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This exhibition scheme, intended to provoke discussion and debate about the future of Sydney, projects a frighteningly plausible scenario for the year 2050. In this scenario, the world is dealing with an ongoing environmental crisis.

 

Martin Place is left without infill and becomes a great urban meeting place, the domain and Hyde Park are preserved as green spaces, but the grain of the city shifts entirely - to something like the pedestrian scale of Venice. The number of lanes doubles, the width of them shrinks, and all roads become shared-ways between pedestrians, cyclists, delivery vehicles, and public transport. Each of the old intersections in the city becomes an intimate new urban piazza, and across the whole city an overlaid filagree of these lively, characteristic pedestrian squares transforms the nightlife and street culture of the place. With no cars, the streets are quiet and full of pedestrians; the ground floor of all new buildings is retail space, ensuring that the street level of narrow and intertwined lanes remains an active social interface. Sydney becomes a tightly-packed, intensely dense, twenty-four hour city, a stage for urban pleasures and urban life.