Pride lets us destroy without conscience century-old trees, just to save a few contractual weeks in building the new light rail. It lets us build endless motorways, knowing that they worsen sprawl, destroy farmland and warm the planet. It lets us pretend that nature can take endless abuse and that the economy is our creation, rather than a wholly eco-dependent entity. Illustration: Simon Letch Credit: Pride also drives our government’s desire to seem consultative while excluding from the conversation all possible dissent. And although cities are nine-tenths shaped by emotion, desire and belief, prideful governments encourage us to see cities as merely technical entities, shaped by numbers – dollars, densities and traffic flows. This allows them to affect "consultation" while resisting actual engagement. Loading Consider, for example, the Western Harbour Tunnel. The proposal is currently available for comment over six short weeks, in 78 separate PDFs, some more than 800 pages long. Such techno-cloaking brings government the triple benefit of making city-shaping decisions seem at once inaccessible, unavoidable and morally neutral. We may not like the cities that result, but we accept them as necessary evils.

Sydney's motorways only worsen sprawl. Credit:Christopher Pearce But neo-liberal governments also actively nurture hubris in the populace, by encouraging us to consider ourselves customers, not citizens. As customers we focus on rights and appetites rather than duties and responsibilities. We’re more likely to vote on short-term self-interest than long-term decency; more likely to consider our own commute time than the long-term air quality, and our own house price than the homeless people we step over in the street. Loading Which brings us nicely to avarice. Neo-liberal culture pivots on having rebadged avarice from sin to virtue. Greed is good. This idea – first floated in the 18th century by the father of capitalism, Adam Smith, but hugely inflated by Margaret Thatcher and the rest – is, of course, the market’s sole guiding principle. Under avarice comes all examples of active government corruption but also market-mindedness, driving the disgraceful sell-offs of Sydney’s treasured and irreplaceable sandstone buildings for a quick buck, the proposed privatisation of Cockatoo Island and the knock-down-rebuild of perfectly good and largely underutilised public assets like the Allianz stadium for newer, bigger versions that prioritise private commercial interests.

Allianz stadium was demolished despite still being usable. Credit:Brook Mitchell Lust? Lust may sound improbable as a city-making ingredient but, at least at a metaphorical level, drives the habitual prostitution of our public lands, institutions and buildings to private corporations. Consider Barangaroo, pimping out hectares of the last remaining public inner-city waterfront for the private profit of Crown Casino, or the Bays Precinct or the Powerhouse, scandalously destroying a venerable public institution so the site can be privately redeveloped. Loading Envy, too, figures here. Activists for housing justice, for example, or those who insist that wealthy suburbs like Woollahra, Hunters Hill or Ku-ring-gai should not be specially protected from medium-density development, are accused of stoking the politics of envy. But there’s envy, too, on the part of governments that yearn to be corporations. There’s a sense that if, as a government, you’re not ruthlessly profit-focussed, you’re not doing it properly. Such governments seem almost ashamed of any impulses they might accidentally have towards fairness, beauty or decency. Gluttony is everywhere. On medieval definitions, gluttony is not just over-eating but dwelling overmuch in earthly thoughts. It drives our disdain for heritage, where refusal to transcend the mundane or recognise the critical importance of narrative in our shared lives allows the wanton destruction of treasured ancient fabric.

In the new-Powerhouse destruction of Parramatta’s pretty Italianate villa Willow Grove, in the vast, ultra-shiny proposals for the Bays Precinct, Parramatta Road, Marrickville and Haberfield, the richly storeyed nature of our city is repeatedly trashed by planning tsars with little imagination and less courage. Willow Grove is one of two heritage properties that will be bulldozed to make way for the new Powerhouse museum. Credit:Nick Moir Wrath is anger. It manifests throughout our culture in impatience with and violence against that which cannot be directly measured, quantified and exploited: the feminine, the beautiful, the old, the principled and the natural. The ultimate built instance is WestConnex, paragon of carbon-belching stupidity, stomping its wrath blindly through our streets and neighbourhoods in pursuit of speed, efficiency and planetary catastrophe. And so to sloth. Again, you might think this plays no part in cities but, again, it’s everywhere. Sloth, or laziness, drives our government’s refusal properly to define contractual relationships – as in the new light rail, where even the Auditor-General recognised "inadequate planning and tight timeframes" increased costs by half a billion dollars and decreased benefits by a billion. Such sloth – evident too in the stadium redevelopments, and the Powerhouse move, where contracts were let before a business case was even developed – is a form of bad parenting that subjects public amenity to developer whim.

Loading But sloth is also present in much of what we justify as efficiency. Sometimes, efficiency implies a genuine frugality with scarce resources (including time). But sometimes what we call efficiency – like driving to the shops – is really about using energies other than our own. And that’s really laziness. So much of Australian culture, from mining to property speculation, yearns after the unearned increment. But we forget that this desire to get more than you deserve nearly always means others – the public, or future generations – get less.