ABSTRACT
Since 2000 there have been profound changes in Australian society, technology, economic activity and attitudes towards sustainability and urbanism. In Sydney, there has been a robust history of state control over urban development in which the institutions of planning have been sequentially refashioned to promote dominant urban objectives. In the past few decades, strategic plans have increasingly been focused on delivering more compact urban development outcomes —essentially by restraining growth on the urban fringe and encouraging intensified development within the urban footprint through multi-unit development. Progressive expansion of the spatial conception of global Sydney deeper into the metropolitan area has also been a feature of successive strategies, most obviously through increasing the tentacles of the global economic corridor. Metropolitan level of governance has been needed to fully assert and implement the imperatives of metropolitan strategies, and Sydney has lacked this dimension since abolition of the Cumberland County Council in the early 1960s.
