Designing the Global City: Design Excellence, Competitions and the Remaking of Central Sydney

This text explores how architectural and urban design values have been co-opted by global cities to enhance their economic competitiveness by creating a superior built environment that is not just aesthetically memorable but more productive and sustainable. It focuses on the experience of central Sydney through its policy commitment to ‘design excellence’ and more particularly to mandatory competitive design processes for major private development. Framed within broader contexts that link it to comparable urban policy and design issues in the Asia-Pacific region and globally, it provides a scholarly but accessible volume that provides a balanced and critical overview of a policy that has changed the design culture, development expectations, public realm and skyline of central Sydney, raising issues surrounding the uneven distribution of benefits and costs, professional practice, representative democracy, and implications of globalization.

Table of Contents:
Introduction.- Property development, governance and the pursuit of design excellence.- Global Sydney: Economy, planning and environment.- A pre-history of design excellence in Sydney.- City of Sydney’s Competitive Design Policy: Context, genesis and operation.- Competitive projects and their design outcomes.- Competitions and Excellence: Three case studies.- The benefits and drawbacks of mandatory design competitions.- Design competitions as public policy.- Conclusion.

About the Author :
Robert Freestone is Professor of Planning in the Faculty of Built Environment at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia. He has held appointments in the NSW Department of Planning, the Department of Geography at the University of Melbourne, and the Urban Research Program at the Australian National University. His books include Place and Placelessness Revisited (2016) and The Planning Imagination (2014). Gethin Davison is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Built Environment at UNSW, Australia. He has a background in human geography, planning and urban design, and has previously worked as a planner in local government and private practice. Both his teaching and research are situated at the intersection of planning and urban design, with a focus on issues of governance and social equity. Richard Hu is Professor of Planning and Urban Design at the University of Canberra, Australia. Heading the Globalization and Cities Research Program, his research cuts across urban design, urban science, and urban policy to investigate issues concerning global cities, urban competitiveness, and sustainable development. 

Review :
“The book is informative and well written. … Well illustrated and amply stocked with diagrams and tables supplementing the narratives, this book is an essential contribution to the comparative literature on urban design. It is certainly an authoritative source for urban designers and public officials interested in improving their cities’ appearance and design. It is also an important argument for the role of public policy and design governance in obtaining excellence in the quality of the built environment … .” (Tridib Banerjee, Journal of the American Planning Association, Vol. 87 (4), 2021)