While many Sydney planners hark back to the comfortable urban form of
old European cities like Paris and Barcelona there is much to learn from the
incredible energy coming out of Asian cities that are in the same time zone
as Sydney. This century has been dubbed the Asian Century by the Australian
Government and it is easy to understand why. There are increasing economic
ties with cities like Shanghai and Singapore and tourism from these cities to
Sydney is growing rapidly.
To understand better the relationships between these cities and the
aspirations of each of them to be globally relevant, the Urban Taskforce
commissioned Professor Richard Hu of Canberra University and an expert
in Global Cities to prepare a research paper on the three cities beginning with
the letter ‘S’ – Sydney, Singapore, Shanghai. Professor Hu’s report looked at
various ranking systems of cities across the world. Interestingly the three
cities ranked highly in many of the measures. To learn more about the cities
I visited them with Professor Hu and met with the key planning bodies and
private planners, architects and developers.
