As we gear up for the inaugural City Nation Place Australasia conference in Sydney this February 12-13^th, we sat down with Eamon Waterford, CEO of the Committee for Sydney, to understand how they’re stepping up and reimagining the future of Australia’s iconic city. From the Committee’s pivotal role in advocating for Sydney’s economic prosperity to their placemaking prowess, discover how the Committee is working collaboratively to create a Sydney that is not only a world-class destination, but is also a home for all its residents.

Can you begin by sharing a little a bit about your role and how you connect in with the other organisations working to promote Sydney?

Of course. The Committee for Sydney is an urban policy think tank, which makes us a bit different in some respects to other business-led membership organisations. We’re a focal point for discussions about medium to long-term future of the city. We put out research and open up conversation around topics which are on the fringe now, but in five to ten years, the topics we cover are often mainstream public discussions. Where we differ from other think tanks is that we’re embedded in the practical realities of the day-to-day business of the city. We work with businesses, with universities, and with local government, and so we have a very rich understanding of how the world currently works. We try to be aspirational in our goals, and practical in our recommendations.

Given your role in defining Sydney’s future, do you draw inspiration from other cities to develop your recommendations? 

One of our most successful avenues for advocating for change is to de-risk issues for locals by pointing our where it’s been done successfully elsewhere.

In Sydney – in Australasia in general, even – there’s this mindset that we’re a long way away from the rest of the world. And with that comes a lack of imagination about what’s possible for us to achieve. By bringing the world to Sydney, we can shift people out of the existing frameworks in the city and say, no, we can do something completely different.

So right now, we’re advocating on 20 and 30mph streets, which is rare in Sydney, but is relatively normal in other cities – like quiet streets or cycling superhighways in London. And we can showcase that in the cities that Sydney aspires to be. For example, we aspire to be a financial hub like London. Well, guess what? One of the reasons that London is successful is that it’s really easy for people to get around on bike or on foot. Which has a knock-on effect in creating really vibrant retail strips and 24-hour experience in districts because there’s been that investment in the public realm to facilitate that.

How does your work connect to Sydney’s city brand and the management of its international reputation? Do you think it’s important to focus on those international perceptions? 

Clearly there’s a strong link between how people perceive a place and when people decide to invest or visit a place. That’s especially true for Sydney – which has always been a gateway city to Australia, and an attractor city in terms of its economy. So our brand as a city is critical to our ongoing social and economic success.

It sounds like placeshaping – and policy that impact placeshaping – is your core focus?

Yes. Urban policy is our core. I mean, we also talk about economic development or about social issues; we spend a lot of time talking abut housing because of the inequity of the housing system. But at our heart, we’re an urban policy group and a lot of our work is focused on architecture, urban design, landscape architecture, development, and infrastructure – and how they create opportunities to unlock and catalyse new places.

Often, we aim to translate the international to the metropolitan and then bring it to the individual, rather than working from the ground up.

Sydney’s clearly seeing real success with your placemaking initiatives. The waterfront development by the Sydney Opera House, for example, has clearly been hugely impactful. 

We’re actually starting to see enormous appetite and interest from Asia to come and learn about the waterfront development in Sydney. Ten years ago, you’d look at many of the waterfront precincts in Sydney and think that they were pretty outdated. But there’s been such a transformation over the last decade. There’s been a big Barangaroo development, there’s the redevelopment of Darling Harbour and Circular Quay, and up Sydney Harbour to Parramatta where the city is turning back to the Parramatta River – they’ve all been transformed into excellent precincts which prioritise mixed-use development. We have a rich Indigenous history, and that culture is woven through our waterfront as well.

There’s a really good story to tell about these precincts. They’re examples of really sensitive, beautiful urban design, and the way that they have been conceptualised or branded has also created a kind of levelling up effect in those places too.

The flip side of Sydney is that while we often feel that we need to learn from the rest of the world, we also totally undersell what we’re really good at. As much as we need to learn from others, there’s a bunch of interesting projects happening in Sydney that international cities can learn from. We’re one of the most multicultural cities in the world. We’re a highly educated city too – 51% of Sydney have a bachelor's degree or higher. For a small city, we have really excellent universities – although we don’t have the 800-year-old universities that London can boast about! Our education system is fantastic, and we do amazing work in placemaking.

You’ve already talked about the importance of sensitive urban design that celebrates the cultural heritage of your community. Given how multicultural Sydney is, how does that extend into districts beyond the waterfront?

The way that Sydney is structured demographically is that most individual suburbs aren’t as diverse as the city at large. We have villages, diasporas dotted around the city with a rich cultural depth to each of them. The reality is that most people in Sydney don’t live near the harbour – they live within our suburbs, but it’s fascinating how these cultures live and reside together. Take me – I’m in an area where on three sides of my community, I have a majority Greek suburb, a Mongolian community, and a majority Arabic suburb. That’s an incredible experience I can have within walking distance of my house.

Fifteen to twenty years ago, we were facing some of the same challenges that London is now. We had a really tough time around integration versus multiculturalism, and we had riots and unrest. We wouldn’t give up our diversity or multiculturalism for anything, though. It’s crazy to think that rich multicultural experiences are negative for your prosperity; we all have to be connected to the world and each other.

Why do you think it’s important for place brand and place marketing leaders to join City Nation Place Australasia to learn from regional and international best practice?

Place branding is so critical to the success of cities – it’s not just about creating (or shifting) perceptions about what experiences people can have in a place, it’s also about creating a ‘north-star’ for people in the place to work towards – a clarifying and unifying goal that gets organisations and individuals to do things they otherwise wouldn’t do.

It’s an art – and a science. You can’t take it for granted, and you can learn how to do it well. So for that reason, we’re delighted to be supporting the City Nation Place event as an opportunity to bring practitioners and experts together to learn from each other.

Wonderful. Thank you so much, Eamon – and we look forward to seeing you in Sydney next February!

City Nation Place is heading to Sydney! Find out more about the inaugural CNP Australasia conference here.