THERE ARE JACKHAMMERS everywhere. A new Parramatta is emerging out of the rubble, seeking to make real its tag line: ‘Australia’s next great city’. Thickets of new residential and commercial towers are rising – testament to the city’s ferocious ambition – overshadowing what remains of the squat, 1970s office blocks built during Parramatta’s previous development boom.

Over the next five years, more than $10 billion will be poured into this city. A city that has long tried to overcome its outer suburban reputation can ingest this volume of cash when its empty skies take on an actuarial sensibility, recalibrated in square-metre portions and sold off to the highest bidders. A city can be transformed this quickly when it is finally revealed to be pivotal to the workings of the vast conurbation that is Greater Metropolitan Sydney, whose spaces of flow increasingly clog without a profitable and attractive ‘second CBD’ to ease the blockages mounting daily around Sydney Cove.