Last week I was travelling through the streets of our busy metropolis, when my Uber driver began by raising concerns that Donald Trump had been elected President of the US and meandered to the need for a vision for the city.
I thought:Â "There's nothing I can do about the US President-elect, but I might be able to help with a vision."
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As a city planner, I've dreamed of the opportunity to help create a strategic vision for our city, centres and neighbourhoods. And in the first 10 months of the Greater Sydney Commission's existence, I've learnt just how many people share this passion and are truly interested in the future of our city.
Sydneysiders, like my Uber driver, have told the commission they understand that a vision and co-ordinated planning are essential to creating the strong, connected communities that they want to live in. This is crucial because any planner worth their title knows that a real vision and the plans to see it through must be based on community input and support.
![Parramatta CBD](/web/20170425235137im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/q/z/a/6/o/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gssudi.png/1479637875009.jpg)
As we build a globally competitive city in an age of localism, a vision and its plan need a bottom-up approach to create the mosaic of great places and bind communities.
For this reason, listening to our varied stakeholders was a first step in developing our vision and plans. On this basis, we delivered six draft district plans and a vision Towards Our Greater Sydney 2056. They will continue our discussions with Sydneysiders.
The draft district plans have some big ideas all backed by evidence. They include affordable rental housing targets to help address our affordable housing challenges; a green grid to deliver a regional connected network of parks, bushland and waterways for a more liveable environment; and a Digital Dashboard to monitor our plans, share our information and improve our decision-making.
We also align land use planning with infrastructure planning, we protect our heritage and we demonstrate world's best practice for sustainability, including a commitment to carbon neutrality for greater Sydney by 2050.Â
These plans are based on a vision, and they come to life within that vision. Our vision is a rethinking of the structure of greater Sydney. It responds to the challenge of a city built on the eastern seaboard which is not sustainable as our population grows to the equivalent of the size of Adelaide west of Parramatta.
Our vision of three cities – the eastern city which is Sydney's current CBD, the central city which is greater Parramatta and the Olympic peninsula, and the western city to be instigated by the Western Sydney Airport – will turn Sydney from an eastward facing city to one that looks both east and west from a central heart at greater Parramatta.
The value of our vision is in the access to jobs and services and improvements to social equity that it can provide to the majority of people who will live in greater Sydney in generations to come.
What could this look like? When we start to build a hospital, we already have a plan for building the homes that its employees will live in, the schools their children will attend, the parks they will play in, the shops and restaurants they will use and, most importantly, the transport connections they will need to move within their city and to other parts of greater Sydney. By nominating "collaboration areas"Â in our draft district plans, we've established priority places for government, councils, industry and local communities to focus on.
And because of the pace of change, our vision is dynamic and digital. It can quickly respond to imminent changes including driverless cars, peak car usage, drones and hologram meetings.
But no plan has all the answers – the value of our vision and the draft district plans to see it through maybe a milestone, but they are also just another next step in our city planning journey.
Sarah Hill is chief executive of the Greater Sydney Commission.
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