Construction and infrastructure projects in Sydney: too much all at once?

If you’ve ever been to the Sydney CBD in the past five or so years, you’ll know that it has definitely seen better days. The current construction of the Sydney South East Light Rail Project has left visible scars scattered across the face of the CBD. With the recent delays and timetable setback for the project, Sydney is expected to stay in this state till at least 2020.

Light Rail construction in Sydney CBD

But it's not just the light rail project that is the only major infrastructure project occurring in Sydney. With the installation of the North West Metro, the redevelopment of the Barangaroo precinct, construction of the new major iMax theatre in Darling Harbour, and the various other developments occurring across Sydney (including WestConnex, and NorthConnex), it is becoming harder and harder to properly navigate the city without a hard hat and a vest. As of 2018, Sydney has the most amount of operating cranes of any city in Australia by far (350 out of the 685 operating in the nation). With all this infrastructure and development being delivered simultaneously, Sydney has become somewhat of an eyesore. So it begs the question: should there have been a broader plan to implement these projects and infrastructure in stages rather than all at once?

A snapshot of some of the major infrastructure projects happening across Sydney

In my own opinion, I believe that the amount of infrastructure that is being delivered to Sydney is too much all at once. For the most part, these projects are more or less required if Sydney is to continue growing sustainably. What I believe is happening now, is that the people of Sydney are being deprived of an important opportunity- to reflect and truly ask themselves if such infrastructure is necessary and if their money should be going towards constructing it. The problem with having major projects like the South East Light Rail, WestConnex, NorthConnex, North-West Metro etc. being delivered at once is that you typically only have the communities in Sydney that are within proximity to these projects actually care about what happens with them. It's creating a further social division in Sydney- right at the time where coming together as a community could not be more important.

Of course, you are probably asking yourself now “well why would anyone outside these infrastructure project’s catchments care about what happens to them?” and you are right to ask that. Why should people living in South-West Sydney care about what happens with the North-West Metro? What it really boils down to is how we understand our cities and how we manage and plan them. In a way, cities are very similar to ecosystems. What happens in one area typically has effects on the rest of the system. It's not always easy to see these effects but they are there. These effects can impact on a range of components from congestion, air quality, train network capacity, land value, heavy vehicle usage etc. The different components that make up our urban environments are not independent of each other. It is this line of thinking that I believe has escaped our city and the public in the past decade or so. By introducing so many billion dollar infrastructure projects simultaneously, we are subconsciously teaching communities in Sydney to forget that it is not just their own area that will be affected by these changes- but the city as a whole. The delivery of these projects are depriving the people of Sydney to come together as a community and actually ask the important questions: is this a good investment? is this the right outcome? Should we be supporting this? Instead, we are in our current position, where the impacts of these projects are only perceived and discussed by the communities that they are being built in. Instead of having city-wide conversations about whether or not projects such as WestConnex should even be built, we just have Inner-West residents leading and caring about such discourse. With all the other infrastructure projects occurring around Sydney, it is quite hard to get a grip on the impacts these projects all have individually.

Effective planning comes from a multitude of processes- but one of the fundamental processes that no town planner should ever overlook is community consultation. The public should always be our number one priority- their interests should always come before that of private or corporate interests. To be able to fully scope this interest and perceive public opinion on what Sydney wants and needs, it is important that infrastructure is temporally staged. Instead of delivering these projects concurrently, a broader plan should be implemented, where the public is given the chance to review these projects and their impacts individually, and independently of other major projects.