Almost 150 years after inner Sydney was sliced in two, the state government is planning an ambitious operation to stitch it back together.
Under the “once in a generation” scheme announced last Monday, parkland, homes and workspaces will be built over rail lines leading into Central station, rejoining Surry Hills to Ultimo after the inner city suburbs were separated by tracks in 1874.
The plan to construct a bridge over the busiest lines in the country includes 15 mixed-use buildings, ranging from four to 34 storeys, and more than 60,000 sq metres of green space.
The New South Wales premier, Dominic Perrottet, said the 10- to 15-year project would repent for “architectural sins” of the past.
“We don’t want people just to come through, we want to enliven it, revitalise it and set out a brighter future for the Sydney CBD,” he said.
The infrastructure minister, Rob Stokes, said he hoped the development would heal the “scar” through the city, improve connectivity and provide 850 much-needed residences.
The proposal has been broadly welcomed, with experts agreeing the area represents a huge opportunity as well as a huge challenge.
But some say it doesn’t go far enough and want to see the government do more on housing, connectivity and future-proofing the development.
The chief executive of the Urban Development Institute of Australia (NSW), Steve Mann, says the government should raise the 15% affordable housing goal to 30%.
“We should be focused on the housing crisis that we’re in,” he says.
“Residential is an important part of bringing livelihood and character to a city. We need to be delivering affordable housing … particularly when it begins with government land.”
The dean of architecture at the University of Technology Sydney, Prof Elizabeth Mossop, says the government has missed a great opportunity by not providing for more affordable housing.
“This key worker housing issue is absolutely enormous and we see very little of that in what’s proposed,” she says.
“This is a proposal that appears to be driven by real estate, economic thinking, rather than city-making thinking, and there’s no reason why you can’t do both things.
“It’s all being treated as a commodity to be sold. It’s not really about making the moves that are going to improve the city.”
With almost 1,000 people on the social housing wait list in the inner city and about 500 either on the street or in temporary accommodation nearby, the head of the Community Housing Industry Association (NSW), Mark Degotardi, says the government could do better.
“That doesn’t even talk about the people that are in housing stress,” he says. “This certainly won’t solve the problem.”
He and others in the sector are pleasantly surprised at the inclusion of a minimum goal for affordable housing, but Degotardi says the developers need to be told to do more.
‘It’s got to be flexible’
Since the plans were unveiled on Monday, the proposal has been compared to widely praised global redevelopments including King’s Cross in London – where Google has begun building a flagship campus – and New York’s Battery Park and Hudson Yards.
But experts say lessons need to be learned from those projects, and from shortfalls in previous Sydney developments such as Barangaroo.
The chief executive of the Committee for Sydney, Gabriel Metcalf, is urging the government to create “a really generous public realm”.
“If you get it right, you can heal a divide in the city and make it easier to get across from one side to the other,” he says.
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Metcalf says the scale and ambition of the plan is “the kind of move that mature cities are sometimes able to pull off”.
“It creates new land in a city that is land-constrained. That’s why it’s worth trying to do.”
Sydney’s lord mayor, Clover Moore, has often been critical of large development proposals that hardly shift the dial on inner-city housing, but she generally supports the Central station project.
“The proposed over-station development does not jeopardise solar access to Prince Alfred Park, incentivises much-needed employment workspace and connects workers to current and future transport,” she says.
But she wants to see more social housing at the nearby controversial Waterloo redevelopment to support the vision.
Helen Lochhead, an emeritus professor of architecture at the University of NSW, also wants to see the state learn from the Barangaroo and the nearby Central Park developments by creating “discrete” projects within the greater scheme so it can be tackled bit by bit.
She says the first focus needs to be on public and green spaces, “so that people don’t feel like they’re living in a development site for years to come”.
“The key takeaway in these mega projects is to ensure that the public domain is delivered first. Then the development happens in a predictable and orderly fashion,” she says.
“It’s not just the technical and engineering challenge, but the framing of it so that each stage feels like it’s a complete precinct.”
Lochhead and others also question how the scheme would fit into a future Sydney with patterns in how and where people work changing so quickly.
“Is that really the most appropriate thing to do at a time like this when we are living in a much more diverse way than we did in the CBD-centred economy a few years ago?” she says.
“Is this model a pre-Covid vision in a post-Covid world? It remains to be seen.”
Mossop wants the government to use the plan as an opportunity to create a “more livable, more resilient city”.
“It’s got to be flexible,” she says.
“We’ve got to design these buildings in such a way that they will be robust to change, that they can be flexible, and that they can operate in a way that is sustainable to the climate crisis.”
The project was announced as construction began on software giant Atlassian’s neighbouring 39-storey tower – part of the Tech Central precinct expected to open in 2027.
It will be open to community feedback until 19 September.
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