In a world dominated by city-states, continuing urbanization, the corporatisation of government, and a global economic condition which has long since seen the critical distance between capital and culture collapse [1], cities continue to deploy strategies geared towards the ‘production and consumption of culture’ in order to be more competitive.

The year is 2025 and the planet has witnessed an unprecedented level of urbanization over the past 30 years resulting in two thirds of the worlds 8 billion people now living in cities. Sydney sits on the doorstep of what is the dominant economic region on the planet, the world’s power-house economies, China and India, have displaced the United States and Europe as the site from which a global culture is enacted and therefore as the world’s economic engine rooms.

With a population of little more than 6 million people, Sydney has secured its role as the pre-eminent centre for cultural innovation and development in the region.

Australia’s historical ties to Europe and the United States had ensured that the conditions were perfect for Sydney to exploit and use to its own competitive advantage. Now, Sydney occupies a crucial link in the management of cultural and therefore economic relations between the west and Asia.

This rise to prominence is most attributed to the formative shift in the City’s cultural economic agenda 20 years earlier, and the corresponding shift in the image Sydney-siders had of themselves. For the first time in decades we witnessed the return of Sydney’s prodigal sons and daughters which made up the Australian Diaspora of the late 20th Century. They created a city of cultural opportunity and innovation, a city which now retains its ‘bright young things’ with the promise that they can work, learn and develop amongst the world’s best right here at home, that the world’s best are in fact Sydney-siders themselves.

Sydney was no longer a City simply offering up a pre-packaged holiday replete with retarding cultural iconography, nor was it simply a theme park for the enjoyment of the world’s sedentary middle-classes; Sydney had grown to become a confronting city. This City is profoundly open-ended and entropy-absorbing, and reflects the lives of those who inhabit it. Ambitious and creative people now see themselves as ‘living’ in either London, Tokyo, Shanghai, New York or Sydney.

Within a short space of time Sydney has positioned itself as a significant site of cultural production exporting everything from commercial media and design services to globally significant events in the arts.

The former industrial waterfront site of Cockatoo Island has been formative in this transformation and is now a powerful symbol of the City’s maturity and influence in the rest of the world. The site is as much a part of the local character of Sydney’s inner west and the lower reaches of the Parramatta River as it of the global network of locations hosting cultural innovation.

When one reflects on the City Sydney has become, one can’t help but feel it has become a place altogether elsewhere.

1. Jameson, F ‘Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’