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How Sydney CBD became a capital of luxury urbanity

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- John Muscat With a great deal of success, urban development elites have been able to sustain the illusion that Central Business Districts or downtowns are still the functional metropolitan centres they were five decades ago. In The New City’s new feature report, Rise of Luxury Urbanity as a System: Sydney CBD , we set out to explain how the truth is different. Opinion leaders seem content for people to assume CBDs have changed in only cosmetic ways, essentially the same but with taller skylines. But since at least the 1980s, they have drifted far from the standard functional definition proposed by geographer Raymond Murphy in 1971: a region “draw[ing] its business from the whole urban area and from all ... classes of people.” The mid-twentieth century was a time of tensions between booming suburban peripheries, driven by mass motorisation, and stagnating post-industrial inner-cities. After the 1980s, however, these former industrial-mercantile junctions or ‘classic’ CBDs were fitted
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Sydney isn't dominated by inner-city knowledge workers

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  By John Muscat We re-publish our article from 10 years ago which holds up as an explanation for why the metropolitan planning behind construction of the new 21 billion dollar Sydney M1 metro rail line is misconceived. Recently, the  Sydney Morning Herald’s  James Robertson  fired another salvo  in the paper’s long-running campaign for more inner-city infrastructure and amenity. Most of it was a regurgitation of some familiar assumptions about stalled employment growth on the industrial fringe and the need for rail ‘connectivity’ to core office-towers. Quoting an academic on the “schizophrenic nature” of Sydney’s housing construction, “either low-density [on the] fringe or high-density in the central city”, Robertson claims “sprawling population is becoming the biggest problem for government service delivery”, adding that “the trouble of travelling from western Sydney to the CBD has been the city’s most obvious transport issue for decades”. For a solution he cites more academics,
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Reply to Elizabeth Farrelly: Suburbia Not Kulturstadt

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Wilton housing estate, western Sydney ( ABC Illawarra ) Recently on Twitter I came across a post  about the NSW Planning Minister’s announcement banning dark roofing for detached houses in fringe housing estates to minimise the heat island effect. Scrolling down the comments, I noticed one by the Sydney Morning Herald’s anti-suburban architecture critic, Elizabeth Farrelly. “It’s ludicrous that this greenfield sprawl is still being approved in Sydney”, she wrote. Having just read a  column of hers slamming the proposed high-rise tower complex for inner-city Pyrmont’s Fish Market site, it was amusing to see her bash the other end of the spectrum. Where would Farrelly have people live? Proposed Fish Market site development, Pyrmont-Blackwattle Bay ( Infrastructure NSW ) I knew, in fact, that she quests for the holy grail of urbanists everywhere, medium-density or the so-called “missing middle”. Since there is a body of commentary explaining why this form of development struggles to ma
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