What will Australia's cities look like by the middle of the century? Will Sydney and Melbourne look like something akin to The Jetsons' Orbit City with flying cars? What this question is really looking for is a prediction about the physical form of our largest and most global cities in 35 years' time. The question is akin to asking a resident of 1980 what Sydney and Melbourne might look like in 2015.

Thirty-five years is a lifetime in a first-world city. Over this timeframe Sydney's Darling Harbour was completed as was the Harbour Tunnel, the Cross City Tunnel, the Anzac Bridge and Star Casino. In Melbourne City Link, the Bolte Bridge, Crown Casino as well as all that is Southbank and the Docklands was completed. In this timeframe the Brisbane CBD reinvented itself with Riverwalk, the Treasury Casino and South Bank. New lifestyle cities emerged like Mandurah and Hervey Bay while others consolidated such as the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast and Cairns. Other places were discovered like Byron Bay and maybe even Margaret River.

Markets rise and fall over the course of a third of a century; there was boom/crash in the late 1980s and again at the time of the global financial crisis. Our cities are vastly bigger now than they were 35 years ago and they are inhabited by vastly different generations, ethnicities and tribes all quite different to anything that existed in 1980. New settlers from Vietnam, India, China, and the Philippines augment the nation's Anglo and Mediterranean bases. The city's edge communities today have been marginalised by the rise of nimbler, smarter, showier inner-city-sophisticated communities that live chic urbanesque lifestyles. In 1980 the inner-city movement was little more than a nascent by-product of urban gentrification.

Even the politics of the city has changed in line with fundamental shifts in human geography: most of the well-to-do remain ensconced in conservative electorates but a new breed of knowledge-workers are embracing progressive Green values that were little recognised in 1980. A lot can change in 35 years. Trading partners, military alliances, and technology are all up for grabs over three and a half decades.

"I'll go further out and say that by mid-century Australia will still be a key ally of the US. That our main trading base will be defrayed across a series of Asian nations. That there may well be a new third political force in this nation"

That Australians of 2050 will talk of the great boom/crash of the early 2040s; some might even recall the global financial crisis. That despite fundamental shifts in the geopolitical balance of power in our region Australia remains a prized place and ally rich in resources and still relatively modest in population with 40 million residents.

The growth of Australia’s cities

1954

1

Sydney

1,863

2

Melbourne

1,524

3

Brisbane

502

4

Adelaide

484

5

Perth

349

6

Newcastle

178

7

Hobart

95

8

Wollongong

91

9

Geelong

72

10

Launceston

49

11

Ballarat

48

12

Toowoomba

43

13

Rockhampton

41

14

Townsville

40

15

Ipswich

39

16

Bendigo

37

17

Broken Hill

31

18

Canberra

28

19

Blue Mountains

23

20

Kalgoorlie

23

2014

1

Sydney

4,841

2

Melbourne

4,440

3

Brisbane

2,275

4

Perth

2,021

5

Adelaide

1,305

6

Gold Coast - Tweed

614

7

Newcastle - Maitland

431

8

Canberra - Queanbeyan

423

9

Sunshine Coast

297

10

Wollongong

289

11

Greater Hobart

219

12

Geelong

184

13

Townsville

179

14

Cairns

147

15

Greater Darwin

140

16

Toowoomba

114

17

Ballarat

99

18

Bendigo

92

19

Albury - Wodonga

88

20

Launceston

86

2050

1

Sydney

7,688

2

Melbourne

7,670

3

Perth

4,633

4

Brisbane

4,188

5

Adelaide

1,797

6

Gold Coast - Tweed

1,225

7

Canberra - Queanbeyan

722

8

Newcastle - Maitland

588

9

Sunshine Coast

503

10

Wollongong

384

11

Townsville

340

12

Geelong

301

13

Greater Hobart

265

14

Cairns

225

15

Greater Darwin

209

16

Toowoomba

197

17

Mackay

193

18

Ballarat

181

19

Bendigo

161

20

Rockhampton

142

2014-50

2,847

3,230

2,358

2,167

492

611

291

165

206

95

121

117

86

78

69

83

94

89

73

56

Population figures expressed in ‘000s

By 2050 both Sydney and Melbourne will fall somewhere between seven and eight million. Perth and Brisbane will fall somewhere between five and six million. The Gold Coast in 2050 will be as big as Adelaide is today. The ethnic base of the nation will be a fusion of Anglo, Mediterranean, Asian, Indian and in some enclaves, Arabic, influences. There will be trading engagement with powerful rising new forces like Brazil, Turkey, Mexico and Indonesia. The centre of global business gravity will shift or at the very least will loosen from the London-NYC nexus to be reaffixed to an Asian triumvirate of power cities namely Shanghai-Hong Kong-Singapore which will be known collectively by the acronym the SHOKOSI cities.

By 2050 global Anglo culture noticeably recedes: less is known in Australia about Hollywood; more is known in Australia about Bollywood. Australians at this time will be able to cite the most fashionable suburbs of Shanghai and Seoul. Australia by the middle of this century is regarded as a buttress or more crudely a resources bank to neighbouring Asian powerhouse economies. Australian cities evolve as dormitory lifestyle repositories of places that generate wealth and that are but an overnight flight away from, well, globally important cities. Within the region Australia cities are kindly regarded as pleasant-enough first-world places to live but they are not places of global wealth generation.

Australian city growth with more land available will tend to the vertical & horizontal.

Sydney at this time spreads its sprawling heaving urban form deep into the northeast and even deeper into the southwest. The second airport at Bringelly was intended to relieve congestion at Mascot but in reality it merely served to further divide Sydney between the global city clustered around the harbour and the marginalised and sometimes disaffected suburban base that regards Parramatta as its capital. The political largesse of decades of political infrastructure decisions designed to curry favour with the electorate are plain to see in every major capital: more motorways, signature tunnels and bridges, stadiums, second and even third airports will be operational or in endless discussion. Australian cities will look good in 2050 even if the locals can't afford it.

The same logic applies to Melbourne which by mid-century will draw level with Sydney in terms of population. And will be insufferably self-confident as a consequence. Knowledge workers will be systematically drawn from the surrounding suburban mass and compressed into a pulsing, planned, cosmopolitan and infrastructure- and culture-rich city centre.

"By 2050 automation, robotification and artificial intelligence will have reshaped the hierarchy of work: first blue collar then low-level white-collar work concedes to the sheer force of efficiency. Driverless cars, teacherless schools, clerkless offices rearrange society and the city."

 

Sydney, Melbourne and to a lesser extent Brisbane begin to cleave into a binary world of have and have nots, into worlds of the skilled and of the unskilled, into worlds of the engaged and of the disengaged, into worlds of the content and of the politically active.

The fundamental issue by the 2050s is that the world of work doesn't extend to the world of available labour. Years of mismatch between education and the skills required by business deliver a mismatch. Unemployment hovers around the 12 per cent mark but the same proportion again exists in a nether world of welfare, training programs and welfare. Drugs, isolation and anti-social behaviour damn vast swathes of suburbia to no-go zones. Political resentment in some dark quarters festers and foments. Initially this takes the form of envy of the lives of the 'haves' and of contempt for corporate facilitators such as big banks, big pharma, big mining and big oil. Eventually, by the 2040s this erupts into tensions that demand a political response: taxation on the privileged wealthy knowledge worker class is vastly increased and is redistributed in a system crudely but effectively designed to avert insurrection if not revolution.

Middle class workers

The system is saved. The national good is preserved. A new social contract is established that underpins life into the second half of the 21st century. A layered society emerges with technocrats and corporate types being best remunerated; they see themselves as running the show. At the base of the pyramid a vast underclass that has been growing for half a century. In the middle ground that was once inhabited by a vast middle class is positioned a new thinner band, a life-form of service workers, artists, creative types and sportspeople. It seems that society has found a way to deliver prosperity and to pursue the fundamental human desire for art beauty and leisure. In some ways Australian society in 2050 is not that much different from Australian society in 1850. The post-war years of the 20th century was something of an aberration.

By 2050 there is some nostalgia for the simplicity and for the social unity that prevailed prior to the 2020s. But for those whose lives and lifestyles by 2050 remain confined to the comfortable knowledge-worker precinct, to the area within the boulevard périphérique of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, life in the lucky country is pretty damned good. Yes there are no-go zones for some in Australia's cities of the future. Yes there is crime and resentment in much the same way that there was crime and resentment in 18th century London to the great democratisation of work through the industrial revolution.

But this time round in 2050 in a world where richly-rewarded work is a scare resource, we as a society are quite civilised about our responses. No poor houses. No begging in the street. No Dickensian mean streets for Sydney and Melbourne. No, we are quite methodically Machiavellian about the outcome we want. We want peace, prosperity and security. What is the income transfer system that delivers this outcome? How can we put that system into effect? Those who do work in the knowledge-worker economy transfer a large part of their income to those who cannot garner the same workplace remuneration leverage.

A view of the future and especially of a future a third of a century hence, cannot be viewed from the prism of urban infrastructure alone. The system that has delivered the glittering cities of Sydney and Melbourne today is more than a drab list of infrastructure projects. What is required to understand how our cities evolved and how they might evolve is a holistic view of Australian society as an economic, social and even political force. Australians in 2050 will fret and fuss about the same issues we fret and fuss about today—who's working and who isn't and how much are we paid—it's just that these matters will play out on vastly bigger and more globally connected canvases in the future than is the case today.

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Bernard Salt

KPMG Partner & adjunct professor at Curtin University Business School

Digital Agency - Deepend