How Sydney CBD became a capital of luxury urbanity
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- John Muscat / The New City With a lot 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 wer...