Sydney’s plan to split into three cities in as little as 20 years

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/04/12/asia/sydney-three-cities/index.html

by optimusrex • 8 years ago

63 37 8 years ago

edition.cnn.com

optimusrex4• 8 years ago

Sydney has had a huge influx of population and the lack of infrastructure to accommodate this growth is a major issue.

I just don't see how splitting into three cities solves any of these problems. Now they are three separate governments with different amounts of funds/budget.

The Easter Harbour District with the CBD should garner the highest budget and thus have more runway to build infrastructure, but what about the other two cities?

Will they still be able to benefit from the tourism revenue from the CBD and Harbour?

daemin2• 8 years ago

I recall listening to an LSE presentation by the mayor of Lagos, where they split the city into several CBDs so people could commute and work around one of those rather than having to come into the single centre. I think this is the general idea where a city would have several central areas so that each of them becomes a functioning city in its own right and it would lessen the peak hour intensity of travel for each of them.

optimusrex4• 8 years ago

Parramatta already is a functioning CBD with infrastructure issues that have been present for the last few years as its become more and more popular for realtor companies to develop. This is the one area that I could see benefiting from this plan.

I'm most skeptical of the Western District becoming its own thriving and independent CBD.

mjsweet• 8 years ago

The NSW government abandoned a forced amalgamation of 14 city councils in Sydney in July last year. My question is this; are they proposing amalgamating existing local councils into three major cities or are they proposing three major urban planning “zones”?... hence the “split” of Sydney into three. If it’s the second option, I wonder how local councils will cooperate considering the animosity toward forced amalgamation in the past?

bigiain2• 8 years ago

For people from the US - we do "cities" differently here.

If you superimposed that map of Sydney onto San Francisco (and lets mirror flip it to get the coasts on the same side) - it'd extend from say Mill Valley in the north down to somewhere past Cupertino in the south - and east (away from the coast) to about Pleasanton.

What we think of as "Sydney" is about 40 miles north/south and east/west. The area GoogleMaps tells me is "San Francisco is about 7 miles by 7 miles.

Not saying either is right or wrong, just that you might not know just how large a piece of ground what is meant by "Sydney" represents. We call Sydney a city of 5million people. You say San Francisco has a population of ~850k people. The "San Francisco Bay Area" with 7.8 million people is pretty close to what we call "Sydney", and I think that's 8 or 9 "cities" the way the US divides things up...

skissane3• 8 years ago

Well, just as San Francisco has a population of only ~850k, the City of Sydney only has a population of ~200k.

In both cases there is a distinction between the city proper and the metro area. Both Sydney and San Francisco are extreme cases, other cases, like Brisbane, Australia or New York City the disparity between city proper and metro area are less extreme.

San Francisco is also somewhat unusual in that its metro area has a different name ("Bay Area"). But that isn't universally true of American cities (it is not uncommon, but not universal either.)

I'm not convinced that there are any fundamental differences between US and Australian usage here.

bigiain2• 8 years ago

Fair enough - I've really only spent enough time in San Francisco and Portland to have felt the "Hang on, what do you mean it's a different city just across that river" weirdness (weird to my Sydney calibrated sense of "how the world works". (Although Reno/Sparks feels odd to me too. Kinda like Albury/Wodonga here - but at least there some sense to there being two cities there, with one on each side of the state border...)

Having said that - "Sydney City" maps closer (in my head) to "The Mission District" than to "San Francisco" still. Google Maps draws Sydney City as around 1.6 miles north/south and 1 mile east/west. (Although I thn there's a larger "Sydney City Council" area than that, I know some of Newtown has Sydney City parking rules and the rest has Marrickville/Inner West COuncil parking rules, and Newtown is a half mile or so away from where Google Maps draws that border...)

Melbourne has a similar sprawl to Sydney (and lets face it, Sydney and Melbourne are really the only "cities" in Australia, everywhere else is just big or small country towns! ;-) )

mieseratte• 8 years ago

San Francisco is also somewhat unusual in that its metro area has a different name ("Bay Area").

I routinely use "San Franciso" to mean "the San Francisco Metropolitan Area." I assume "Bay Area" is more of a local thing.

There's nothing different about "how Australian's do cities" in the sense OP is talking about. You have a central "City of" and a lot of similar, or smaller sized "City of," "Town of," that compose the area we think of as "the city."

tomhoward3• 8 years ago

I'm not convinced that there are any fundamental differences between US and Australian usage here.

Technically that's right, but culturally there is a big difference in my experience (as an Australian who has spent a lot of time in SF Bay Area).

In the Bay Area, when people describe where they live they'll refer to their local city/town first - i.e., Palo Alto, San Jose, Oakland, San Mateo, or indeed San Francisco the distinct city. Sure they might refer to the "Bay Area", as a general descriptor of where they live to an outsider, but they wouldn't normally say "I live in San Francisco" if they live in Menlo Park.

In Australia, people will primarily describe themselves as living in "Melbourne" or "Sydney", and only if the conversation progresses to which part of that city they live in will they refer to the suburb. Even then they'll talk about the local suburb, which is normally distinct from the municipality, particularly now that the municipalities are quite large and encompass several suburbs.

nkrisc• 8 years ago

I think Americans well understand huge metro areas. Take Chicago for example: the city proper is only about 220 sq mi (~3mil people) but the metro area is around 10,000 sq mi (~9mil people). Most of that is contiguous urbanization, too. You could drive from Milwaukee, WI to Gary, IN and just about feel like you've never left a city.

Pretty much all the major cities in the U.S. are like this.

We know how to do sprawl.

femto• 8 years ago

As a Sydneysider, I see it as the state government giving up, and trying to sell their ineptitude as a good thing. Successive governments have botched transport to the point where it is no longer possible to commute between large sections of Sydney. For years now, I've had to accept that the locations of my potential employment are limited within Sydney, if I want to have any waking time overlapping with the rest of my family. Now we are being told that it's our own silly fault for expecting that if we live in Sydney then we can have a job in Sydney.

I'm guessing that this declaration will have little real effect. The government will try to create new job centres out of Parramatta and Liverpool, as they have been for decades, but the new efforts will he just as effective as the old and people will continue to commute to the CBD and North Sydney arc, where a big chunk of the jobs will remain.

It's not a world leading bit of town planning, but the results of poor planning.

optimusrex4• 8 years ago

<I'm guessing that this declaration will have little real effect

Thats exactly how I feel and how my local Sydneysiders feel as well.

I only lived there a couple years and have since moved away, but the government ineptitude was quite obvious.

This plan must be costing the tax payers millions.

Was there any sort of public vote for this initiative?

tallanvor• 8 years ago

Is the problem with transportation in Sydney really that unique in Australia? I've only been there once for a couple of days, but I've spent a few weeks total in Melbourne, and it seems to have a similar issue - public transportation seems almost exclusively arranged to get people to and from the CBD. I have a friend who lives in Kingsbury, and going to the airport can take him more than 1.5 hours compared to driving there which can take less than 30 minutes.

ACow_Adonis2• 8 years ago

Melbourne's transport system is indeed largely built around getting everyone along spokes into the CBD.

Sydney is a slightly different beast though. Its transport problems stem from a mixture of geography, history and lack of/inept planning.

Its roads are generally thinner and crazier due to being a more "organic" in its early planning compared to melbourne (which is built in a planned grid). Sydney literally tore up and destroyed one of the biggest tram networks in the world and converted the roads to automobile.

Meanwhile the combination of the harbour, sea to the east, blue mountains to the west create an increasingly geographically constrained city. Transport options are severely limited out to the eastern suburbs (cynically, partly by desire, they are also the wealthiest suburbs in general). Contrasted with melbourne, which is built on a massive flat plain around a bay, Sydney terrain encompasses hills and valleys to a far greater extent further limiting the engineering options.

Finally, sydney's main airport is comparatively close to the main CBD (almost half as close as melbourne's) which is further limiting the available land within the central area, and resulting in requirements to build a second airport out west to try to increase air capacity to the city.

The result, along with australia's cultural and historical proclivities is a city almost in constant congestion, highest house prices, and with easily the longest commutes in the country. (keeping in mind when viewing comparable stats, that although sydney is out in front, I felt many sydney-siders will rationally try to compensate/substitute their travel times to avoid the congestion).

Lived in both myself. All major cities have congestion, but its at another level in Sydney compared to the other Australian cities. The culture in the office of "accepting crazy travel times to get into work" was insane.

talldan• 8 years ago

Australian cities do tend to have poor public transport, but I don't think the kind of issue you mention will go away, even as transport is improved.

In London you quite often have the same issue, and that's a city with excellent public transport coverage (albeit a much more populous city). I have a friend who lives only 5 miles from where I used to live, and transport between our places often involved 2-3 changes, and could easily take 1.5 hours.

It's interesting you cited Melbourne, as I think it's the Aussie city generally considered as having the best public transport.

caf• 8 years ago

Right - I think the money quote is this one:

""The idea that you can reverse the job centralization process by suggesting adding two new cities ... then (saying) it will happen, is somewhat fanciful, I think," says Searle."

mcrider• 8 years ago

In Toronto I think we'd love this idea for the same exact reasons. Our city was amalgamated from several different cities in the 90s and most people regret the decision because citizens/politicians from the more suburban areas have different motivations than those that live downtown (especially WRT driving vs transit). The infighting over the years has caused many delays/cancellations in our infrastructure to the point that transit has become possibly the #1 problem for our city. I can't compare the situation to Sydney but aren't smaller jurisdictions generally more nimble?

smoyer• 8 years ago

"By creating three cities out of one, officials are hoping to persuade residents to live in a more diverse range of locations."

Do residents of an area actually behave like this? Those who can afford to may live anywhere they want. But only those who own their own businesses can determine where they work - the rest have to work in a particular location. And the choice of where to live involves many trade-offs including commute distance.

My intuition would say that splitting up Sydney will have no effect on resident behavior but that having three governments will be less efficient than one with taxes going up accordingly.

toyg• 8 years ago

having three governments will be less efficient than one

But it will provide three times as many jobs for the class of people that decides on these matters.

It's hard not to be cynic about politics when institutions "self-reform" by expanding in non-obvious (and likely more expensive) ways.

jlangenauer2• 8 years ago

As a former resident of Sydney, this will change nothing. Sydney is fucked because of a number of interrelated circumstances, none of which are easy to change:

- The first is its geography. The harbour is a giant wall through a big part of the city, with only a few chokepoints where people can cross. These are congested, and constrain the entire road and rail transportation network. The Pacific ocean constrains growth to the east, the blue mountains to the West, and the national park to the south. The only growth corridors are towards the southwest, and northwest - a long, long way from the CBD.

- It's not nearly dense enough. Australians love their free-standing houses, both the McMansions in the new suburbs, and the trendy terraces in the inner city, beloved by Baby Boomers who have a convenient lifestyle while living in an "urban village" - of course, they all bought back in the 90s when it was still affordable. These two types of housing make it incredibly inefficient to build a workable rail public transport network, so a lot of the PT is forced to use busses, which are not as popular, and suffer from the same congestion at the chokepoints as well as the additional car traffic from everyone who isn't well-served by PT. This is a lot of people.

- Any attempts to build higher density housing, particularly in the sainted inner suburbs will be met with cries of "Over-development", even by people who should know better such as the Greens.

I moved to Berlin a few years ago, and it's a comparable city in size to Sydney (3.5m vs around 5m in Sydney). It works far better because it's far denser, and the level of infrastructure provided makes living here a breeze by comparison. Berlin came of age before the motor car, and was geographically constrained for quite a period there by an actual wall. Sydney really started to grow just as the car become popular and widely-owned.

claudius• 8 years ago

Berlin also has the advantage of only becoming a large single city in the 1920s. Beforehand, there was "Berlin proper" and a number of cities nearby nearly equally large and locally equally relevant (e.g. Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf and Spandau in the west, Köpenick in the southeast and Lichtenberg in the east). Due to there being no cars, travel between those cities was impractical on a daily basis up until the rise of mass transport. This lead to these cities setting up their own city centres with residential areas formed around those city centres.

After extension of the city of Berlin in 1921, this lead to it having many "city centres" around which life was formed in a similar way Sydney attempts to achieve now by this artificial after-the-fact split. I’m doubtful it’ll be successful.

jlangenauer2• 8 years ago

The same thing happened in Sydney - Parramatta was a separate town until (I'm guessing here) the 1850s or so, Camden was until recently a separate town, but it's being swallowed up by the outwards expansion of Sydney.

mixmastamyk• 8 years ago

Sounds just like Los Angeles, minus the harbor.

retrogradeorbit• 8 years ago

"The divide aims to tackle problems such as major population growth, sky-high housing prices and increasingly congested commutes."

All three problems are self inflicted. Some have labelled Australia a "Population Ponzi". We could just stop doing it to ourselves. But then house prices might collapse, followed by the banks, and no land owner wants that. Apparently just reducing the intake is not an option. [1]

[1] https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2018/03/four-corners-fails-...

tankenmate• 8 years ago

Sydney is already a number of cities, Sydney, Paramatta, Blacktown, Ryde, Liverpool, Canterbury, Blacktown, Penrith, (and a veritable stream of smaller "cities" like Fairfield) and various counties / shires as well, Hornsby, Sutherland, Hills Shire. The issues has never been the names or appellations, the biggest issue since WWII has been the sheer vast size of the suburban sprawl and relatively little coordination and NIMBYism that goes with it.

Sydney’s plan to split into three cities in as little as 20 years

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