Planning Greater Sydney

The planning of Australian cities since World War II has been vexed and spasmodic, yielding a disconnect between promised outcomes and the ensuing urban reality. Sydney has suffered particularly; attempts at city plans have been compromised by laissez-faire politics, rival ministries and agencies with more power than planning, disregard for the environment, the self-interest of powerful development forces and post-war planning’s own disciplinary shortcomings.

Sydney’s latest strategy, A Metropolis of Three Cities, has been prepared by a new entity, the Greater Sydney Commission (GSC),¹ an initiative of the New South Wales Government. Established by an act of Parliament in 2015, the GSC has more recently been moved into the New South Wales Premier’s office. It operates independently of, yet overlaps with, the New South Wales Department of Planning and Environment.²

As a city-scale planning commission adjudicating between state and local interests, the GSC responds to calls for more than a century for an independent metropolitan planning agency. There have already been nine iterations of a city-wide plan, the first in 1909 and the