The roots of Sydney’s crisis lie in the rejection of office decentralisation back in the 1950s-1970s
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John Muscat / The New City The New South Wales Government’s historic decision to lift Sydney CBD’s 150-foot building height restriction in 1957 seems inevitable in retrospect. But it was controversial at the time and attracted strong criticism from technical urban planners into the 1980s. Debates about height limits were tied up with broader discussions about whether to embrace decentralising trends induced by mass motorisation and aspirations for decent home ownership or reinforce growth in the traditional city centre. Approaches to metropolitan planning were guided, in theory, by the County of Cumberland Planning Scheme, passed into law by the NSW Parliament in 1951. Generally, the County’s boundaries encompassed the greater Sydney metropolitan region of the time. Among key problems, the plan nominated “over-centralisation and congestion of industry; congested and confused traffic; slum housing.” These were expected to be made worse by a predicted rise in the County’s populat...