Footnotes

1. The GSC has four commissioners, an executive team and its own staff.

2. A New South Wales Premier’s press release states that the GSC’s remit is to “effectively collaborate across Government agencies and ensure the Government’s vision becomes a reality.”

3. Royal Commission for the Improvement of the City of Sydney and its Suburbs (1909).

4. The County of Cumberland, a forerunner to the current GSC, is the closest to an instituted metropolitan planning agency that Sydney has had. For more information, see Denis Winston’s Sydney’s Great Experiment:

The Progress of the County of Cumberland Plan (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1957).

5. Greater Sydney Commission, A Metropolis of Three Cities (Sydney: Government of New South Wales), 22–23.

6. Greater Sydney Commission, A Metropolis of Three Cities, 6.

7. The official name of the Western Sydney International Airport is the Nancy-Bird Walton Airport.

8. Greater Sydney Commission, A Metropolis of Three Cities, 16.

9. Following the 1968 Sydney Region Outline Plan, there were tentative city-making attempts at Campbelltown and Mount Druitt during the 1970s.

10. In 1991, Deputy Prime Minister Brian Howe’s initiative Building Better Cities helped to seed fund light rail, public space and affordable housing in Ultimo Pyrmont – a rare example of cooperation between three tiers of government that included a dedicated project office throughout the 1990s.

11. Richard Weller and Julian Bolleter, Made in Australia: The Future of Australian Cities (Perth: UWAP, 2013).

12. Department of Planning (NSW), City of Cities: A Plan for Sydney’s Future, 1 January 2005, apo.org.au/node/93871 (accessed 11 July 2019).

13. See, for example, Paris’s metropolitan plan (metropolegrandparis.fr/en), an integrated, spatial plan for the city’s central area. The project brings together a large number of institutions and bodies under a single public authority controlled by the state. Unlike the GSC strategy, it includes easily accessible protocols for air quality, mobility and other urban amenities.

14. Richard Weller and Julian Bolleter, Made in Australia.