We all know Sydney‘s got some mad infrastructure issues. The western parts of the city are increasingly the most densely populated, and yet everything from jobs to culture to nightlife are packed densely in the eastern reaches of the city. Turns out the combination of staggering urban sprawl in conjunction with a single, poorly-serviced CBD… does not work. Whodathunkit?
Well, Lucy Turnbull has been chipping away at a plan to resolve this issue, and now we’ve got the details. Kinda. Over the next 40 years, Sydney will apparently become three connected cities: an eastern, central and western city, with transport links between them.
Good morning. Here’s today’s front page of the Herald https://t.co/eEH8m1plEu pic.twitter.com/DFcVfmwrLS
— The Sydney Morning Herald (@smh) October 22, 2017
The ultimate idea is that two thirds of Sydneysiders will be able to get between their homes, their workplaces and essential services in 30 minutes. At the moment, only 39% of Sydney’s population are hitting that benchmark.
It’s a pretty ambitious plan – especially considering that by 2056 Sydney’s population is expected to hit 8 million. Most of that growth is happening in the west, necessitating a radical plan to ensure the city, you know, functions.
Turnbull pointed out that the plan aligns with Indigenous understandings of the landscape of the greater Sydney region: the “salt-water region of the eastern harbour city, the muddy-water country around Parramatta and the clear-water country around western Sydney”.
“It’s only taken us 230 years to catch up with a vision that our indigenous ancestors always had for this city,” she said.
A whole bunch of smaller measures have been proposed to make this three-city Sydney a reality, including train links like rail from Parramatta to Kogarah and light rail extensions across the entire city.
You can read a little more about the project over at the Greater Sydney Commission website. But them’s the facts, folks. By the time 2056 rolls around, we’ll be living in the ultraconnected cyberpunk dystopia of our dreams.
