A Tale of Two Cities

Sydney and Par­ra­matta – the Lon­don and Paris of the Great South­ern Land? A laugh­able pro­pos­i­tion by any measure.

As part of the Sydney Design fest­ival (the exist­ence of which I was not aware of before this event – it’s rather telling that I know more about the fest­ivals cur­rently on in Mel­bourne than in my home city), the Lord May­ors of Sydney and Par­ra­matta (Clover Moore and David Bor­ger respect­ively), together with three pan­el­ists, presen­ted their vis­ions of their respect­ive cit­ies before a minus­cule audi­ence. I went with Daniel, and he has already made some com­ments.

Firstly, the concept of Par­ra­matta as a city dis­tinct from Sydney, as a city with a dis­tinct role, cul­ture and vis­ion, was for­eign to me. I had known that Par­ra­matta was grow­ing in import­ance as a centre of gov­ern­ment and busi­ness, and I had viewed it as a regional centre, but I had always per­ceived Par­ra­matta (along with Liv­er­pool), as being merely regional centres of the lar­ger entity known as Sydney. Borger’s vis­ion of Par­ra­matta being the com­ple­ment of Sydney, as being the hub of west­ern Sydney – per­haps inspired by self-​​interest as he is the Mayor of Par­ra­matta – made little sense, for eco­nom­ies of scale and the innate attrac­tion of the lar­ger city centre (Sydney), will deprive Par­ra­matta of the fuel required to make it truly great. Per­haps the prob­lem is in the defin­i­tion of “city”. As Daniel noted, the two may­ors’ speeches focused almost exclus­ively on inner-​​city liv­ing – on the devel­op­ment of the City of Sydney and the City of Par­ra­matta – but hey, Sydney is more than that. What Sydney (as a met­ro­pol­itan area) doesn’t need is for such a lim­ited vis­ion restric­ted to two cent­ral busi­ness dis­tricts and their imme­di­ate sur­round­ings. That is Sydney’s prob­lem – a frag­men­ted, loc­al­ised approach that lacks coher­ent over­sight. For­tu­nately, at least in Borger’s case, he recog­nised the need that the exist­ing gov­ernance struc­ture of local gov­ern­ments in Sydney is prob­lem­atic. Sydney is a whole, liv­ing, breath­ing organ­ism – and it deserves an author­ity with the jur­is­dic­tion of the entire greater met­ro­pol­itan area.

My other cri­ti­cism relates to the May­ors’ vis­ions them­selves. Put­ting aside the fact that clearly neither of the two May­ors could be bothered com­ing up with decent speeches, the vis­ions (presen­ted as a Uto­pian vis­ion of Sydney in 2030) lacked gen­er­al­ity. We heard plans for a theatre here, the demoli­tion of a car­park there, and the spe­cif­ics of the envir­on­ment­ally friendly solu­tions in a build­ing some­where else, but there was no under­ly­ing con­text in which to place these ideas. You walked out of the talks feel­ing as if Sydney’s going to be going on with the busi­ness of just get­ting things done by 2030, but I left the Town Hall without the excite­ment that I’m liv­ing in a city that has a goal: a united goal that all Sydney­siders will be proud to take part in, a goal that will cause Sydney, as a whole, to shine brightly. The motto was that Sydney was to become a city of vil­lages (ignor­ing the fact that that is simply copy­ing Melbourne’s repu­ta­tion) but there wasn’t any sense of that either. It’s true that large vis­ions can often be a pan­acea for hav­ing real con­crete plans, but if done cor­rectly, it will motiv­ate the people of Sydney to take own­er­ship of their city’s destiny.

Update: An extract from David Borger’s speech can be found on the SMH site: here

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