How might Plato’s ideal look now, on the cold, hard ground of modernity?