Emerald city

I spent most of the election weekend down in Sydney, finishing a book in my hotel room and giving a talk at that architecture conference.

It went very well, thank you.

Both the talk—and, of course, the election.

It had been a while since I’d spent much time in the centre of Sydney. When I go down, I usually stay out at Bondi—my old hood. But I hadn’t been in the city proper for any serious stretch of time since the light rail went into George Street, and I was really surprised by how much of a difference it’s made to the CBD.

Like, completely transformed it.

In some ways, it’s taken George Street back to what it originally was, the main axis of the city, the spine of the old colonial town. Removing almost all vehicular traffic—except for the trams, which seem to run every five or six minutes—has turned the entire strip into something like a pedestrian mall.

And you can see the effect.

The city now has the same density of foot traffic well into the evening that Melbourne’s had for years. It makes central Sydney a much more pleasant, amenable place to be in some ways. But it also means it’s more crowded. Busier. Sometimes unpleasant, depending on where you are and what time of day it is.

The other thing that struck me, travelling up George Street and out to Sydney Uni for the conference, was just how much development—and redevelopment—has been done. The old brewery site, I think it was the old Carlton Brewery just off Broadway, on the way out to Glebe and the uni? It’s a whole new city now.

I’d say there’s been billions of dollars worth of rebuilding. More even than I recall before the 2000 Games.

Sydney’s always been the point where global capital enters and leaves Australia, so there's always been a shit-ton of money there. But it feels like it’s exploded in the last ten years.

You walk around now, and it’s obvious: this is one of the wealthiest cities in the world.

But of course, most people who live in Sydney aren’t wealthy. I imagine a lot of them are struggling just to get by, and some are losing that struggle.

What really struck me was not just the number of homeless people on the streets, but the extent and the permanence of their settlement. That’s the only word that fits—settlement. These aren’t people just sitting on a bit of cardboard scrounged from behind Woolies, trying to hover over a warm air grate from the underground railway.

It looks more like hard rubbish collection day in my suburb, with everyone’s stuff piled up along the footpath. Except this isn’t waiting for the council to take it away. This is home. Their home is on the street, and they’ve furnished it.

And yes, I know—it’s like this everywhere now. Post-COVID, this is the new normal in cities all over the world. But it still hit hard. The contrast between the staggering wealth on display and the equally staggering poverty sitting alongside it was shocking.

And it does seem pretty strange that we’ve got Labor governments at both the state and federal level—and this is still happening.