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Relational planning and performative sub-regional strategies: Analysing the construction of the Sydney Global City Region through an assemblage

framework

Kane Pham1 1University of Technology Sydney

Abstract: The construction of ‘Global Cities’ have become contemporary grand projects with a shift from cities to agglomerations of city-regions increasingly prioritised in strategic plans. This has been necessitated by an increasing emphasis on mobilities through network structures of nodes and flows, and has been adopted by the inclusion of relational planning models in parallel with traditional blueprint plans. The complexity of these frameworks that seek to integrate the perspectives of public, private and community actors has been less uniform as constraints of time and resources often maintain overly deterministic strategies. New strategies are essentially refreshed plans without significant resolution of previous guidance nor innovation, instead introducing new sub-regional governing actors without the responsibility for, or accountability of its outcomes. Through analysis of recent metropolitan strategic plans, this paper finds a continued emphasis and placing greater visibility to supporting economic growth through global aspirations and comparisons in lieu of localised spatial conditions that continue to remain less visible in these strategic documents. The paper argues through an assemblage framework for the adoption of a flatter ontology into each scalar level of the strategic framework. This inductive mode of inquiry allows the emergence of innovative strategies to be found through, rather than by the localisation of context, making visible the often tacit or unseen sociospatial issues.

Key words: Relational planning, Sydney Global City Region, Greater Sydney Commission, assemblages.

IntroductionIn recent years the agenda and discourse of strategic planning in New South Wales (NSW) has undergone significant restructuring with a proliferation of metropolitan strategic plans produced since 2005. This in particular has maintained attention towards Sydney as a Global City at its centre, but as a strategic space of the urban hinterland has now been extended towards its regional boundary, a territorial adjustment has seen the city now extending its identity to represent the agglomeration of its region, thus becoming the Sydney Global City Region. This stable configuration is however undergoing an overhaul to shift the strategic, political and economic centre west towards Parramatta and a newly formed Greater Parramatta and Olympic Peninsula (GPOP) precinct (GSC, 2016f). Utilising an assemblage frame this paper examines recent changes of urban governing strategies in the Sydney Global City Region through an analysis of recent strategic planning documents delivered by the New South Wales (NSW) Government and the Greater Sydney Commission (GSC). The discussion deconstructs the performative construction of the region and the multiple overlapping lenses in which to see the formation and conflicts that occur within this process.

Experiments in urban consolidation and attempts at unified metropolitan planning in NSW have had a speckled history that has seen varying levels of success (Larcombe 1978; Baines and Miles 1981). In the 1980s the Labour state government prioritised urban consolidation in the 1988 metropolitan strategy (Gleeson & Low 2000, p. 87) and with the most recent round of amalgamations being forced by the NSW Liberal party in 2011 (ILGRP, 2013) has evolved into new attempts at metropolitan governance through the GSC, a recently formed quasi-governmental agency. This most recent attempt has been fraught with controversy not simply because it ran counter to the Liberal-National government’s 2011 election policy to not pursue forced amalgamations but also due to inadequate explanation of the benefits and intentions of these council mergers (ILGRP 2013, pp. 9, 100). These visible conflicts between local and state government are not immune to political party differences and with the ordination of the GSC giving greater power to the NSW Government to pursue metropolitan consolidation and metropolitan metagovernance.

This paper evaluates contemporary metropolitan strategies and the rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 develops theory on assemblages, some dialogical clashes and application within urban policy arrangements. Section 3 examines recent strategic plans and the role of the GSC to

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influence metropolitan governance. Section 4 applies an assemblage lens towards the changes of the successive metropolitan plans concluding with Section 5 discussing the conflicts and potential of the GSC to address urban inequality and how assemblages can contribute to understanding their performance.

Regional Assemblages and Mobile PoliciesTerritories and regions have increasingly been realised as the product of sociospatial relations (Anderson & McFarlane, 2012) that have opened up the study of urban politics and discussions of policy-making through interdisciplinary means (McCann & Ward, 2013; Baker & Temenos, 2015; Peck & Theodore, 2015). Cities and urban regions are also affected and transformed by both local institutions and actors, and from a distance from global entities (McFarlane, 2011a; Anderson & McFarlane, 2011). These myriad entities that distend, disrupt and distort the relationships of cities and their hinterland enact processes of reconfiguration, territorialisation and reterritorialisation of urban spaces, acting as a soundboard for changes occurring from the local through global.

In recent debates, the utilisation of assemblage as a lens and framework to understand the urban have sparked discussions in its application and utility (see City 2011(15.2, 15.3-4), in particular McFarlane, 2011a; Brenner et al., 2011). Assemblage, and assemblage thinking is a growing epistemological field of research that observes objects ‘in motion’. This post-structuralist framework assumes that the subject, in the case of this paper, the city-region, as an unstable object that is formed through a relational mosaic of different elements be it material objects of people and places, or expansive relationships of politics and power. These elements interact through unpredictable, asymmetric ways (Bender, 2010) and are contextually specific. The inspiration for this theoretical framework is varied but the dominant field of thought has however settled on a few key components that have generally guided scholars in this field notably following from Deleuze & Guattari (1988) and more recently DeLanda (2006; 2016). In general, assemblages (as relational objects) are explored through their qualities of emergence; territorialisation, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation; composed of heterogeneous entities; as parts (of larger assemblages) and as a whole; and interactivity between their parts. These dialogues range from the methodological (McFarlane, 2011a), ontological (Dewsbury, 2011) and empirical that question and promote its function and feasibility (Brenner et al., 2011). This rich generation of literature has drawn functional perspectives from a range of fields in the social science and humanities (Law, 2004; Marcus & Saka, 2006), politics (Legg, 2011), international relations (Acuto & Curtis, 2014), regional studies (Allen & Cochrane, 2007; 2011) and architectural sciences among others (Dovey, 2011). These attempts to navigate a difficult and varied conceptual lens range from the side of too ontologically flat, encompassing a totality of the urban, and vitally lost, or by choosing a thread that may hold marginal relatedness through a ‘follow the actor’ approach structured through an Actor-Network-Theory framework that traces contestable results (Sayes, 2014).

Cities are products of sociospatial relations (Jessop et al., 2008; Brenner & Elden, 2009) and are thus sensitive to the reorganisation of the social agents and structure of urban form. By extension, global cities are then more extensively networked structures that are ideal objects to study changes in urban political ecology that describe the metabolic process of city development (Heynan et al., 2006; Farias, 2016). These networked systems combine and intertwine uneven and divergent paths of city development that have been termed mongrel (Sandercock, 2003), hybrid (Amin, 2007; Farias & Bender, 2012) and cyborg (Gandy, 2005; Swyngedouw, 2006) among other imaginations attempting to categorise and theorise the city. The proliferation of these novel lenses then find conflict when compared with strategic plans that often promote and presume path dependencies and outcomes instead of offering open frames that allow unexpected and organic forms of interaction and input into the highly volatile stages of urban development and change.

Assemblages thus are open frameworks that allow for a greater range of inputs to be considered when applied to the urban. This flat, rather than hierarchised ontology questions embedded and a priori interpretations of existing urban political arrangements allowing for mediation regarding conflicts of social justice and power (Dovey, 2016, p. 264). Then viewing the political organisation of the city through this framework we can begin to remove the constrictions of boundaries and borders that limit the view of cities, instead beginning to see the city as a networked structure and part of a “complex interdependence between humans and non-human organisms, technologies, infrastructures and objects” (Rodgers et al., 2014, p. 1553). This scalar connectivity of more fixed nodes such as cities

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gives greater agency to actors with less mobility to become empowered and could then effectively contribute to the construction of place with an acquired distributed political agency.

This distributed locus of place with greater connectivity of city spaces has also contributed to the proliferation of urban strategic plans through the mobility of urban policies. The mobility of urban actors has accelerated and capitalised on the displacement and circulation of policy knowledge not only replicating, but mutating and quickly translating these lessons to their home turf (Peck & Theodore, 2010; 2015; Rodgers et al., 2014; Baker & Ruming, 2015). Embedded in these global networks, urban policy actors have greater exposure to emerging and cutting edge insights, but this translation and importation can become messier in practice and in its transference (McGuinness et al., 2015, p. 27). An assemblage framework offers possibilities to consider the cross cutting nature of these globalising processes situating the multifarious actors and contexts that are deconstructed and reconstructed. This reconstruction process can be seen as an ‘assemblage of assemblages’ (Bender 2010, p. 306) considering the city as a triple object of space, node and network.

These (fast) policy transfers are the result of sociopolitial practices that increases the flow and removes the barriers towards policy learning and implementation that Peck & Theodore call “policy without borders” (2015, p. xv). The construction of global networks and the response by cities and States extends towards an expanded urban territory to capture these flows called the city-region. This restructuring of the city towards a city-region sees the potential of urban assemblages as an analytical device suggesting the city as multiple, following Farias, “provides a concrete and graspable image of how the city is brought into being and made present in ensembles of heterogeneous actors, material and social aspects” (Farias, 2010, p. 14). This ability to analyze the city as a multiple object stresses the complexity of cities as regions whilst understanding the contingent relations of interiority. These interior relations allow for agency to move past the co-isolated development of a rigid hegemonic structure that has allowed business as usual development and governance to dictate the construction of cities.

Viewing urban territories through frameworks of assemblages allows one to capture a moment in time, of an open field of a diverse range of sociopolitical actors within a relatively fixed spatial field of the city-region. Seeing the city-region as a space, node and network allows a de-ontologised perspective of this dynamic form that begins to recognise and integrate a diversity of voices that act within urban spaces. These heterogeneous actors can then contribute to the mutation of policy that has been drawn from multiple origins (McCann and Ward 2013, p. 11) rejecting a priori constructions of power, thereby excavating the already existing potential of these localised actors shifting the direction of sociospatial relationships towards more emancipatory (urban) assemblages (Ruddick, 2012).

Planning and assembling the Sydney Global City RegionSydney has, since the mid-1990s taken the mantle of a global city (McGuirk, 2004, p. 1019). The maintenance of this title has however faced regional challenges from fellow east coast capital Melbourne (Searle & Cardew, 2000). Since 2005, metropolitan planning in Sydney has been punctured by discontinuities of governance and frequent changes in leadership that has been reflected in the accelerated production of strategic plans without reflection upon the results of past plans or their failures (Bunker et al., 2017). City and global-regional competition has also been the driving force of these plans that has attempted to reshape the metropolis from a single dominant node (of the Sydney CBD) towards a polycentric model of cities achieving compact growth and global recognition. As a result of local restructuring through globally prioritized development the interrelationship between councils, state authorities and industrial and commercial partners has emphasized the economic potential of spatial development to foster conditions agreeable for these organisations to develop.

To achieve this growth, economies of scale have been marked as essential to both deliver efficient councils, and have the capacity to generate growth within councils and region recognising that “spatial scales are never fixed, but are perpetually redefined, contested and restructured” (Swyngedouw, 2004, p. 33). These states of flux and the indeterminacy of their paths follow McFarlane’s reading of assemblage as “a contingent set of translating logics that have to be enacted in practice” (McFarlane, 2011b, p. 379) that provide emphasis on the utility of assemblage as a framework to see the changing dynamics of the construction of a city-region. The rest of this section will review the recent strategic

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plans from the 2005 City of Cities plan, 2010 Metropolitan Plan for Sydney 2036 and following onto the 2014 Plan for Growing Sydney, as well as the inherited legacy of these plans driven by the GSC.

Figure 1. 2005 Metropolitan Strategy MapSource: NSW Government, 2005, pp. 10-11.

Since 2005, there has been a steady increase of the rate of strategic plans produced at the State level, from 2005, 2010, 2014 and with the finalised GSC plans due in 2018. The City of Cities (2005) plan was comprehensive attempting to prescribe detail to metropolitan development although was seen as a vehicle for business lobby groups merging many of their suggestions from the Property Council of Australia’s Metro Strategy: A Property Industry Perspective (Searle 2006; Bunker et al. 2017). Through structuration of a series of ‘corridors’ the metropolitan strategy began to draw hierarchies of strategic centres and their supportive jurisdictions forming a typology of districts dependent on their function within a larger Sydney. Examining Figure 1, the economic corridor draws an arc from Sydney Airport and centred on the global centres of Sydney and North Sydney towards Macquarie (technology) Park, renewal corridors such as along Parramatta Road from the CBD west to Parramatta, and enterprise corridors yet to be indicated or clarified of their functions. These plans clearly illustrate the centralized spatial planning prioritising Sydney (and North Sydney) as harbour cities and at the centre of ‘global Sydney’ radiating towards the regional capital of Parramatta and the newly suggested centres of Liverpool and Penrith further west, all three of which are categorised as river cities supporting the growth of Sydney (NSW Government, 2005, p. 8).

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Figure 2. 2010 Metropolitan Strategy MapSource: NSW Government, 2010, pp. 18-19.

The Metropolitan Plan for Sydney 2036 (2010) builds on the City of Cities plan, maintaining an emphasis to be ‘global’ and integrating the NSW Governments Metropolitan Transport Plan: Connecting the City of Cities. In Figure 2, the metropolitan plan maintains the separation of (global) Sydney attached to North Sydney as the key elements of ‘Global Sydney’, in comparison to the regional cities of Parramatta as the second CBD, and Liverpool and Penrith (NSW Government, 2010, p. 24). By addressing spatial development within a regional context, the plan intends to both “strengthen Sydney’s roles as a globally competitive city” and “strengthen Parramatta’s role as the premier Regional City and second CBD” (NSW Government, 2010, p. 6). The plan also recognises the 2005 plan, noting that “Sydney’s spatial structure as a city of cities is a key factor in its national and global success” (NSW Government, 2010, p. 24), with the centre of Sydney CBD and North Sydney, and satellite cities of Parramatta, Liverpool and Penrith supporting Sydney’s growth. Transportation and infrastructure are emphasised in this plan with a desire for connecting the 5 city centres within their ‘one hour city’ boundaries taken from the Marchetti principle (NSW Government, 2010, p.25). Sub-regional divisions are maintained from the 2005 plan, with the Inner West, Sydney City and East uncombined as are the North and North East sub-regions (NSW Government, p. 133).

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Figure 3. Towards a Network CitySource: NSW Government, 2010, p. 27.

To reach these goals of connectivity and strengthening the satellite cities, an ideal of a ‘Network City’ was included to respond to the ‘City of Cities’ approach suggested in the previous plan. This long-term strategy aimed to restructure Sydney from the ‘City of Cities’, and beyond the 2036 frame towards a network structure of cities. Considering Figure 3 if we plot the major centres suggested in the plan then we can already see Parramatta securing both strategic and geographical primacy in future plans. The plan is also explicit in its aim to achieve the ‘City of Cities’ structure through effective density towards compact cities, leading to structure the 5 cities in Figure 2 towards a network of distinct but not independent cities (NSW Government, 2010, p. 39). Not to be forgotten is the ‘global economic corridor’ that is to be expanded and connected to the second CBD, Parramatta.

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Figure 4. 2014 Metropolitan Strategy MapSource: NSW Government, 2014, pp. 12-13.

With the Plan for Growing Sydney (2014) we see the aspirations of the 2010 plan of maintaining Sydney CBD’s international competitiveness continue and expansion of the Global Economic Corridor, but grounded in more detail is the desire to grow the importance of western Sydney, especially Parramatta, through the expansion of the Parramatta CBD and extension towards the Olympic Peninsula (NSW Government, 2014, pp. 6-7). The key message is that Western Sydney is the “key to Sydney’s success” (NSW Government, 2014, p. 16) with Figure 4 seeing greater emphasis and activity in the Western region, with Parramatta, Norwest (business park) and Olympic Park becoming connected with the Global Economic Corridor.

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Figure 5. A metropolis of three citiesSource: GSC, 2016c, p. 4.

With the introduction of the GSC, a new relational configuration of the Sydney Global City Region was established restructuring Sydney as a ‘metropolis of three cities’. Beginning with A Draft Amendment to update A Plan for Growing Sydney (2016c) the GSC has been tasked to both create draft sub-regional plans and to update the Plan for Growing Sydney (2014) towards a unified Towards our Greater Sydney 2056 plan before the end of 2017, but recently pushed back to 2018 (NSW Government, 2017, p. [8-14]). This amendment (seen in Figure 5) “reconceptualises Greater Sydney as a metropolis of three cities” (GSC, 2016c, p. 1) although a growing emphasis on the Western sub-regions, with a Western Sydney City Deal (GSC 2016c, p. 4) to support the development of Western Sydney Airport. This City Deal modelled after the UK City Deals, forms partnerships with federal, state and local governments that work to fulfil the Australian Government’s ‘Smart City Plan’. The most significant material development in this plan is the formalisation of the Greater Parramatta and Olympic Peninsula or GPOP. This plan explicitly aims to restructure the arrangement of cities and sub-regions in Greater Sydney shifting its strategic and geographical centre towards the proposed GPOP precinct to achieve its aim of a productive, liveable and sustainable Sydney. These two strategies fit under the ‘once-in-a-generation’ opportunity rhetoric (GSC, 2016a, p. 25; 2016b, p. 25) that seeks to re-organise Global Sydney around this relationship.

As we can see, the principle changes in recent metropolitan plans reorientate Sydney from the eastern CBD towards a natural geographical centre. This significant shift reorganises the relative importance of each sub-region and city of the metropolis that sees the boundaries and definition of the component parts of the region inherently mutable and instable. The following section expands on the performativity of the city-region examining the changes and implications for future strategic planning.

Re-assembling the regionIt is apparent that the Sydney Global City Region is composed of a series of component parts of heterogeneous actors from local and state governments, citizens, sub-regional borders, while also affected by global actors, markets and policies that interact respectively through spaces, nodes and overlapping networks. The emergence of Sydney, as a region can trace its roots that promote a scalar privileging deeming it necessary for the construction of a larger urban agglomeration to maintain competitiveness. Hybrid multi-level governance arrangements are then made to institute regional assemblages forming part-private, part-public agencies (Allen & Cochrane, 2007, p. 1171) that are composed of local, regional and state governments, and partnerships with agencies and business

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actors to engage in a ‘politics of scale’ to achieve competitive advantages through efficiencies that are pooled through these arrangements. Threading a scalar narrative, these effects act through achieving a compact city (Bunker et al., 2017), urban regeneration projects (McGuirk et al., 2016, Pham, forthcoming), and regional adjustment reordering the relationships between geographical strategic zones of the region.

This complex relational arrangement of spaces and actors then offers the potential for urban harmonisation to produce more equal cities, but this increased complexity may also shelter these issues from engagement. As regional governance arrangements are both local and global, “it is increasingly difficult to entertain a simple central versus regional government binary as more networked arrangements disrupt traditional, hierarchical forms of regulation and coordination, it becomes harder to pinpoint how governing agencies mobilise to secure, modify or translate their goals.” (Allen and Cochrane, 2007, p. 1171). Circling back to the 2005 plan, there is an explicit integration of interests from business lobby groups with significant parts of their strategy absorbed into the City of Cities plan (Searle, 2006; Bunker et al., 2017). Beginning from this base we have seen provisions towards facilitating urban renewal through large development given an easier berth from planning to implementation with controversies such as the Barangaroo renewal of East Darling Harbour emerge in recent years (Pham & Grant, 2017). Further the emphasis on maintaining ‘global’ status within the rhetoric of competitive cities places focus on the restructuring of the urban environment to strengthen this capacity in lieu of their impact on the localised sociospatial form within the city-region. Of course exogenous factors such as global trade and developmental trends must be considered and addressed and are inherently important but an a priori emphasis and starting point that frames the metropolitan strategic planning process does little more than reinforce existing conflicts and maintain hegemonic determination within measures of urban governance.

These global aspirations of the political class are seen in the reconfiguration of the city-region reorganising the ‘Central City’ alignment over Greater Parramatta. Seen relationally, the different framing of the city-region from a sub-regional lens through metropolitan lens sees conflicting characterisation of the formalisation of the existing Sydney City and Parramatta. Table 1 organises the deployment of the categorisation of each as well as the area that encompasses Western Sydney Airport.

Table 1. Defining Sydney relationally Sydney City Greater Parramatta Western Sydney Airport

Sub-region Central West Central West‘metropolis of three cities’

Eastern City Central City Western City

Source: GSC, 2016a; 2016d.

The relations of interiority still observe Sydney City to be in the Central sub-region while within the metropolitan vision it is listed under its geographical position as the Eastern City relative to Greater Parramatta as the Central City. This repositioning of Greater Parramatta within external networks vitalises the Western sub-regions and appears to be a step-wise change towards Greater Parramatta as the ‘true centre’ of Sydney (GSC, 2017). These scalar shifts of regional (power) centres are representative of the not fully determined nature of cities within a globalising discourse (McGuirk et al., 2016, p. 130). They may be shaped and reshaped through differing strategic alignments with agency imparted on urban spaces that were, in the past, not of strategic importance to the performance of the region. These performative strategies can be seen within an assemblage framework to draw relations between local-global dynamics and interior/exterior forces. Urban assemblages most closely resemble the re-ordering processes of city development and provide strategies to imagine and see the disassembly and reassembly of inter-urban relationships. As these relations shift and change, a flexible yet imperfect framework like assemblages may be the most suitable analogue to open a dialogue into the sociospatial construction of the city-region.

ConclusionCities and city-regions are unorthodox and volatile spaces that are sensitive to changes on a local and planetary scale. This heterodox assemblage of different actors, spaces and processes marks an inherently difficult territory to govern, but it is “the coming together that matters – the recognition that urban policy is constantly in the process of being redefined and reimagined, drawing on a particular

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menu but combining its elements in different ways at different times and in different ways” (Cochrane, 2007, p. 14). These multi-scalar and heterodox sociospatial relations are often actualised through relations of exteriority, that is, the global forces that are prioritised. This is seen in rhetorical strategies such as the relations between sub-regions or alternatively in the production of the ‘metropolis of three cities’ with inherent contradictions in their representation. At a strategic planning level these conflicts invite confusion and dissonant understanding of the plan, but when moving towards implementation at a local level, these conflicts become materialised compounding existing urban issues and reinforcing Sydney’s heritage of an ‘mongrel city’ (Sandercock, 2003). This approach reinforces the regressive nature of these policies and strategies returning to a state of urban governance as usual.

The institutional assemblage of the GSC forged through government and industry actors must consider the foundations on which they are formed, and to respond to the regressive policies that they have inherited. A greater consideration must be given towards encouraging agency for not just underrepresented institutions and urban territorial actors, but also the individual agents that are often placated and treated with tokenistic merit. Cities and regions are often founded and formed but their legacies often forgotten. This must not be the practice as beginning from a blank state that would be akin to processes of colonization of an existing territory. Cities are sociospatial relations and the policies that are designed must be refined towards achieving an outcome of emancipatory urban assemblages. These processes are inherently political but mechanisms defining regional governance are open and this is where emancipatory politics can resolve the already existing urban inequalities.

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Searle, G. (2006) Is the City of Cities Metropolitan Strategy the Answer for Sydney? PRACTICE REVIEWS. Urban Policy and Research, 24(4), pp.553-566.

SOAC 2017

Searle, G. & Cardew, R. (2000) Planning, economic development and the spatial outcomes of market liberalisation. Urban Policy and Research, 18(3), pp.355-376.

Swyngedouw, E. (2004) Globalisation or ‘glocalisation’? Networks, territories and rescaling. Cambridge review of international affairs, 17(1), pp.25-48.

Swyngedouw, E. (2006) Circulations and metabolisms:(hybrid) natures and (cyborg) cities. Science as Culture, 15(2), pp.105-121.