The release this week of district plans by the Greater Sydney Commission potentially foreshadows a new era in Sydney planning, which may mean a new look and feel for the city's neighbourhoods and for how we move between them. There is that possibility. But it is also apparent that, for all the power of the documents, the district plans at this stage largely imply the status quo.
Why are these documents powerful? They are powerful because they set out the number of dwellings that councils will be required to help provide in the next five years and beyond. The documents provide the broad framework within which suburbs and centres may change, and within which councils may change them.
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Councils do not rate a mention in Australia's constitution. They exist in NSW as creatures of state law. Councils are therefore independent of government only so far as Parliament allows them to be. If the state government, or an agency created by the government – such as the Greater Sydney Commission - directs them to approve a certain number of dwellings within a given period, councils are, subject to other legislation and the messiness of politics, required to comply.
And why do these plans imply the status quo? One reason is that despite their many hundreds of pages, they don't say much. They contain targets for jobs and for housing. They offer demographic statistics. And they include pat descriptions of existing suburbs.
But they do not prescribe the street corner on which a new apartment block should be built; they do not tell you which road should include a bus lane; which parks need more trees; which unit blocks should be four storeys and which should be eight; nor which suburbs need a new train line more than other suburbs. This might be fair enough. The Greater Sydney Commission was established about a year ago, is governed by part-time commissioners, and it may have been a tough ask for it to have nutted things out more minutely.
Another reason the plans imply the status quo is that they tend to follow what is already happening in Sydney. The housing targets adopted by the commission are in step with population forecasts prepared by the Department of Planning and Environment. To a large extent, therefore, the housing targets lock in the trends already taking place. And those trends largely involve building new properties in places where it is easiest to do so. Planning Minister Rob Stokes might be correct in saying his government has arrested the trend of concentrating development on Sydney's fringe, but the shape of development across the city remains uneven.
Two councils, for instance, have appealed to the Supreme Court against the Baird government's compulsory amalgamation agenda: Woollahra and Hunters Hill. Those councils – along with Mosman, which has also been successful in staving off amalgamation through the courts – may have had the least to fear about the Greater Sydney Commission's changes. According to the commission's targets, Hunters Hill is to increase in size by 150 dwellings in the next five years. Woollahra, which takes in the Turnbull family's Point Piper shack, will grow by 300 dwellings, and Mosman by 300.
These targets are infinitesimal compared with those in the rest of the city. Taken together, the 750 new dwellings for these waterside locations will be less than 8 per cent of the 10,150 new dwellings to be built in Bayside Council, made up of the former Rockdale and Botany councils. They are barely 5Â per cent of the 13,250 houses and apartments targeted for the Canterbury-Bankstown area.
![The shape of development across Sydney remains uneven.](/web/20161124101109im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/l/1/x/e/n/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gsvsp7.png/1479884441220.jpg)
Other neighbourhoods to have decried the pace of change are also forecast to grow at a slower pace than elsewhere. The three eastern suburbs councils of Woollahra, Waverley and Randwick are to grow by about 3800 dwellings combined in the next five years. These suburbs occupy an area significantly larger than the former inner-west councils of Leichhardt, Ashfield and Marrickville which, combined, are to increase by 5900 dwellings.
Head further west and the intensity of development increases. Strathfield, less than half the size of the new Inner West Council, is to grow by 3650. Burwood, a fifth the size of the Inner West, is to grow by 2600. Parramatta and Blacktown have the city's largest overall targets, with the exception of the City of Sydney, which is largely meeting housing targets by encouraging development on former industrial land.
![Lucy Turnbull, the chief commissioner of the Greater Sydney Commission and former lord mayor of Sydney.](/web/20161124101109im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/s/c/d/v/m/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gsvsp7.png/1479884441220.jpg)
The Greater Sydney Commission has injected some change by proposing what would be Sydney's first city-wide affordable housing policy.
Otherwise, the organisation has a way to go if it is to be more than another layer of bureaucracy padding out what is already going on.
Jacob Saulwick is city editor.
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