Why Sydney Banned Skyscrapers
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- čas přidán 14. 05. 2024
- The secret rule keeping Sydney short.
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Building skyscrapers in Australia should be much easier than in Europe or the US, since you build them downwards not upwards. You don't need to fight gravity!
Might need to re-edit the video to add that joke in
jajajajajajaj
Nice one😂
I knew there would be a comment like this!! 😂 just didn’t expect it to be the first one I see
😂
I live in Sydney, one of the reasons that the Sydney City Council has been opposed to tall buildings is because they don’t want the building to block the sun and shade Hyde Park in the CBD.
NY has central park yet its tall buildings dwarf anything here. Time for Sydney to grow up, no pun intended
sounds like a shitty excuse
@@marcozolo3536I’m sorry but Australia has been doing just fine by not taking advice from America 😂
Let’s all let people from other countries tell us what we need and when 😂😂 I definitely don’t see a influx of Australians wanting to move to New York 😂😂
@jamesbradford651 I don't see an influx of Australians wanting to move to Sydney either. The estimate of the population growing by 60% by 2050 is a bit far fetched.
Brisbane's height limit is 275m due to flight paths. Until the ~70s the restriction was that no building could be taller than the City Hall clock tower.
Nice fact!
Melbourne had similar rule. about nothing could be taller then the town hall
In addition, Brisbane's Gateway Bridge(s) are the design they are because there's a narrow envelope of air they must sit within: low enough for the planes overheard, and high enough on the underside to let ships pass beneath. From an engineering perspective, the design used was apparently the only one that could work.
Brisbane isn't even a city
@@DolphLundgrensDolphinDungeon you're a gronk. Go back to school bub
Welcome to Sydney! One interesting impact of the height limits within the CBD are that it's resulted in many secondary hubs such as Parramatta, North Sydney and Chatswood which all have multiple 150m+ skyscrapers well outside of the main CBD and even more under construction.
That’s not the reason. It was very early on and careful planning to allow this.
Dude! Do you think people actually live in tall skyscrapers? Most of these type of buildings are used for companies and such.
@@sfmaximo plenty do. the tallest buildings in chatswood and parramatta are all residential. outer hubs of blacktown and liverpool are all residential for their towers.
Sounds very good for those areas
@@sfmaximoI work in a building on the 29th floor in Parramatta. Across the street is a newer building, appears from lvl 8 up to the top is all residential … you can see the clothes washing drying on the glass enclosed balcony.
The vast majority of tall buildings in Sydney's CBD are office towers. There's loads of spare capacity in them for many reasons - the 'working from home' revolution being just one.
If we're to have more tall buildings in the CBD, they've got to be for homes, not half filled office buildings.
And if they are for homes, they must be properly built with full inter-unit sound-proofing. If you can sit in your own apartment and hear the neighbours walking and talking, it is a slum, no matter the trendy decor.
Agreed with all of the above.
So Sydney’s gonna end up as more of a hell-hole, noice.
And infrastructure to move people quickly.@@lobstermash
Newcastle is the opposite. It’s all apartments and no extra parking.
I love city with low rooftop. As a traveler, I can see the sun, the actual life of the local people, and some how the nature of the city.
To be honest the reason Sydney expanded so much outward is not due to the height limit, countless of cities such as Paris, Berlin, Madrid and Rome are packed in a much smaller area despite having near/more the population of Sydney. It has more to do with urban sprawl.
There's more urban sprawl in Melbourne and Perth than Sydney. But yeh it did influence planning in the past. Now Sydney can't sprawl as much which is why everything is going vertical even in the suburbs.
In another few decades when Sydney doubles, every suburb will have at least a few buildings approaching twenty storeys. Its already starting to happen in the eastern suburbs thanks to the recent tram ridership increasing dramatically.
@@MarcoCholo-iz9js I think it's great, that smaller population centers are forming in Sydney. Being from Europe I've gotten used to them and looking at endless suburbs in the new world without anything interesting is quite depressing.
@@what-mj3kwI personally like suburbs, but I spent a stint living in suburban Brisbane where it's easy and quick access to top tier natural tourist attractions. Geographically the largest city in Australia, but you're never far away from nature/adventure based tourism that shits all over Sydney and Melbourne.
I think it depends on what you like and are used too, really. The first time I traveled to QLD I found the lack of density and sea of green disorientating.. and I live in the western suburbs of Sydney. Also the poor public transport was an entirely other thing.@@dingobonza
a result of car dependency
Sydney has a special place in my heart. One of my favorite cities in the entire planet that I can’t wait to revisit! Greetings from America 🇺🇸
as a person who lives in syd, such a dead city
@@bathwaterseller7080fr lol
@@bathwaterseller7080 As a fellow aussie, the city aint dead, but everyone living there is.. on the inside anyway...
I've never had a single friendly smile returned to me in syd metro area, rural NSW is a great time though :^)
@@greg_one_izm Agreed. I moved out of Sydney into the regions, the people are so much better here. Lockdowns, and lock out laws didn't kill Sydney, the Zombies that live in Sydney killed Sydney for me, still a beautiful city though.
I lived in Sydney for 15 years; in those years the people were so different to the residents in that metropolis now. God, their soulless, I hate it when I have to go back there, except for the views.
Sadly, Sydney is slowly becoming like New York! Expensive/unaffordable housing and rent and more homeless people out on the streets as a result!
One problem with skyscrapers in Sydney that I'm surprised wasn't mentioned is the proximity of the airport which is about 8km south of the CBD. Its a factor I'm pretty sure would affect the construction of supertall skyscrapers in the future
How?
The planes don't fly over or near the city. Also there is a new airport being made in western sydney.
Yeah that was a massive omission. Sydney Kingsford Smith Airport is only about 8km from the centre of the CBD, and many of the flight paths cross over large parts of central Sydney.
Aren’t they building a new airport in the western suburbs?
It won't be an issue, the north approaches to the airport filter in over the northern suburbs, west of the harbour bridge and then over the inner west for their final approaches, Takeoff to the north on the 3rd runway track to the right well before reaching the city.
Given the vacancy rates of skyscrapers in other cities after Covid, hopefully Sydney's being smart about it and making its new big boys adaptable to change with the times, like the German skyscraper covered recently on the channel.
As a Sydneysider I have very little faith in anything smart being done
That's not happening. We are in a housing deficit. Immigration/population rise is exceeding dwellings built by double the rate.
@aussiefaraday Sydney metropolitan area spans 50+ km NS and EW. The problem is where the vacancies are, and where is the demand due to work etc. Like all cities, it's a multifaceted issue
Skyscraper offices have a high vacancy rate. Apartment buildings do not. The tallest buildings in the world are apartment towers.
Tax loopholes, basically. It's more profitable for these things to sit empty and claim the 'lost rent' as a tax write off then see them used at a price that reflects their value.
That's how we have a glut of empty houses/businesses and a lot of people who can't access them.
Extremely dodgy system.
A problem with skyscrapers is that they benefit the few in those top floors, while disadvantaging everyone in the building's shadow. It also compounds concentration in a few areas.
It would be better to have more of those Medium height buildings along the transport corridors. (Other vids discussing the missing middle)
Fun fact: in Cambridge, MA, the city where MIT is located, there was a limit to the number of floors buildings could have.
When MIT asked the famous architect I.M. Pei to design the a building (the "green building") for the campus, he noticed a loophole: he made it the maximum number of floors, but made the ground floor extremely tall.
The city then changed the law to restrict the maximum height to no taller than the green building.
If that was a law before, it must have been amended or repealed. SoMa Building 4 in Kendall is now taller than the Green Building at 315 ft.
Genius
Changing rules by design from the ground up
@@ZetaPyro yeah it looks like they changed it in the last decade or so specifically for the Kendall redevelopment efforts.
😅
Just arrived in SYD for the first time today, saw the upload notification while still in the plane. Huge fan since multiple years Fred, I was really amazed by this coincidence. All the best, and thanks for your outstanding content!
Welcome to Sydney! How has your experience been so far?
Hope the stay was fine for you, The Heat must have tanned you up lol. Enjoy your stay
You missed the most important part why Sydney has no skyscrapers: They don't want to give the spiders two tall buildings where they can build a spiderweb between.
Imagine the horror of a (from australias perspective) normal sized spider chilling between two skyscrapers and waiting for prey (helicopters or so)
🤣
@@idelsancats
A giant Sydney skyscraper-web spider would indeed be horrifying.
But I did design a twin tower here just not sure if council will accept it
thats not horror for us thats just the equivalent of a huntsman living in our house but for the entire city
As a Sydney sider, the height restrictions is what makes Sydney so beautiful, they should lift the height restrictions in Parramatta instead and even build over 500m
So beautiful, but also so expensive
The view of the Parra CBD skyline from Eastwood, Carlingford and Pennant Hills is so beautiful! Always amazed by how it looks. Parra just needs an iconic skyscraper or tower to complete it.
Yeah, let's ugly up what was once a beautiful place (Parramatta) with hideous skyscrapers to pack people into vertical pods, coz lol, who cares about what the west looks like. When another pandemic hits and politicians get drunk on power, enjoy being trapped in your human filing cabinet!
Atleast 532m twin tower but will keep lowering it down to around 332m but 296m without spire or around 90 stories
I agree, why do all these people want to spoil the Sydney that all us Sydneysiders love?
The tower built by James Packer actually blocks the Sydney observatory telescope at certain angles. Tall buildings aren’t always a great idea.
We were able to attend the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. It was epic. Everyone was so friendly. It was organized and run beautifully. Well done 😊.
Oh yes, that was the peak 😍 The city had never been that great before and sadly has become more crowded, more expensive and less friendly since.
Peak Australia
There's actually a lot of vacant office space in the greater Sydney CBD. Barangaroo has very expensive space, as an example. I live in Sydney and just increasing the height of skyscrapers I think is going to be really difficult because of the density of the space. But then again New York did it so I don't know we will see.
Still think investing in surrounding suburban areas would be a smarter move than overpopulating the city, as it's the most popular place for careers; people travel towards the city for work. All this traffic and pedestrian activity is already dense as it is, imagine if we lived like NY... Had American relatives visit and stress as passengers while we drove around the CBD, it;'s hell as is it is..
I can think of 2 things that would probably still limit skyscrapers.
I would be surprised if there wasn't setbacks from Hyde Park and the botanic Gardens to limit shadow impacts.
Also the number of train and road tunnels under the CBD would restrict the foundations you can dig on certain sites.
You are correct. The extra height for buildings is only permitted in certain areas where there will be no shadowing effect. The council did a huge study first
Tunnels aren't quite the limitation you would think. 30 Hudson Yards, here in NYC, is 395 meters tall and stands (as the name suggests) atop Penn Station's western rail yard. Project Commodore, if it's built, will be 480 meters tall with foundations straddling Grand Central's loop track and all four tracks (and platforms) of the Lexington Avenue subway line.
The current height limit of 330m was set by CASA, the aviation authority. Airport is 8 kms away.
The Gold Coast, a city in South-east Queensland recently defined an area along the coast (mainly Surfers) as having no height limits whatsoever. The current height of Q1 is 322.5 metres (1,058 ft). It will be interesting to see what developers do.
If you take off the non-habitable (only there to set records and good looks) spire the Q1 has a roof height of a mere 245m so not much taller than Sydney's old limit
Q1 used to be the tallest residential tower in the world.
@@tonybloomfield5635unlike most others, Q1 towers spire is actually built to help the design which was based off the Olympic torch for the 2000 games in Sydney, the building would not have achieved that look without it compared to similar tall buildings with spires which would look better without
everybody gangsta until sea levels rise
Doesn't Q1 have cracks in the structure already?
The problem with skyscrapers is that they don't solve the space problem at all. They might provide a few homes for the mega rich, but mostly they'll provide offices, which attract workers, who in turn need more homes. It's like when they build huge highways to try to solve traffic problems, but ultimately end up with more congestion. Cities need truly affordable homes and green spaces. Not architects tearing up historic sites to compete for who has the biggest...
That's true past a certain point due to increased need of elevators/supports, but you don't max out usable floor space until like 60 or 70 stories I'm pretty sure. I agree we should ban single family homes and aim for middle housing, but in very dense cities skyscrapers can be a benefit. Also lol at "offices which attract workers," are you really saying urbanization is bad? The denser a city is, the easier it is to justify a robust metro system. Infrastructure becomes more cost effective in a dense city. Not every old building is a historic site worth preserving either, preservationists in my city freaked out when a historic parking garage was torn down, and another time when a historic grain elevator was removed. Good riddance I say.
6 floors high is all that is needed, anything higher is nonsense human scale and most urbanists agree with this.
@@CompuBrains27too many skyscrapers is ugly for a city. We don’t wanna look at concrete
@@shykur They make skyscrapers out of things other than concrete. Stone, glass, wood, metal, you can use lots of materials.
If it's anything like London, even if these buildings have apartments, they won't be lived in, just bought as an 'investment' by foreigners. It makes sense if you are rich in places like the Middle East or China to buy property in places that are a safe bolthole, in case things go pear-shaped and you need to get out of the country!
I just left a job working in the new Parramatta square development in western sydney, which has become a test case for what we must build in this city. 8 tower's built over 1 city block which was previously home to a library and carpark. Each building except 1 &3 is at least 20 stories and they share open public spaces between them
It’s hardly “one city block”
oh and how's parramatta square going? cause from where i'm standing it looks pretty desolate and repeats most of the mistakes of bad large-scale urbanism from the last few decades.
@@jesserowlingsify i wont go near parramatta anymore. from about bernie st onwards...WTF HAVE THEY DONE?
nah, i stick to my usual rat run through park st down to fennel st rather than go right down vic now. or get off back at marsden. dont go right down into parra... screw that.
i used to enjoy wandering down church street, amused as it went from foot to cars to foot to cars to foot again... looking at all the dining structures i made...
is bergs hobbies still open under the train tracks? i havent been there since they first started pulling crap down...
I was there a few months ago and the new square was a desolate shole. Most of the shops in the old mall were closed or empty. The streets empty. But the Westfields was packed. So sad tbh. Parramatta had charm now its just another case study in poor planing and over migration. People who now live there only want to go to westfields and over consume or just walk around inside Westfields like its the only thing to do. Pretty dystopian and sad.
@@glencoe1266 Amazing. The Westfield in downtown San Francisco is dead and very empty.
So surreal seeing you in my backyard. Hope I bump into you in the coming days if you're still in town!
Sydney CBD has narrow London-style streets compared to American cities with skyscrapers, so you end up with dark airless canyons.
Also we don't really need more in the CBD. If you zoom out, you see that Sydney has multiple business districts with high-rise, adding North Sydney, Chatswood, Parramatta and the future Aerotropolis. Sydney's population centre is waaaay west of the CBD towards Parramatta, so to fill the skyscrapers on the eastern edge of Sydney you need to have hundreds of thousands of commuters travelling ridiculous distances. As it is with increased hybrid working from home, many of the existing towers are waay under-populated.
housing crisis u bellend if demand is there let them be built. a reason for higher vacancy is inflated prices, so increasing supply will drive down prices
Thanks. I didn't know that. In Tasmania, Launceston heights are limited to about 8 stories because there's 40 metres of sedimentary mud under the city, so every tall building needs to be stabilised with pylons in the foundations. It keeps the place looking small and friendly, though.
I always get excited when you make a video about Australia
🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺
Me too.👍😀
Let's get on Sydney YIMBY!
Stop the bans on housing (even lowrises) that cause huge urban sprawl and unaffordability
Cities especially in countries like USA, Canada, Australia complain about the high cost of housing with low density housing and continue to build low density housing and then wonder why housing is so expensive.
Sort of, new high rise are not for low income, neither. Low density but spread out could work, skyscrapers are super expensive to build, so the developers will targeted high income people for better profit margins.
@pongsatonrattanapriyanuch7331 More medium density housing such as 4-6 story apartment buildings, townhouses which are the most common type of housing in Barcelona, Paris, Vienna etc. Instead of single detached homes that take up more land and house fewer people. Goverments have the resources to build more homes like this or at the very least subsidized private builders, but they don't because of current home owning NIMBYs that don't want to see new developments.
That's why Sydney is seeing a shift of high rise apartments and even small skyscrapers in satellite suburbs/cities such is Chatswood, hurstville, Penrith, Campbelltown, Parramatta and Liverpool to name a few. Although we still have an insane amount of urban sprawl happening in the west it is slowly hitting the geographical limits of the city with mountains which is forcing planners to start building up in those places that have good public transport and amenities
@@JayJayGamerOfficial Also to mention, we tend to follow water reservoirs when building. While there's technically a lot of space for more sprawl, suitable reservoirs that can sustain a dense population are becoming fewer and far between.
@@osier769 true that, due to the lack of resoivers we have for our new population we have struggled with droughts in past years, to be fair though most of our resoivers are outside of the basin such as Woronora and warragamba. We also have a desalination plant that has a lot of room for upgrade in Kurnell
Damn. If you think Sydney doesn’t have skyscrapers, the UK definitely needs more.
It's a yes to both have you seen Shangai or Hong-Kong
no it doesnt we dont need already rich pricks becoming more rich for homes that there rich mates can own and charge poor people 2000 grand a month for a flat
Most of Europe needs more. Here in Germany we still have this shitty old law that prohibits building taller than the nearest church.
@@maythesciencebewithyou thats a good thing european citites are historical unlike australian or american cities
@@maythesciencebewithyougood, maintains the culture and heritage.
Parramatta in Sydneys west is becoming the next Sydney. Sydney the city it self is becoming the economic sector. The shopping side is becoming Parramatta which is central to all of Sydney's suburbs.
Sydney once again relegates Melbourne to second place
Parra is still a dump tho
@@jayg6138agree. It’s also not close to most of Sydneysiders. It’s difficult to get to from most suburbs excluding some in the west and inner west.
"Central to all of Sydney's suburbs" bruh the meth must be good out West 🤣
@@BDub2024people here are reactionary, most haven't even picked up a map of Sydney or gone more than five suburbs away from their own home. So yeh there's that.
Don't let that fool you. Parramatta is set to take centre stage in coming decades, it's getting a metro link to Sydney CBD, it's getting a tram line, it's getting an airport to its west and it's height limits are now closer to the CBD than any other suburb bar North Sydney and maybe Chatswood.
So yeh it's building upto 70 to 80 storeys already. It was projected to surpass Adelaide and possibly Perth in population within the next decade and a half. And that's just the beginning.
I hope Sydney doesn't lose its natural charm where only a 1.5 hour drive can get you on a beach that very few visit, or mountain views, gardens, sporting fields of many various sports covering the suburbs.
And my favourite is awesome fishing in and around her clean beaches and estuary and river systems like Port Hacking, the Hawkesbury and Brisbane waters, Tuggerah lakes, lake Macquarie, lake Illawarra down to Shoalhaven.
This city is growing to fast and with that the standard of living goes down, what NSW needs is to spread the increasing population and make larger cities out of say Bathurst, Port Macquarie, Coff Harbour, Batemans Bay and Bega and Canberra..........stop overloading Sydney.
The major parties will work diligently to ensure that the charm is all gone by 2030.
Too late lol, already takes 2.5 hours to get to Manly from Liverpool due to the traffic. Imagine with all the growing population; best to watch the sunset through your window or laptop screen
It already has the morons that decided to destroy Parramatta have already stuffed it up for the future..
@@_.--._._-._--._-.--__.--._._-.That's not the case for the Central Coast, which is north of Sydney.
obviously not, anything North of the river is much easier to reach destinations in the North...@@TheTardisDreamer
I have lived in London, Paris, Athens, Tokyo (currently) and Sydney, plus over the years visited numerous other cities.... Sydney is absolutely beautiful and would recommend it to anyone ❗❗
I hope they cap the development to only the CBD area 👍
Excellent vid as always Fred & crew.... cheers to you 🤟🎶
Fred, great to meet you on the flight leaving Sydney earlier this month. Keep up the great work 👍🏻
The population is not expanding in the CBD (it's still looking less vibrant than it used to), it's expanding in the outer suburbs some 40km away.
Looking forward to seeing what Sydney builds in the future.. MASSIVE potential. Great video guys
I regard the fascination with skyscrapers to be old hat and unless they are done really well they usually create a shadowy wasteland at street level. Both Melbourne and Sydney had beautiful sandstone Victorian buildings which were mostly demolished for the ones we have.
In the late 1880s Melbourne built what was probably the third tallest building in the world (obviously exceeded only by the USA). It was a lovely ornate, boom style, late Victorian tower. But in 1980, it was demolished and replaced with an ugly mirror glass building only half the height. 😞
I'd be very happy with more shade at street level.
In Vancouver, there are restrictions on building heights because of view cones, used to preserve the views of the mountains.
Now, it may seem like low-hanging fruit to get rid of them, but the even lower hanging fruit is that most of the city away from the view cones have single-family homes that could densify.
There are clusters of high rise buildings there,my Canadian cousin said they are apartment blocks.
@@Andy_M986 Are you talking about the downtown area? We do have clusters of tall buildings around SkyTrain stations in Vancouver and the suburbs, but they're away from the view cones.
@mma0911 I saw some over on the West side of the bay,or maybe it was the North?, and some around Burnaby, my cousin drove me around the area,love Vancouver.
The suburbs are now home to the tallest buildings. Plans for an 85 story condo building in the outer burbs are still in place
Same in Ottawa. Buildings couldn't exceed the height of the peace tower (100m) so everyone could always see it.
I think Sydney has the right balance and approach. It is one of the more beautiful cities in the World i've seen .I think with its icons and harbour ,rivers and greenery ,it doesn't need skyscrapers to make it the way other more featureless places require to pad them out.
It's got like 50% less tree coverage than Brisbane and is consistently considered a prime example of a heat sink city due to the lack of nature. You need to go travel more through Australia mate.
To me, Sydney is a shit place to live. The harbour is ok but it's extremely commercialised and nearly everything is skewed with wanting you to spend money... A LOT of money... hence the newer saying of Sydney being ok for the uber rich but shit for everyone else.
QLD, specifically SEQ is significantly nicer. Better nature, better national parks, better beaches, friendlier people etc etc etc hell; you can feed dolphins for $10 on the very outskirts of SEQ. Find me anywhere within Greater Sydney that offers an experience like that for a price so minuscule... lol
Personally for me, and for many others that come to Sydney from elsewhere in Australia, the 2 overwhelming positives are public transport (severely lacking in most of Aus) and the food. Everything else is crap though.
@@dingobonza Don't forget the constant humid-piss smell throughout the city... and the dirtyness... Sydney is beautiful at the harbour.. but scratch any deeper and it's an dirty boring stinky city with no heart... I'd take any other Aus capital over Sydney.
@@morphoist definitely can't forget that. When I first moved to Sydney I found it disgusting how dirty the place is. Anywhere away from the harbour is a littered, polluted shithole where no one takes pride in where they live. When my family came down to visit, they were disgusted as well at all the rubbish dumped everywhere and the lack of pride in people's yards.
You just unlocked a memory ... 40 years ago my parents took me up the Centrepoint tower, I was 12. $0.02 cheers.
SUPRESSED MEMORY
The good kind
I watched blade runner once, and they get memory implants
Very sad
Very sad
We have a similar law in Cape Town, South Africa. There is a height limit on buildings so that no building interferes with the view of Table Mountain.
If you value your city's soul let the lessons of London's "protected" views of St. Paul's cathedral and the gentleman's agreement to protect the backdrop of Tower Vridge
The first has been 'gamed' by unsubtly angling back on itself - Cheesegrater and its naughty neighbours.
As for Tower Bridge, some numpty in a S.E. borough allowed a black slab slap bang on the horizon, so now the icon has been cheapened and they cd have moved the bldg south a bit.
Dirty cash and lack of thought win.
What Sydney really needs is a whole heap of medium size skyscraper apartments built everywhere to mitigate the housing crisis we are in. Rental and purchases priced in Sydney are astronomical!
Lol. No. Absolutely not.
@@hanashi5727you again. Ppl need homes
Maybe it has to do with internal and international migration?
It will be gross city! Scandinavian way of 3-7 stories well designed buildings is the best answer to sprawls
And at least they can see sunlight hit the ground, it's bizarre how people want us to turn into NYC. Like why..@@yourone
Another fine, informative video. I'd heard various pieces of information about this but not the full explanation. Thanks, Fred, for clearing things up. It seems Sydney's infrastructure has been focussed down, not up. Tunnel, tunnels and more tunnels.
Yes, going to interesting when they start digging the foundations for some of these tall buildings. Sydney's got tunnels all over the place.
Wow, that is a very clever way to describe this video! In my capacity as a student of engineering at the University of Technology in Sydney (UTS), I have seen that you are absolutely correct in asserting that there is a maximum limit for the number of buildings. I appreciate you providing this CZcams as well as other videos that are pretty excellent.
Hello from Sydney, Australia too.
Glad you are here!
From where you’re standing, the end of the third Matrix movie showed what Sydney’s skyline *could* look like. But Sydney has a symbiotic relationship with nature unlike any other city in the Anglosphere - you can drive as little as 15 minutes and end up surrounded by national park … walk up the crest of the hill to Wakehurst Parkway in Seaforth and you’ll see the CBD skyline all of a sudden. Maybe Paris and Hong Kong could claim to abut the forests as hard as Sydney does.
But you’re right - Sydney loves icons and monuments, and it was the first one, Sydney Harbour Bridge, that kicked off a new mindset to “build big”. The Bridge is the reason we have the Opera House, and in turn is the reason we have the Centrepoint Tower. It nearly led to the rotating apartment tower in East Circular Quay in the 1990s, but too much potential ugliness stopped that one - and instead we swapped potential ugliness for certainty in ugliness, with “The Toaster” blocking the view from Circular Quay station to the Opera House. (Sydney was spoiled by the unbroken visibility for a few years during construction).
But J J Bradfield, the architect of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, turned the direction of Sydney in more ways too - constructing and planning underground railways for decades ahead, future-proofing for double-decker stock and putting 6 lanes of traffic on the bridge 3 decades before the trend swung hard into building wider roads. This was also at the time, as you noted, when Sydney’s suburbanisation kicked off in earnest, and the first outer suburbs marked the boundaries of the Sydney Basin (or County of Cumberland), an area equivalent to Los Angeles or London (of today). It’s a fun little mix in Sydney, where the outer suburbs have the very Los Angeles style of suburban space (and McMansions), but the CBD / city / financial district / downtown has the boxed-in features of San Francisco peninsula or Manhattan island; and on the tip of that you have another era represented by The Rocks and The Domain, where old-world London is represented with colonial-era late 1700s sandstone buildings.
You can really walk around and take your pick of flavours with Sydney - London 1800, San Francisco 1900, Los Angeles 2000, and then there’s “The Matrix” City 2100 and even Aboriginal Australia 1700 CE (or 60,000 BCE) - just take the Manly Ferry around Bradleys Head and you’ll be face-to-face with bushland on the foreshore. And the entire city has a tougher “green belt” than London ever did or will have.
Perth, Canberra and Adelaide would like a word about this symbiotic relationship with nature claim.
You're completely missing Brisbane in your Anglosphere consideration. National parks within easy access by car that constitutes the most biodiverse region in Australia, Logan City (part of Brisbane) has the highest density of public free use parks out of any urban LGA in Australia, Brisbane takes the cake in Aus for the nature side of things.
@@thetrashmaster1352 and Brisbane. It's in the most biodiverse region of Australia. And apart from Hobart has the highest density of tree coverage out of any city in Australia.
@@dingobonza that is true, Brisbane might not have too many parks but when it comes to symbiosis with nature, Brisbane definitely has a weirdly high number of medium sized animals that roam the streets. In Perth, while there are a huge number of parks, the largest animal you might find are stalks and swans, never is there a cat sized lizard chilling in the park.
@@dingobonza and I don’t think national parks nearby count, since they are outside the metro area.
In the City of Wollongong, south of Sydney, we have the second tallest buildings in New South Wales at only 120m, but being built mostly on hills approximately 30m above sea level certainty makes them look taller. I can see the height limit being increased again soon enough like they are across Sydney's CBDs.
@@quarkcypherI’m surprised Parramatta didn’t come up at all. That skyline has changed so much in the last decade it’s crazy. They have a handful of more skyscrapers above 200m planned. One is under construction and already 20 floors high off church street. I think the fact they are building so many of these things in outer suburbs now is definitely a shift. If they are having this skyscraper boom the 300m things should go Parramatta. Having all these tall buildings covering the tower isn’t good for tourism. Parramatta could be Sydney’s answer to La Defence in Paris. Just a place to the side to have these things.
@@quarkcypherI did say Sydney CBD's, which obviously includes Parramatta
If Wollongong and Newcastle get high speed rail, you can be rest assured that both cities will grow rapidly and surpass Adelaide in size within a generation or two.
@@MarcoCholo-iz9js honestly, high speed rail doesn’t make sense in Australia. The population is too low to sustain it. You need dense large urbanisation like Japan, South Korea, China and Europe to justify it.
Even though Europe has these things to justify high speed rail, it still doesn’t guarantee sky scrapers.
For Wollongong and Newcastle to grow you would need Sydney to be at full capacity, and it really isn’t. Even then they are too close to Sydney without offering anything Sydney doesn’t have. Like the Gold Coast having a beach and Brisbane not.
Byron Bay or Wagga Wagga have a bigger chance of exploding than those two cities.
@@sloppynyuszi the thing you are forgetting is how rapidly Australia is growing and keeps growing compared to other OECD countries. It grew over 3 x it's original population size in the last 70 years from 8.6 million to over 26 million today. Meaning in another 70 years it will triple again to 78-80 million people. By then Sydney and Melbourne will be over 10 million people, Perth and Brisbane over 7 million and even Adelaide over 5 million. The official projections have it more like 60 million but abs projections have always been inaccurate and ultra conservative.
Japan or Europe isn't growing with those staggering numbers. So the phallacy is to put that infrastructure in once the population catches up. By then it's too late. You end up waiting decades for infrastructure to fill in the shortfall. That will cost Australia billions in lost productivity and forfeiting money that could have been earned through value capture.
Newcastle and Wollongong don't need to offer beaches or something unique to attract Sydneysiders. Cheaper property prices and lower density housing with good connectivity to the CBD is reason enough. They also have airports that could couple as Sydney's 3rd or 4th international airport in coming decades. Canberra too could be Sydney's 5th.
Nice timing. Weather looks stunning this time of year!
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If you compare Melbourne to Sydney, Sydney has done it much better. Although Melbourne has a lot more skyscrapers in the CBD area it doesn’t have any large buildings outside of the centre of the city, Sydney on the other hand has North Sydney, Chatswood, Parramatta, Hurstville, Bondi ect, while on the other hand Melbourne has only one being Box Hill if Melbourne wants to take the cake it needs to build mini CBDs like Sydney on train lines to maximise its growth and reduce the need to expand its urban area. Sydney is taking a good step though in increasing its height.
Nonsense. There are many tower hubs outside Melbourne CBD. You clearly haven't visited in a while
Melbourne has Fisherman's Bend, E-Gate and Arden-Macauly all next to the city centre. There is no need to push skyscrapers to the burbs like Sydney yet. Suburban Rail loop (if built) might change that. Central Sydney is going to look very very small compared to Central Melbourne in 20 years time.
@@ChrisJohannsennothing to the scale of Sydney though. But Sydney's much better train network has really helped it with it.
As a Melbournian, I can attest to that annoyingly enough. I think Dandenong at one stage was supposed to be Melbourne's version of Parramatta. It just never really took off properly. Or the progress is atleast very... very slow. Melbourne's collective NIMBY mindset is not really all that much worse than Sydney's. It's just that NSW Governements have historically been less likely to cower down to clueless loud minority groups, and just get things done. Hopefully, Melbourne's Suburban Rail Loop will change things. Although I fear that cancelling the SRL will be the first thing a new Liberal State Government will do once voted in. Done out of revenge for when Labor cancelled the East West Link back in 2014.
Box Hill is where they want to set up a second CBD for Melbourne. it's already a highly developed area and has good access to public transport, which will be further improved once SRL East is completed, though that's not gonna be done for about a decade or so. there are plenty of skyscrapers and high-rises outside of the CBD and Box Hill though, mainly in South Yarra, Carlton, and along St Kilda Road
Sydney has my favorite skyline in the world. I hope they don't ruin it.
Bro. Its skyline is pitiful compared to Melbourne.
@@danieldavidson8203it's not a contest.
Melbourne definitely has the best skyline but Perth is the best city in oz to live in ..period
@@nigelhorsley7395 Melbourne people are always putting down every other city in Australia, because that's what the do.
@@danieldavidson8203 As a Melburnian our skyline is absolutely rubbish. Terrible architecture and the CBD looks cramped and overbearing. Skyscrapers are completely overrated, starting to become obsolete and haven't looked good since the Art Deco era which Australia missed. Sydney is making a huge mistake by lifting the height restrictions.
Brilliant video, thank you. Not only you were walking the exact streets that I do every morning but you accurately conveyed the local sentiment. Sydneysiders have a love hate rely with the Sydney tower and in many ways it’s great that Sydney CBD stayed low as it is now, however it is worth touching on other Sydney business districts, such as Parramatta, Liverpool or Chatswood where there is no excuse to build above 330m or even 500+.
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Fred, amazing video! I hope you got some video on Greece in the pipe line.
Airport is close to the CBD limiting height, additionally, we take our overshadowing of public space seriously and with so many parks and public spaces, towers often get haircuts to meet the solar access plane.
Here in the Philippines, we did not respect the law maintaining a clear skyline for the Rizal Park and now we have a condominium behind it
watching this as someone who's lived in syd her whole life, this was so interesting to me! thank u for sharing, feel like i've learnt some really interesting facts
Great video! Would love to know your thoughts on this, but for Barcelona. It has the most densely populated neighborhoods in Europe, it is pretty much boxed in from all sides geographically. It has a height limitation below the projected taller tower of La Sagrada Familia. Moreover, urban planners in the city recently are more in favor of growing the city horizontally rather than vertically.
Why don’t they just build taller in adjacent cities like Badalona, L’Hospitalet etc. or does the height limitation apply to the entire Barcelona metro area?
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Can you guys make a vid on the phs project in the Netherlands? It is a program to prepare the main dutch railroads for more frequent trains. Ot includes minor changes like some switches, but also completely new stations.
Fun fact: the original The Matrix movie was filmed in Sydney
It's hilarious that SF movies like The Matrix, Dark City, The Punisher etc are shot in Sydney but American producers then fake the streetscapes to fill them with left-hand-drive vehicles. Because Americans can deal with virtual reality but not people driving on the other side of the road...
I was in Sydney CBD the day they were shooting the famous Matrix tower-top scenes.
You left off that Sydney has space to build more skyscrapers over Central train station, in the planned tech precinct. And that skyscrapers will have a sloping height limit as they get closer to parks. This is to ensure natural light
Building over Central Station is a horrible idea. Central station is a heritage listed station and having beam columns near the railway tracks will just slow the trains down even further heading in and out of Central station. Belmore park next to Central station will also be overshadowed by massive skyscrapers on top of Central. Central is an icon that needs to maintain its unique look. 😊
"Nearby Melbourne"
Isn't it a nearly 10 hour drive away?
Yer it's about that 😅
I live in Sydney and did not know about the limits. Thanks
As usual great content. Please do not stop!
I thought you were going to say the height restriction was because of the airport. That's why Brisbane has a height restriction of 274m on buildings in the CBD.
Australia 108 in Melbourne (featured in this video) had to undergo redesigns to reduce its height after it was determined that the emergency low altitude approach to Essendon airport transected the tower.
While commercial property prices in the Sydney CBD are coming down, due to record lows in demand for office space, due to the huge shift towards Work-From-Home initiatives.
WFH is cheaper for a lot of businesses (high rent gets replaced with some modest increases in IT remote access costs) for many of their staff and better for many of those workers who no longer need to commute, etc.
Jørn Utzon (the arcitect of the Sidney Opera House) was my neighbour in Hellebæk, Denmark. No bull s...
Now his son, Jan, lives there. He showed me models of the opera and the famous half sphere like pealing a orange :-)
Melbourne has beautiful skyscrapers, and are constantly building new ones. I guess it’s to make up for not having the natural beauty like Sydney or Brisbane does
I wish Melbourne's craze with supertalls will ease off. Quite a number of those high rise office buildings are sitting somewhat empty thanks to the pandemic changing work habbits. So it's a bit of a hollow victory really (no pun intended). If we want new high rises, we should atleast try to encourage decentralisation by building them outside the CBD and its surrounding inner suburbs, and hence creating a more polycentric city, like Sydney.
@@eddielong8663 that's what they want to do with Box Hill. it's already got quite a few tall buildings and there's plenty that have been proposed or approved for construction
@@TheLostProbethey should also do Dandenong (South), and another suburb in the north and west.. maybe Weribee?
@@dangerislander they were actually going to do Werribee but cancelled it. not surprising considering the plans were very very ambitious, they wanted to turn the place into a massive futuristic metropolis, something you'd only see in a utopian sci-fi movie. some other second CBD candidates were Clayton, Dandenong, Sunshine, and Bundoora, but those much less ambitious plans were also cancelled. those areas are still developing at quite a rapid pace though
Might be worthwhile visiting Sydney's second city; Paramatta. Its growing and its growing fast, projected to have a CBD the same size as the current Sydney CBD within 25 years
What do you mean the same size? It certainly is not going to have the amount of office space Sydney CBD has.
@@tobyb6248 Size as a percentage of GDP, yes, really
@@tobyb6248that may not be true but it will definately outweigh the residential space compared to Sydney CBD. There's a reason why the CBD is considered the economical harbour city and Parramatta as the more population focused city
feel like this is an archive video since the Australia 108 completed couple years ago, Melbourne Square's second stage is on the way and STH BNK is also on the way.
Great content mate, hope you had an amazing time in our city!
Philly had a gentleman’s agreement for the longest time that no building would be built that was higher than Billy Penn on the top of City Hall. This was broken with One Liberty Place in the 80s. Since then, Philly has built many buildings higher than City Hall, including the largest building in the US outside of Manhattan or Chicago
There was an old tale that Edinburgh was the same as “No building can exceed the height of the castle”
That and most of the city is a world heritage site these days !
Edinburgh has the original skyscrapers.
Interesting!
@@TheB1M Yes Edinburgh did have the World's first skyscrapers . But no chance of even thinking building them now with the World Heritage sites covering hundreds of acres in that truly beautiful City.
As someone who services businesses everyday in the Sydney CBD we could do with some taller buildings. Plus my company pays for parking fines so once I find a spot in a loading zone in a decent loacation I park there for a while and service miltiple businesses from that spot. Would be good if there were taller buildings so we could basically do all businesses in one building in the same day. The highest I've been is the fifty something floor. I don't think there are many buildings even higher than that.
Thanks
I live in Sydney and never knew about this
You learn every day
Any new tower would only serve as an investment opportunity in maybe a few apartments for the mega rich and do nothing to stem the growing housing crisis in Sydney. There is too much migration (as usual) and figures expected to rise, via gov policies, yet not enough housing to accommodate the rising growth.
Love the B1M. Welcome to our amazing city!
3:10 - For about 75 years, Philadelphia had an unofficial informal rule of no building to be higher than City Hall tower. That height limit was broken in about 1988.
When I first came to Sydney I was never amazed by skyscrapers, but the historical buildings. I also loved places like Newtown, just old houses and very few apartment complexes. Things are changing fast, tall buildings are poping up everywhere and they all look the same.
5:04 It will always be Centrepoint Tower to us
As a Sydneysider who is not only suffering from this housing crisis but also works in a currently struggling building material production company a flood of new skyscrapers would absolutely be a good thing for me, and I definitely think it's time we started catching up to other global cities
Lol… really? Suffering from housing crisis, but want an expensive loft ?
Skyscrapers make it so house prices increase
@@Peterigepanclearly I don't want it for myself, but more housing means more choice. Some people who work in the city would be willing to pay to live closer to where they work, and that would open up the houses they leave behind.
I don't expect it to solve the housing crisis, but it surely wouldn't hurt
Without any realistic access to affordable housing, yes - it's going to hurt.
Yeah. No. No one wants a bunch of ugly pod dwellings shitting up the skyline.
all you need is a tent, an esky, some rags for privacy, and a barbeque and you should be all good to go. My great-uncle did it for a good 40 years! He saw it as home sweet home.
All the building height breaking records of the Commonwealth for the 20th Century were raised in Canadas' three major cities. Until the last few years when Hong Kong real estate boomed.
Vancouver has view corridors that restricts some building heights though.
Such an amazing pair of buildings, really enjoy seeing them when travelling into the CBD.
Parramatta is building what Sydney can not. Parramatta may seem like another suburb, but it's a city of it's own.
Um, what has Parra built that Sydney couldnt?
@@tobyb6248 Space. Cheaper office space. Something Sydney will never have.
@@IonianGardenoh yes definitely. Parramatta is prime for space of the lower office grades.
more affordable office space. less height restrictions. @@tobyb6248
The B1M team should look into Halifax, Nova Scotia, although it doesn’t have any major skyscrapers it’s the fastest growing city in Canada with quite an impressive skyline change and boom in the last 10 years. Would be a very interesting video
Get Ricky & Julian to show us around
And Halifax is just down the road from Sydney, too. 😊
I believe Ottawa has a similar height restriction close to Parliament Hill. Building close to it are not supposed to be taller than the Parliament building. Further out, taller building can be made but then you are out of the downtown.
Love learning new things about the city I call home!
Greetings from Amsterdam. An extremely beautiful and liveable city, all below 150m.
In many US cities, there is this law called Minimum parking requirements which limits the floor space by the amount of parking that can be provided.
You end up with fairly tall structure 1 story structures. With fake windows and balconies second end third or fourth floor windows.
Parking minimums is what led to the dire state of US city’s car dependency right now
Anything to bring the conversation screaming back to topic being the US. 😂
I love the America Derangement Syndrome(ADS)....I thought the video was about a faraway country called Australia?
In inner Sydney, there are parking maximums put on developments instead.
Glad you enjoyed Sydney as much as I enjoyed your video, Fred 😊
According to the BCA/NCC, they also chosen 40metres (or is it 45m can’t remember) as the arbitrary height where all these new building services are required such as dual water supply, zone smoke control, and other things that are prohibitive. So most buildings are just under this height to avoid these items.
Comparing American cities to Sydney is less applicable because Sydney has more business districts. Many businesses have their offices in Western Sydney, so there is more of a high rise boom happening around the adjacent areas there
Hi Fred. Hope your year has been good and your holidays are great. ❤
Thank you! You too
I'm an Australian and I learnt some interesting things from this video. Thanks.
Thanks for the great presentation graphics as well as your excellent thought out discussion Fred. Hope you had a good time down under as well! (yes I am slightly jealous! 🤣)
As a Melbournian, Sydney is our showcase city as far as landmarks go. I dont think their skylike should under go radical change. Develop Parra and the other larger suburbs.
Yep
I don't really want any supertalls here, I'd prefer to keep the skyline relatively clear but what do I know?
A sensible response, i agree.
I had to scroll far down to see a comment like yours. So many others talked about how great Sydney will look with a skyline of tall buildings. Yet they forget that when anyone on the planet thinks of Sydney they think the bridge and opera house. Also... skylines only look good from a distance. At ground level the streets are dark and horrid, like NYC.
I agree with the developing other areas, I for one want to see more of a Paris approach in the city going forward where the CBD is like the Eiffel Tower, having a bit of everything and the biggest landmarks but not overdoing it and Parramatta as the CBD where all the major skyscrapers are built
Do they need it in the CBD (also makes it unique) as we are all keen to work from home
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The most beautiful cities in the world don't necessarily have hi-rise structures. Sydney is beautiful the way it is.
7:35 Why would developers want to increase the floor space by 1,000,000 ft.², when the current commercial occupancy is still only at 70%