The Three Pillars of Sydney’s International Standing

A bridge, an iconic opera house and an Olympic Games. These are the three main pillars on which Sydney has built its prestige and its international reputation as an open, cosmopolitan and appealing city. Alongside these three human achievements, an extraordinarily generous natural setting, shaped by the ocean, lush vegetation and the many beaches that serve as the city’s foremost public spaces, gives Sydney its distinctive and unmistakable character.

Sydney is the subject of a volume in the Cities collection published by ACS Group. “Sydney is the beautiful outcome of a difficult history in a challenging country, ultimately crowned with success,” writes engineer and economist Miguel Aguiló, the driving force behind and supervisor of the collection, in his introduction.

That difficult history began in 1788, with the arrival from Britain of the First Fleet, carrying convicted prisoners and their guards. Sydney remained a penal colony for more than half a century, until 1840, when the settlers finally said “enough” and threatened to launch an American-style war of independence.

The gold rush triggered the first major wave of migration to the city from across Australia in 1851. Later industrialisation, followed by the modernisation of the final three decades of the twentieth century, brought immigrants from much further afield, including Asia, North America and Arab countries. Today, the city’s population comfortably exceeds five million, spread around the harbour: in neighbourhoods of detached houses, along coves whose hillsides are dotted with homes, and in a city centre filled with skyscrapers. Yet life invariably revolves around the beaches, Sydney’s true public spaces and places of enjoyment, with the city forever looking out to sea.

The bridge across the harbour, which is in fact an estuary and the largest natural harbour in the world, was built a century ago and opened in 1932. The iconic Sydney Opera House, designed by Danish architect Jørn Utzon after he won an international competition and completed by Australian architects, was inaugurated in 1973 by Elizabeth II in her capacity as Queen of Australia. The Olympic Games, held in 2000, opened the city fully and decisively to the world.

“The Games undoubtedly became a showcase for Sydney, but for me, what the Opera House has achieved is unique. For the first time in history, a man-made building has come to define the image of both a city and a continent. Never before has a work of architecture glorified its setting in quite the same way,” Aguiló observes.

Despite its origins as a British settlement and colony, Sydney bears little resemblance to the cities of its former colonial power. There is a historical reason for this. Australians broke with the British following the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, during the First World War. Australia committed 50,000 men, lost many of them and felt betrayed by Britain. The country subsequently drew closer to the United States and absorbed American culture, aesthetics and ways of life. “That is why Sydney follows a distinctly American urban model,” Miguel Aguiló explains. Skyscrapers, motorways, residential neighbourhoods and beaches at the very heart of city life.

Located almost at the opposite end of the world and many hours away by air, Sydney may seem a daunting destination to visit. “From Sydney, everything is far away. It is the centre of a vast emptiness,” Aguiló says. But what a centre it is.