Opinion
July 4, 2026 — 1:30pm
As an Italian architect and an urbanist based in the United States – with past stints in Australia as visiting professor and, at one point, Queensland’s “innovator-in-residence” – I find the debate around the proposed Town Hall Square heartening. The reactions are strong and the concerns legitimate. This is precisely what civic space should do: provoke disagreement. One could say the current controversy is already the square’s first event.
From the Athenian agora to the Italian piazza, the square is one of humanity’s foundational pieces of urban technology, older than the sewer and sturdier than the smartphone.
Urbs and civitas, the Latin words for the city of stone and the city of citizens, were never truly separate. The square is where the two collide, where ideas are aired, tested and occasionally shouted down. What happened in Athens and Rome continues, under other names, in cities everywhere.
Australia is a striking exception. Its two great cities were effectively designed to avoid this civic instrument altogether. It is said that in the 19th century, governing New South Wales – which then reached into what is now Victoria – Governor Richard Bourke instructed his surveyors to exclude public squares, fearing they might become sites of rebellion. The result is still visible today: Sydney and Melbourne inherited centres defined by absence.
Melbourne’s Federation Square, after years of controversy, proved how necessary and contested such space remains. Sydney is now facing the same reckoning.
That absence matters more today than ever. Work has migrated to the home, shopping to the doorstep, friendship to the screen. As a result, loneliness is now a public health concern across much of the world. This is why cities should keep making squares, and make them well. A square is a remedy for isolation that asks nothing of anyone except to show up.
To show up is also to confront diversity. Here lies an even more important function. Modern society has invented something the Athenians and Romans could not imagine: the option of never meeting anyone we disagree with. Online, we block, filter and curate our way into bubbles of perfect alignment.
Public space denies this luxury. You cannot mute a passer-by. You cannot curate the street. As a result, our social networks grow more resilient through what sociologist Mark Granovetter called “weak ties” – the connections between people in different social circles that carry information and help hold a society together. At our lab at MIT, we have shown that when physical encounters decline, these ties erode with measurable consequences.
The implication is simple: the question is not whether Sydneysiders need a square. They do, as the current debate itself demonstrates.
A good square is infrastructure for chance, just as a reservoir is infrastructure for water. What remains undecided is how. And this is precisely the moment to chime in, while the design is being settled and Sydneysiders can still shape the square before it shapes them.
The arguments so far have covered cost, demolition and displaced businesses. They are valid concerns and should go on: public money deserves scrutiny. Also, a functioning CBD block should not be erased lightly or justified only through architect’s renderings – those diaphanous impressions that always show perfect weather and improbably contented pedestrians.
But Sydneysiders should argue about other things. Which trees provide shade in February heat, whether fountains are accessible or ornamental, whether edges invite sitting rather than consumption, whether the space works for those who do not buy a coffee. These details determine whether a square is lived in or merely walked through. And the time is now: a design team has been appointed, the concept plans are not yet public and consultation is due this year. This is the time to argue before the drawings harden.
The past can also offer guidance. We can look back at how in ancient times Gadigal Country’s Tank Stream drew people together near where Town Hall is today. More recently, we should study how an earlier intervention by the famed Danish urbanist Jan Gehl on George Street already transformed a traffic corridor into a civic street. Seen this way, Town Hall Square can be interpreted as the centrepiece of a longer run of connected public squares. It anchors a new urban logic that keep a square alive long after the opening ceremony.
For more than I recall, “meet me at the Town Hall steps” has been the city’s default rendezvous. The new square simply gives that habit a better place to go.
Carlo Ratti is a professor at MIT in Boston and at Politecnico di Milano, and co-founder of the international design and innovation office CRA – Carlo Ratti Associati. He designed the Olympic torch for the 2026 Winter Games, among other projects.
