Shifting Centers: Investigating the Urban Patterns of Western Sydney

This paper explores the notion of downtown using an analysis of the urban development of Sydney since the Second World War, which has increasingly focused on a peripheral model of multiple distinct CBD areas and the expansion of urbanism outward to radiating shopping “centers” connected by arterial roads and car parking. This radicalized model of “center” provided a largely internalized replication of the shopping street, absorbing or displacing the historical street and fundamentally challenging the traditional model of a downtown area. As Sydney has expanded to include strategic second (Parramatta) and third (Bradfield/Liverpool) CBD areas, this landscape has come to embody a new notion of “downtown” located at the periphery and distinct from the urban and geographical condition of Sydney since occupation. This paper explores the historical development of four of these new centers, namely, Parramatta, Liverpool, Mount Druitt, and Penrith, and the envelopment of their downtown streets into Westfield Shopping Centers using three-dimensional modeling of pedestrian, center, and network configurations. It provides a novel method of categorizing new typologies of downtown associated with the growth of the shopping center, including an internalized street center model, a grafted model, a regional anchor model, and a bridged “mega-island” model.