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Utopia Or Dystopia: A Contested Space On Sydney's Urban Frontier, Ian Willis

Ian Willis

Australia is a settler society where the rural-urban fringe of the major cities and regional centres is a contestable stage. There are a range of actors who compete in place making processes re-shaping the cultural landscape when there is collision over the ownership of space and the dominant narrative. This paper examines the proposition that Sydney's urban growth has created a zone of conflict on the city's metropolitan frontier between cultural heritage and the interests of development. In recent years Sydney's rural-urban fringe has encroached on the village boundaries of Menangle where there has been a collision between the expectation …