Breaking down the silos through geodesign – Envisioning Sydney’s urban future

One of the challenges in creating plans for sustainable urban futures is the ability to work across government agencies and to break down traditional barriers to truly collaborative planning. Typically, metropolitan planning has been carried out by different agencies that are separate in their mandate and planning strategies. This siloed approach to city planning means there are problems in the coordination and sequencing of critical projects. To address this problem, we investigate the use of the Steinitz geodesign framework and the GeodesignHub.com software for supporting collaborative and integrated negotiation-based geodesign. We hypothesised that by using the geodesign framework we can involve key government agencies and begin to break down the barriers between these agencies to create a single integrated strategic plan for the city. In this research we focus on South East Sydney, discussing the process in designing and implementing the geodesign framework with real world actors spanning several government agencies, municipalities, industry and academia for this study area. This being the first application of geodesign in the Australian context, we draw on feedback from participants on the strengths and weaknesses of the framework.