After sprawl : post-suburban Sydney

The march of the suburban bungalow across the surface of Sydney's metropolitan landscape is" at the beginning of the 21st century" no less a feature of public commentary than it was 100 years ago in the Royal Commission for the Improvement of Sydney and its Suburbs (1909). In that report, suburbanisation was held out optimistically as the congested city's counter-ideal. It was the lynchpin of an urban reform agenda geared at low-density living, efficiency, physical and moral health, and family life. Nearly a century later, Sydney's Metropolitan Strategy (Department of Infrastructure, Planning and Natural Resources, 2004) proposes solutions to the problem of a city (seemingly) without end. It predicts that over the next 25-30 years, Sydney's population will grow by around 40,000 people per year, much of it to be accommodated in existing suburbs, with the rest in new release developments, even 'edge cities' master-minded from scratch. How are we to conceptualise the spatial order of contemporary Sydney? What models can describe its emergent forms? The conventional land use, land value and population density schema of 'zones' hailing from the Chicago School of Urban Sociology in the 1940s, are increasingly irrelevant and inaccurate. Images of concentric 'rings' of inner, middle, and outer suburb evoke a singular reference point and a false homogeneity of use, status and density. The detail of spatial patterning is significantly more complex. Right across the surface of the Sydney basin, we find that fragmented geographies of class, ethnicity, employment, investment, amenity, and accessibility are producing a highly differentiated landscape form and fabric. Like many other large metropolitan regions abroad, 'Sydney' cannot be conceived as a coherent entity with a binding mechanism linking all parts.