How can social justice be achieved in Sydney’s Future?
The release of the Draft State Plan in August 2006 and the recent community consultations providing feedback on the Plan’s priorities, shows that Sydney is becoming a more unequal city, with serious and intensifying social problems, exacerbated by geographic and demographic inequalities. These tendencies with their very real social consequences have called forth a range of responses by government, focusing on the fears expressed by Sydney’s residents about their futures.
The Metro-strategy, which recently announced it was closing its independent e-newsletter, was one such set of responses. In the first of the Sydney Futures Symposia earlier this year, a range of critics argued that the Strategy, while valuable in parts (and they could not of course agree about which bits were the more valuable), was fundamentally flawed by its lack of control of real resources, and its subjection to the imperatives of the private development market.
Can these forces be addressed by the community so the trend lines slow or reverse? Is there a public desire to do so? Or is urban management simply a bureaucratic strategy to contain and control the downside of urban growth while ramping up the profitability of the upside?
Cities can be understood as systems for allocating opportunities among populations: location is thus both an expression of and a contributor to life chances. In this paper I want to explore how Sydney works as an allocator of those scarce resources that are crucial in determining life opportunities, and what the implications of such an analysis are for the longer term “social health” of the city.
Full paper now available !
Sydney’s Global Future – how unequal can it be?
