Abstract
From an accidental city without a plan, Sydney has become a city with many plans. Some would say too many, and there have been endless rounds of planning system reform since the 1980s. The central city and suburbs no longer grow ‘like topsy’ but with the greater metropolitan area still being propelled by market forces towards a population of seven million by the mid twenty-first century, there are new sets of pressures around both old (development versus environment, local-state tensions, congestion) and new (affordability, social polarisation, impacts of climate change) problems which inescapably challenge the first Australian city and the one most connected to the global economy.
Highlights
Despite attempts by colonial governors back to Arthur Phillip to regulate urban growth, early Sydney grew ‘like Topsy’
At the first Australian Town Planning Conference and Exhibition held in Adelaide in 1917, JD Fitzgerald – politician and leading town planning advocate – lamented that Sydney was ‘a city without a plan, save whatever planning was due to the errant goat
This was placed before the colonial legislature at the end of 1877, but the Bill was not considered by a Select Committee until February 1879 and was attacked by property owners, many of whom were slum landlords
Summary
Sydney has been described as an ‘accidental city’, one with a planning history characterised by opportunistic development and disjointed or abortive attempts at holistic planning.[1]. Wherever this animal made a track through the bush’, he observed, ‘there are the streets of today’.2
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