The environmental consequences of Sydney’s expansion across the Cumberland Plain and beyond pose formidable challenges in terms of air quality, water quality, biodiversity and the loss of productive farmland.

Growth and development can come at a great cost. Historically the city has expanded with a footprint of degradation far larger than its own physical dimensions, a reality that we ignore at our peril. In the not too distant future, recalibrating our relationship with the ecosystems we occupy will become an essential precondition of urban development.

The idea of the metropolitan Sydney being comprised of ‘three cities’ in the future is a way of encapsulating and harnessing the potential of the Western Sydney Airport to improve equitable access to employment, education and cultural.

It was a stretch in our original thinking, but our public places and spaces eventually transitioned into highly productive networks of service-oriented, citizen-centric, and digitally transformed connective tissue

The new realities of the 3^rd City are being and will continue to be tested within the frame of the professional project, with its specific constraints and opportunities.