Sydney’s much-lauded new urban policies are keen to reinforce the image of Sydney as a city on the move. But while these policies are touted as game changers, they represent a significant step backwards.

Most worryingly, they continue an unhealthy trend within our urban governance; one that eschews critical analysis of the city’s urban condition in favour of projecting an aestheticised image of Sydney as a “global city”. This masks the city’s real needs and possibilities.

The focus of the Three Cities plan remains firmly fixed on shoring up the “Global Sydney” brand, Credit:Wolter Peeters

The Greater Sydney Commission’s new metropolitan plan, A Metropolis of Three Cities, exemplifies this paradox. When measured against its own high-minded rhetoric, one thing is clear: the plan is a failure. Like its predecessor, 2014’s forgettable Plan for Growing Sydney, it bypasses any critical analysis of Sydney’s long-term urban structure in favour of superficial discursive tropes (“great places”) and spatial metaphors (“a metropolis of three cities”), the main purpose of which appears to be validating the government’s existing investment commitments.

The notion that responsibility for the plan is outsourced to a supposedly independent agency is an illusion; the GSC is a crown agency like any other arm of government. At no point does the plan question the wisdom of the government’s growing list of big-spending projects, despite the obvious scope for doing so. How could it, with the Premier’s benign visage featured prominently within the opening pages?