With thanks to the Daily Telegraph

SYDNEY'S "gormless" apartment blocks with facades that look more like "ice cube trays" are depressing the city's residents and defacing the Harbour, former prime minister Paul Keating said yesterday.

In a scathing address that shocked 700 members of the nation's biggest developers attending the Urban Development Institute of Australia (UDIA) national congress, Mr Keating said city units were a "mess on a pavement".

He told developers not to call for land releases in Sydney's west and said they should build upwards to address the city's failures.

"We have to do high density [developments] but can't do it the way we are doing it," Mr Keating said. "[The community does] not need instruction in architecture or design to know what is mediocre or bad, they know it instantly.

"They are depressed by what they see and are forced to inhabit and buy and they resent it. They know they are living in these ice cube glass shapes with their unused little verandas, their eight-by-six ceilings, their gyprock walls. They say: 'Is that all there is to it?'."

He listed Potts Point and Kings Cross, which have the highest densities in Australia, as a success because they made aesthetic sense.

Public policy was not to blame for the rut, he said, but rather "an absence of civic conscientiousness" that has led to "urban incoherence".

"It cuts down the city as a composite project. Every developer and architect must do their own thing, their own little mess on the pavement," he said, adding they were not only depressing to live in but also to look at, defacing Sydney Harbour.

He also slammed Manly Council for ruining the escarpment of Seaforth and Canada Bay for "botching" the Parramatta River.

He called for the perimeter of Sydney Harbour to be deemed a matter of state significance and administered by a single authority.

UDIA NSW president Stephen Albin said Mr Keating did not have all the answers.

"High density is not going to solve our issues. The key challenge is to meet a growing population need on our housing market," he said.