Sydney's Singapore, Sydney's China

01

Opening

From the train window on the T9 line, somewhere after Strathfield, Rhodes arrives all at once. A wall of pale towers stands up out of the Parramatta River, thirty and forty storeys of glass and balcony, and then the doors open at a station that did not much matter to anyone twenty-five years ago. Ride four stops south and west to Burwood and the effect is different but related. The town centre is low and dense and busy at ten at night, its shopfronts given over to hotpot and bubble tea. Two suburbs, a short ride apart on the same inner-western spine. Between them they hold the two clearest pictures Sydney has of what a certain kind of Asian city looks like.

The comparison is a loose one and worth making anyway. Rhodes is the planned one — a peninsula redrawn in a single sweep, towers to a masterplan, a shopping centre wedged under the apartments, water on three sides, calm to the point of sterility. It reads as Singapore. The towers are ordered and vertical, the population prosperous and overwhelmingly born somewhere else. Burwood is the opposite temperament. It grew up around a Victorian railway station and never stopped, and the density there feels accreted rather than composed, closer to the crowded commercial grain of a mainland Chinese city than to anything in the property brochures. Neither is an accident. Both were made by putting a lot of homes very close to a train, and both are better places for it than the low-rise suburbs that Sydney spent most of a century insisting were the only respectable thing to build.

02

The peninsula that made Agent Orange

Rhodes is a masterplanned dream built on remediated poison ground.

Before it was anyone's idea of Singapore, Rhodes was one of the most contaminated pieces of land in the country. From the late 1920s the peninsula was industrial, and for the second half of its working life the dominant tenant was Union Carbide, which from roughly 1949 to 1976 manufactured the herbicides 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D on the site. Those two compounds, mixed, are the active ingredients of Agent Orange, the defoliant sprayed over Vietnam. The manufacturing left dioxin in the ground and, through decades of stormwater and spillage, in the sediment of Homebush Bay next door. For years the peninsula sat as exactly what it was, a poisoned brownfield too expensive for anyone to want.

That toxicity is the reason the Singapore could be built. Clean land in Sydney comes parcel by parcel, owned by hundreds of people who each want their price, which is why most of the city densifies one reluctant infill block at a time. A poisoned peninsula is different. It is cheap, it is empty, and it tends to be held by one or two large owners who have to clean it before they can do anything — which means that when it finally opens, it opens all at once and to a single plan. Remediation at Rhodes ran for years and finished, to a standard fit for redevelopment, around 2011; roughly 175,000 tonnes of dioxin-laced soil on one of the sites was cooked clean in a thermal desorption plant. The NSW environment regulator's position on the remediated land is careful and worth quoting in its own register: there is no evidence that the contamination now poses a risk to residents. Not "safe" — no evidence of risk, monitored. Tens of thousands of people live on the answer to that sentence.

And they came. The 2021 census counted about 11,453 people in Rhodes, more than nineteen in twenty of them in flats, and roughly three-quarters born overseas — the largest single group from China, with sizeable Korean and Indian populations behind them. Chinese ancestry alone runs to something like two in five residents. The apartments are still going up. Billbergia, the developer behind much of the peninsula, is finishing a roughly $3 billion town centre whose final tower, at 39 levels on Marquet Street, was unveiled at the end of last year. There is a strange, small fact buried in the census returns: between 2016 and 2021, through the middle of this boom, Rhodes's recorded population barely moved and may have dipped slightly, a quirk of when apartments complete and fill. The cranes tell one story and the count tells a quieter one.

03

A turning point at Homebush Bay

The 2000 Olympics proved a poisoned wasteland could be made valuable, and the rest of the corridor took the lesson.

None of this — not Rhodes, not really Burwood either — reads the same without the Games. In 1991 the state set up the Homebush Bay Development Corporation to clean up the land immediately west of Rhodes, an old abattoir and brick-pit district that had been used for decades to dump the city's waste. The transformation of that ground into Sydney Olympic Park was one of the largest urban-renewal exercises the country had attempted, and its central technical achievement was unglamorous. It showed that a genuinely ruined site could be remediated, serviced, and made to hold value.

For a long time it was not obvious the Games had left anything worth having. Olympic Park spent years after 2000 as a handsome, well-connected, half-empty precinct that no one had a use for, the classic Olympic hangover. What eventually redeemed it was the thing it had always had — infrastructure and remediated land, a short train ride from the CBD — meeting a city that had run out of cheap greenfield and finally, grudgingly, decided to build up. The park is now filling with apartments; the state has it slated for around 15,000 homes. The suburbs that ring the old bay were the first to take the hint, and Rhodes, on the far shore, was among the earliest to go vertical.

Framed that way, Sydney 2000 looks less like a fortnight of athletics and more like the moment the city changed its mind about density and toxic ground at the same time. It is tempting to overstate this, and the temptation should be resisted: the Olympics did not cause the apartment boom, and plenty of Sydney densified with no reference to Homebush at all. What the Games supplied was a proof and a permission — a large, public, expensive demonstration that the poisoned edge of the harbour could become somewhere people paid to live. Everything downstream of that, including the two suburbs this piece is about, was built in its light.

04

Burwood grew the other way

No masterplan, no blank slate — just an old station and a wave of new arrivals.

Burwood had no dioxin and no blank slate. It had a station, one of the oldest on the network, on the Main Northern line that opened through here in 1886, and it had never been anything but a centre. What changed was who arrived. Over the past two decades Burwood became the gravitational centre of a young, mostly mainland-Chinese Sydney, an alternative to the old Haymarket Chinatown that had served earlier, largely Cantonese and Southeast Asian generations. The council LGA holds around 32,000 people on about seven square kilometres, which makes it one of the densest local governments in the state, and the Chinese-ancestry share of the suburb sits above forty per cent.

The most concentrated expression of all this is a laneway. In 2019 a developer, Blairgrove Group, opened Burwood Chinatown on Burwood Road — a purpose-built, neon-lit hawker alley of around thirty stalls under a canopy of lanterns, selling sheng jian bao, hand-pulled noodles, deep-fried ice cream and whatever had trended most recently in Chengdu or Shanghai. It is not organic in the sense that Haymarket was, thrown up over a century by the people who ran the shops. It was designed and leased and themed. But it is authentic in the sense that matters commercially, which is that it tracks the actual tastes of the people who eat there, and those tastes are extremely current.

There are a lot of new concepts coming from mainland China; a lot of it is focused on desserts.

Louie Semrani, property manager, Burwood Chinatown

Louie Semrani, who managed the property, described the job to Broadsheet at the opening as a matter of keeping up rather than importing nostalgia. "There are a lot of new concepts coming from mainland China; a lot of it is focused on desserts," he said, and the discipline he set himself was a narrow one. "I'm trying to get the right mix, we want to stick to a street-food theme." It is a small quote and it says a lot about the difference between the two suburbs. Rhodes was planned around a river view and a rail line. Burwood accreted around an appetite.

05

The council that said yes

Burwood's density arrived partly through a planning culture reformers would rather it hadn't. That is awkward, and it is worth saying plainly.

Here the happy story acquires a shadow, and the honest version keeps both halves in view. Getting apartments built in Sydney is hard, deliberately so; the system is a thicket of controls, objections and reviews that in most suburbs grinds density down to nothing. Burwood built anyway, at scale, faster than almost anywhere comparable. The uncomfortable part of why is a matter of public record.

In 2017 the Sydney Morning Herald reported that a single architecture firm, Urban Link, had designed more than forty per cent of the significant residential projects — apartment blocks, boarding houses, townhouses — that Burwood Council approved in the two years to December 2016. One firm, four in ten of the consequential approvals, in a council with a famously development-friendly reputation.

The council's dominant figure through most of this era is John Faker, first elected in 2000 and mayor on and off across the years since, including the current term — by the council's own account its longest-serving mayor. In July and October 2020, Faker declared a conflict of interest to the council, recording that his own family uses Urban Link to develop properties. The declaration is the correct thing to have done and it is also, read alongside the forty-per-cent figure, the kind of fact that makes people uneasy.

What has to be said next matters as much as what came before it. No corruption finding has ever been made against Faker or Burwood Council over any of this. Declaring a conflict is what the rules require, not evidence of breaking them; a firm can win a large share of the work in a small market by being good at getting things approved there, which is not the same as anything improper. The record shows scrutiny and concentration and cosiness. It does not show a crime, and this piece is not alleging one.

The interesting question is the one that survives all those caveats. A planning culture this tight — repeat players, a dominant firm, a mayor who has run the place for a generation — is exactly the arrangement good-government reformers spend their careers trying to break up. And it delivered, in Burwood, a genuinely good urban outcome: thousands of homes next to a station, a walkable centre, a night economy, rents that house people the harbourside suburbs have priced out entirely. Meanwhile the cleaner, more consultative, more objection-friendly councils a few kilometres away delivered almost nothing and called it heritage. It is possible to find Burwood's arrangements distasteful and still notice that the distasteful version built the housing and the tasteful version did not. That tension does not resolve, and pretending it does would be the dishonest move.

06

The next station

Metro West is coming, and it aims to do on purpose what the last twenty years did half by accident.

Whatever mix of vision and expedience got Sydney here, the state has now decided to do it again, deliberately, with a new railway. Metro West is a twenty-four-kilometre driverless underground line between Parramatta and the CBD, targeted to open in 2032, built to roughly double rail capacity across the inner west. Two of its stations matter to this story. One is Sydney Olympic Park, which will finally give the old Games site the fast, frequent connection it has always lacked. The other is Burwood North, a few hundred metres up the hill from Burwood's existing station, where crews have already dug a station box some twenty-nine metres into the ground.

Around each station the government is planning the density in advance rather than chasing it afterwards. The Burwood North precinct has been rezoned for something like 15,000 new homes; Olympic Park is slated for a similar number, with a share set aside as affordable housing. This is transit-oriented development stated as policy instead of stumbled into — the same formula that made Rhodes and Burwood, written down and applied on purpose. Put the station in, permit the towers around it, and let a suburb thicken until it can support the shops and the trains and the late-night laneways that make density livable rather than merely dense.

Whether the designed version produces the same life as the accidental one is the open question, and Rhodes is the cautionary half of the answer. It is the most successful piece of masterplanning on the corridor and also the quietest, a place that can feel a little airless, all towers and no mess. Burwood, built by appetite and by a council that kept saying yes, has the mess and the life. The next twenty years on this line will be a test of whether you can plan for the second thing or only for the first. The station boxes are already in the ground, and the towers will follow them, the way they always have here.