A few weeks ago, NSW Premier Chris Minns announced plans to redevelop Glebe Island for housing. It’s hard to argue with the premise. Sydney needs more homes, urgently, and land this close to the city, between the CBD and the inner west, cannot remain underused forever.
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But a comment he made more recently has stayed with me. The silos may go. Minns has been clear they are likely to be removed, pointing out they are not especially old. Perhaps. But cities are not defined by age alone. They are shaped by memory, and by the stories that accumulate over time.
Anyone who has crossed the Anzac Bridge knows these silos. They rise abruptly from the harbour’s edge. Blunt, industrial, unmistakable. Not conventionally beautiful, and perhaps “iconic” is a stretch, but they are undeniably present. Despite the billboards that wrap them, they act as a kind of spatial marker between the CBD and the inner west.
Alongside White Bay Power Station, they tell you something instantly: this was a working place. Not a lifestyle precinct or a curated destination, but part of the machinery of the city. That story still sits in the landscape, even as much of it has already disappeared.
What happens at Glebe Island matters, but it is also part of something larger. Across Sydney, we are entering a period of rapid transformation. New metro lines, rezonings, urban renewal sites and growth corridors are reshaping the city at a scale not seen in decades.
Entire precincts are being planned, often from scratch, to accommodate the housing we urgently need.
So the question is no longer whether Sydney will grow. It is what kind of city it will feel like when it does.
We tend to talk about this growth in numbers. How many homes? How quickly can they be delivered? How does infrastructure keep pace? These are critical questions, but they are not how we experience cities. We experience them emotionally.
Think about the places you return to, almost without thinking. It’s rarely because they are the newest or most perfectly curated. It’s because of how they feel. The look and feel of a high street. The old pub whose walls could tell a million stories. A grassy hilltop with a strangely satisfying view across the local park. These places carry atmosphere. They feel like they belong.
Think about the places you return to, almost without thinking. It’s rarely because they are the newest or most perfectly curated. It’s because of how they feel. The look and feel of a high street. The old pub whose walls could tell a million stories. A grassy hilltop with a strangely satisfying view across the local park. These places carry atmosphere. They feel like they belong.
That quality is difficult to define, but easy to recognise. In urban design, we call it identity.
Much of the unease around development stems from a fear that this quality is slipping away. Not because Sydney is growing, but because too many of its new places feel interchangeable with places that could be anywhere in the world.
Spend time in recently developed precincts, here or overseas, and similar patterns emerge: buildings of the same size and material, a shopping strip with a familiar mix of cafés and retailers, streets shaped by consistent codes. They function well, but they feel strangely familiar.
This is where the housing debate often misses the point. It is framed as a simple trade-off between growth and resistance, between building more homes and protecting what exists. The shorthand has become YIMBY versus NIMBY. But for many people, the concern sits somewhere else. It is not about whether we build, but about what we are building.
It is the feeling that in solving one problem, we are creating another in the process. That in delivering housing at scale, we are also erasing the specific character of the city itself.
Glebe Island and White Bay make this visible. This is not the picture-perfect postcard of Sydney Harbour, sails and sandstone, but a harbour shaped by labour and industry. For decades, this edge of the city handled grain, cement, fuel and cargo. It was largely hidden from view, but it was essential. Much of that working harbour has already been pushed further away or replaced altogether. What remains is fragmented, and that is exactly why it is so important.
The question is no longer whether Sydney will grow. It is what kind of city it will feel like when it does.
This is not an argument for preserving everything. Cities must change, and not every structure deserves to remain. But before we clear sites like this entirely, it is worth asking what is worth carrying forward.
Because when every trace of what came before is removed, something subtle is lost. New places can arrive fully formed, but without depth or a story.
There is a temptation in large-scale redevelopment to begin with a blank slate. It feels efficient, flexible, easier to deliver. But blank slates tend to produce a particular kind of city. A city where each new neighbourhood starts to resemble the last, and where moving through the city becomes less about discovery and more about repetition.
Over time, that sameness accumulates. And you start to wonder what Sydney actually feels like anymore.
Because one of Sydney’s defining qualities is that it reveals itself in fragments.
A glimpse of harbour between buildings in Potts Point before it disappears again behind a fig tree. The intensity of Burwood’s old streets giving way to the openness of Burwood Park.
In Penrith, a view to the Blue Mountains from a town centre that feels almost untouched by time. In the inner west, remnants of industry sit alongside cafés and terraces, creating a contrast that just works.
It is this layering, not a single look or style, that gives Sydney its identity.
The shorthand has become YIMBY versus NIMBY. But for many people, the concern sits somewhere else. It is not about whether we build, but about what we are building.
As we build the next generation of neighbourhoods, we have an opportunity to do better. Not by resisting change, but by shaping it with more intent.
By asking early what gives a place its character, and how that can be carried forward. By retaining elements where they matter, reinterpreting them where they don’t, and allowing the story of a place to remain legible in what comes next.
Glebe Island offers exactly that opportunity. The silos, or parts of them, could remain. The industrial language of the site could shape the architecture, the materials and the public spaces. The memory of a working harbour could be something you experience, not something that has been erased.
Sydney needs more housing. But housing alone does not make a place. What we build now, at Glebe Island and across the city, will shape how Sydney feels for decades to come.
If we’re not careful, we’ll solve one problem while creating another in the process.
Sydney needs more homes. But if we’re not careful, we’ll build them in places that could be anywhere, and lose what makes this city itself.
In Sydney the industrial precinct known as Glebe Island will become a site for 8500 new homes with a new name of Bays West. In Newcastle three large industrial areas in Wickham have been given State significant development status after recommendations from the Housing Delivery Authority (HDA). This conversion of industrial land into residential, seen as a “windfall” for developers has become rampant throughout Australia to such an extent that the NSW introduced an Industrial Lands Action Plan designed to protect key industrial areas but at the same time encouraging transition of industrial land near transport hubs into residential. The resulting loss of industrial land has left Sydney with only about one year of serviced industrial land supply with vacancy rates down to 2.1%. This flies in the face of the federal governments commitment to kick start our manufacturing industry which needs the transport access, especially harbor and rail, even more than houses.
It’s a good point, Don. While we clearly need more housing, there’s also a real challenge around the loss of industrial land.
Glebe Island is a key site for Port Authority NSW, so decisions like this have implications well beyond a single precinct.
In addition to the points on identity, I would hope government is working closely with Ports to identify alternative sites that don’t simply shift pressure elsewhere in the system.