Building skyscrapers in Australia should be much easier than in Europe or the US, since you build them downwards not upwards. You don't need to fight gravity!

Brisbane's height limit is 275m due to flight paths. Until the ~70s the restriction was that no building could be taller than the City Hall clock tower.

I live in Sydney, one of the reasons that the Sydney City Council has been opposed to tall buildings is because they don’t want the building to block the sun and shade Hyde Park in the CBD.

Welcome to Sydney! One interesting impact of the height limits within the CBD are that it's resulted in many secondary hubs such as Parramatta, North Sydney and Chatswood which all have multiple 150m+ skyscrapers well outside of the main CBD and even more under construction.

The vast majority of tall buildings in Sydney's CBD are office towers. There's loads of spare capacity in them for many reasons - the 'working from home' revolution being just one. If we're to have more tall buildings in the CBD, they've got to be for homes, not half filled office buildings.

I love city with low rooftop. As a traveler, I can see the sun, the actual life of the local people, and some how the nature of the city.

To be honest the reason Sydney expanded so much outward is not due to the height limit, countless of cities such as Paris, Berlin, Madrid and Rome are packed in a much smaller area despite having near/more the population of Sydney. It has more to do with urban sprawl.

Sydney has a special place in my heart. One of my favorite cities in the entire planet that I can’t wait to revisit! Greetings from America 🇺🇸

One problem with skyscrapers in Sydney that I'm surprised wasn't mentioned is the proximity of the airport which is about 8km south of the CBD. Its a factor I'm pretty sure would affect the construction of supertall skyscrapers in the future

Given the vacancy rates of skyscrapers in other cities after Covid, hopefully Sydney's being smart about it and making its new big boys adaptable to change with the times, like the German skyscraper covered recently on the channel.

The problem with skyscrapers is that they don't solve the space problem at all. They might provide a few homes for the mega rich, but mostly they'll provide offices, which attract workers, who in turn need more homes. It's like when they build huge highways to try to solve traffic problems, but ultimately end up with more congestion. Cities need truly affordable homes and green spaces. Not architects tearing up historic sites to compete for who has the biggest...

A problem with skyscrapers is that they benefit the few in those top floors, while disadvantaging everyone in the building's shadow. It also compounds concentration in a few areas. It would be better to have more of those Medium height buildings along the transport corridors. (Other vids discussing the missing middle)

As a Sydney sider, the height restrictions is what makes Sydney so beautiful, they should lift the height restrictions in Parramatta instead and even build over 500m

The tower built by James Packer actually blocks the Sydney observatory telescope at certain angles. Tall buildings aren’t always a great idea.

Fun fact: in Cambridge, MA, the city where MIT is located, there was a limit to the number of floors buildings could have. When MIT asked the famous architect I.M. Pei to design the a building (the "green building") for the campus, he noticed a loophole: he made it the maximum number of floors, but made the ground floor extremely tall. The city then changed the law to restrict the maximum height to no taller than the green building.

Sydney CBD has narrow London-style streets compared to American cities with skyscrapers, so you end up with dark airless canyons. Also we don't really need more in the CBD. If you zoom out, you see that Sydney has multiple business districts with high-rise, adding North Sydney, Chatswood, Parramatta and the future Aerotropolis. Sydney's population centre is waaaay west of the CBD towards Parramatta, so to fill the skyscrapers on the eastern edge of Sydney you need to have hundreds of thousands of commuters travelling ridiculous distances. As it is with increased hybrid working from home, many of the existing towers are waay under-populated.

Parramatta in Sydneys west is becoming the next Sydney. Sydney the city it self is becoming the economic sector. The shopping side is becoming Parramatta which is central to all of Sydney's suburbs.

You missed the most important part why Sydney has no skyscrapers: They don't want to give the spiders two tall buildings where they can build a spiderweb between. Imagine the horror of a (from australias perspective) normal sized spider chilling between two skyscrapers and waiting for prey (helicopters or so)

I can think of 2 things that would probably still limit skyscrapers. I would be surprised if there wasn't setbacks from Hyde Park and the botanic Gardens to limit shadow impacts. Also the number of train and road tunnels under the CBD would restrict the foundations you can dig on certain sites.

I hope Sydney doesn't lose its natural charm where only a 1.5 hour drive can get you on a beach that very few visit, or mountain views, gardens, sporting fields of many various sports covering the suburbs. And my favourite is awesome fishing in and around her clean beaches and estuary and river systems like Port Hacking, the Hawkesbury and Brisbane waters, Tuggerah lakes, lake Macquarie, lake Illawarra down to Shoalhaven. This city is growing to fast and with that the standard of living goes down, what NSW needs is to spread the increasing population and make larger cities out of say Bathurst, Port Macquarie, Coff Harbour, Batemans Bay and Bega and Canberra..........stop overloading Sydney.

There's actually a lot of vacant office space in the greater Sydney CBD. Barangaroo has very expensive space, as an example. I live in Sydney and just increasing the height of skyscrapers I think is going to be really difficult because of the density of the space. But then again New York did it so I don't know we will see.

The Gold Coast, a city in South-east Queensland recently defined an area along the coast (mainly Surfers) as having no height limits whatsoever. The current height of Q1 is 322.5 metres (1,058 ft). It will be interesting to see what developers do.

Cities especially in countries like USA, Canada, Australia complain about the high cost of housing with low density housing and continue to build low density housing and then wonder why housing is so expensive.

We were able to attend the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney. It was epic. Everyone was so friendly. It was organized and run beautifully. Well done 😊.

Let's get on Sydney YIMBY! Stop the bans on housing (even lowrises) that cause huge urban sprawl and unaffordability

Just arrived in SYD for the first time today, saw the upload notification while still in the plane. Huge fan since multiple years Fred, I was really amazed by this coincidence. All the best, and thanks for your outstanding content!

Thanks. I didn't know that. In Tasmania, Launceston heights are limited to about 8 stories because there's 40 metres of sedimentary mud under the city, so every tall building needs to be stabilised with pylons in the foundations. It keeps the place looking small and friendly, though.

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I think Sydney has the right balance and approach. It is one of the more beautiful cities in the World i've seen .I think with its icons and harbour ,rivers and greenery ,it doesn't need skyscrapers to make it the way other more featureless places require to pad them out.

I just left a job working in the new Parramatta square development in western sydney, which has become a test case for what we must build in this city. 8 tower's built over 1 city block which was previously home to a library and carpark. Each building except 1 &3 is at least 20 stories and they share open public spaces between them

The population is not expanding in the CBD (it's still looking less vibrant than it used to), it's expanding in the outer suburbs some 40km away.

I regard the fascination with skyscrapers to be old hat and unless they are done really well they usually create a shadowy wasteland at street level. Both Melbourne and Sydney had beautiful sandstone Victorian buildings which were mostly demolished for the ones we have.

Damn. If you think Sydney doesn’t have skyscrapers, the UK definitely needs more.

In Vancouver, there are restrictions on building heights because of view cones, used to preserve the views of the mountains. Now, it may seem like low-hanging fruit to get rid of them, but the even lower hanging fruit is that most of the city away from the view cones have single-family homes that could densify.

What Sydney really needs is a whole heap of medium size skyscraper apartments built everywhere to mitigate the housing crisis we are in. Rental and purchases priced in Sydney are astronomical!

If you compare Melbourne to Sydney, Sydney has done it much better. Although Melbourne has a lot more skyscrapers in the CBD area it doesn’t have any large buildings outside of the centre of the city, Sydney on the other hand has North Sydney, Chatswood, Parramatta, Hurstville, Bondi ect, while on the other hand Melbourne has only one being Box Hill if Melbourne wants to take the cake it needs to build mini CBDs like Sydney on train lines to maximise its growth and reduce the need to expand its urban area. Sydney is taking a good step though in increasing its height.

I always get excited when you make a video about Australia

So surreal seeing you in my backyard. Hope I bump into you in the coming days if you're still in town!

From where you’re standing, the end of the third Matrix movie showed what Sydney’s skyline *could* look like. But Sydney has a symbiotic relationship with nature unlike any other city in the Anglosphere - you can drive as little as 15 minutes and end up surrounded by national park … walk up the crest of the hill to Wakehurst Parkway in Seaforth and you’ll see the CBD skyline all of a sudden. Maybe Paris and Hong Kong could claim to abut the forests as hard as Sydney does. But you’re right - Sydney loves icons and monuments, and it was the first one, Sydney Harbour Bridge, that kicked off a new mindset to “build big”. The Bridge is the reason we have the Opera House, and in turn is the reason we have the Centrepoint Tower. It nearly led to the rotating apartment tower in East Circular Quay in the 1990s, but too much potential ugliness stopped that one - and instead we swapped potential ugliness for certainty in ugliness, with “The Toaster” blocking the view from Circular Quay station to the Opera House. (Sydney was spoiled by the unbroken visibility for a few years during construction). But J J Bradfield, the architect of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, turned the direction of Sydney in more ways too - constructing and planning underground railways for decades ahead, future-proofing for double-decker stock and putting 6 lanes of traffic on the bridge 3 decades before the trend swung hard into building wider roads. This was also at the time, as you noted, when Sydney’s suburbanisation kicked off in earnest, and the first outer suburbs marked the boundaries of the Sydney Basin (or County of Cumberland), an area equivalent to Los Angeles or London (of today). It’s a fun little mix in Sydney, where the outer suburbs have the very Los Angeles style of suburban space (and McMansions), but the CBD / city / financial district / downtown has the boxed-in features of San Francisco peninsula or Manhattan island; and on the tip of that you have another era represented by The Rocks and The Domain, where old-world London is represented with colonial-era late 1700s sandstone buildings. You can really walk around and take your pick of flavours with Sydney - London 1800, San Francisco 1900, Los Angeles 2000, and then there’s “The Matrix” City 2100 and even Aboriginal Australia 1700 CE (or 60,000 BCE) - just take the Manly Ferry around Bradleys Head and you’ll be face-to-face with bushland on the foreshore. And the entire city has a tougher “green belt” than London ever did or will have.

Sydney doesn't need billion dollar sky scrapers for foreign investors to buy and leave empty. It needs affordable housing for Australians.

I have lived in London, Paris, Athens, Tokyo (currently) and Sydney, plus over the years visited numerous other cities.... Sydney is absolutely beautiful and would recommend it to anyone ❗❗ I hope they cap the development to only the CBD area 👍 Excellent vid as always Fred & crew.... cheers to you 🤟🎶

We have a similar law in Cape Town, South Africa. There is a height limit on buildings so that no building interferes with the view of Table Mountain.

In the City of Wollongong, south of Sydney, we have the second tallest buildings in New South Wales at only 120m, but being built mostly on hills approximately 30m above sea level certainty makes them look taller. I can see the height limit being increased again soon enough like they are across Sydney's CBDs.

Here in the Philippines, we did not respect the law maintaining a clear skyline for the Rizal Park and now we have a condominium behind it

Airport is close to the CBD limiting height, additionally, we take our overshadowing of public space seriously and with so many parks and public spaces, towers often get haircuts to meet the solar access plane.

You just unlocked a memory ... 40 years ago my parents took me up the Centrepoint tower, I was 12. $0.02 cheers.

You left off that Sydney has space to build more skyscrapers over Central train station, in the planned tech precinct. And that skyscrapers will have a sloping height limit as they get closer to parks. This is to ensure natural light

As a Sydneysider who is not only suffering from this housing crisis but also works in a currently struggling building material production company a flood of new skyscrapers would absolutely be a good thing for me, and I definitely think it's time we started catching up to other global cities

Looking forward to seeing what Sydney builds in the future.. MASSIVE potential. Great video guys

Sydney has my favorite skyline in the world. I hope they don't ruin it.

While commercial property prices in the Sydney CBD are coming down, due to record lows in demand for office space, due to the huge shift towards Work-From-Home initiatives. WFH is cheaper for a lot of businesses (high rent gets replaced with some modest increases in IT remote access costs) for many of their staff and better for many of those workers who no longer need to commute, etc.

Fred, great to meet you on the flight leaving Sydney earlier this month. Keep up the great work 👍🏻

I thought you were going to say the height restriction was because of the airport. That's why Brisbane has a height restriction of 274m on buildings in the CBD.

Fun fact: the original The Matrix movie was filmed in Sydney

feel like this is an archive video since the Australia 108 completed couple years ago, Melbourne Square's second stage is on the way and STH BNK is also on the way.

Parramatta is building what Sydney can not. Parramatta may seem like another suburb, but it's a city of it's own.

Any new tower would only serve as an investment opportunity in maybe a few apartments for the mega rich and do nothing to stem the growing housing crisis in Sydney. There is too much migration (as usual) and figures expected to rise, via gov policies, yet not enough housing to accommodate the rising growth.

Might be worthwhile visiting Sydney's second city; Paramatta. Its growing and its growing fast, projected to have a CBD the same size as the current Sydney CBD within 25 years

Hello from Sydney, Australia too. Glad you are here!

As a Melbournian, Sydney is our showcase city as far as landmarks go. I dont think their skylike should under go radical change. Develop Parra and the other larger suburbs.

Another fine, informative video. I'd heard various pieces of information about this but not the full explanation. Thanks, Fred, for clearing things up. It seems Sydney's infrastructure has been focussed down, not up. Tunnel, tunnels and more tunnels.

"Nearby Melbourne" Isn't it a nearly 10 hour drive away?

Brilliant video, thank you. Not only you were walking the exact streets that I do every morning but you accurately conveyed the local sentiment. Sydneysiders have a love hate rely with the Sydney tower and in many ways it’s great that Sydney CBD stayed low as it is now, however it is worth touching on other Sydney business districts, such as Parramatta, Liverpool or Chatswood where there is no excuse to build above 330m or even 500+.

Jørn Utzon (the arcitect of the Sidney Opera House) was my neighbour in Hellebæk, Denmark. No bull s... Now his son, Jan, lives there. He showed me models of the opera and the famous half sphere like pealing a orange :-)

I live in Sydney and did not know about the limits. Thanks

Melbourne has beautiful skyscrapers, and are constantly building new ones. I guess it’s to make up for not having the natural beauty like Sydney or Brisbane does

As someone who services businesses everyday in the Sydney CBD we could do with some taller buildings. Plus my company pays for parking fines so once I find a spot in a loading zone in a decent loacation I park there for a while and service miltiple businesses from that spot. Would be good if there were taller buildings so we could basically do all businesses in one building in the same day. The highest I've been is the fifty something floor. I don't think there are many buildings even higher than that.

Wow, that is a very clever way to describe this video! In my capacity as a student of engineering at the University of Technology in Sydney (UTS), I have seen that you are absolutely correct in asserting that there is a maximum limit for the number of buildings. I appreciate you providing this KZfaq as well as other videos that are pretty excellent.

Fred, amazing video! I hope you got some video on Greece in the pipe line.

Great video! Would love to know your thoughts on this, but for Barcelona. It has the most densely populated neighborhoods in Europe, it is pretty much boxed in from all sides geographically. It has a height limitation below the projected taller tower of La Sagrada Familia. Moreover, urban planners in the city recently are more in favor of growing the city horizontally rather than vertically.

Nice timing. Weather looks stunning this time of year!

watching this as someone who's lived in syd her whole life, this was so interesting to me! thank u for sharing, feel like i've learnt some really interesting facts

Comparing American cities to Sydney is less applicable because Sydney has more business districts. Many businesses have their offices in Western Sydney, so there is more of a high rise boom happening around the adjacent areas there

The most beautiful cities in the world don't necessarily have hi-rise structures. Sydney is beautiful the way it is.

According to the BCA/NCC, they also chosen 40metres (or is it 45m can’t remember) as the arbitrary height where all these new building services are required such as dual water supply, zone smoke control, and other things that are prohibitive. So most buildings are just under this height to avoid these items.

When I first came to Sydney I was never amazed by skyscrapers, but the historical buildings. I also loved places like Newtown, just old houses and very few apartment complexes. Things are changing fast, tall buildings are poping up everywhere and they all look the same.

Philly had a gentleman’s agreement for the longest time that no building would be built that was higher than Billy Penn on the top of City Hall. This was broken with One Liberty Place in the 80s. Since then, Philly has built many buildings higher than City Hall, including the largest building in the US outside of Manhattan or Chicago

There was an old tale that Edinburgh was the same as “No building can exceed the height of the castle” That and most of the city is a world heritage site these days !

3:10 - For about 75 years, Philadelphia had an unofficial informal rule of no building to be higher than City Hall tower. That height limit was broken in about 1988.

Love the B1M. Welcome to our amazing city!

The fact that we get free videos on KZfaq by The B1M is truly a gift. 👏👏👏👏👏

The lack of medium density housing is a much bigger problem. Way too much suburban sprawl in Sydney. You can walk 5 minutes from central station and find a fair bit of single level housing.

Can you guys make a vid on the phs project in the Netherlands? It is a program to prepare the main dutch railroads for more frequent trains. Ot includes minor changes like some switches, but also completely new stations.

In many US cities, there is this law called Minimum parking requirements which limits the floor space by the amount of parking that can be provided. You end up with fairly tall structure 1 story structures. With fake windows and balconies second end third or fourth floor windows.

As usual great content. Please do not stop!

All the building height breaking records of the Commonwealth for the 20th Century were raised in Canadas' three major cities. Until the last few years when Hong Kong real estate boomed. Vancouver has view corridors that restricts some building heights though.

I never knew what you looked like. Very interesting voiceover voice you have. Good work! Keep it up!

The B1M team should look into Halifax, Nova Scotia, although it doesn’t have any major skyscrapers it’s the fastest growing city in Canada with quite an impressive skyline change and boom in the last 10 years. Would be a very interesting video

Greetings from Amsterdam. An extremely beautiful and liveable city, all below 150m.

I believe Ottawa has a similar height restriction close to Parliament Hill. Building close to it are not supposed to be taller than the Parliament building. Further out, taller building can be made but then you are out of the downtown.

Thanks I live in Sydney and never knew about this You learn every day

That line that Melbourne overtook Sydney in population this year is going everywhere. That is by Australia's official population figures, not true. The Australian bureau of Statistics uses a measure called the GCCSA to give the official population figures. Sydney is still bigger at 5.3 million vs Melbourne at 5.1. It is only by using another measure called the SUA, which contains more restricted city boundaries, that Melbourne overtook Sydney in that measure (iirc both around 4.9 million), and that is because the Melbourne SUA this year incorporated a town called Melton just outside the city that wasn't included in previous years. Australia uses the GCCSA figures to give their official city populations, not SUA, so saying one city is bigger than the other depends on which way you look at it.

5:04 It will always be Centrepoint Tower to us

Great content mate, hope you had an amazing time in our city!

Kinda glossed over the fact that Sydney had many CBD’s and Parammatta in the west had taller buildings than Sydney’s CBD.

Sydneysider here. The height restriction was a little more complex than the simple phobia suggested in the video. Until the 1960s New South Wales was largely run by a rural elite, descendants of the old squatocracy. They wanted a port to export agricultural commodities, they did not want a big city that might threaten their control of the state. Especially since a greater Sydney municipal government could feasibly have a larger budget than the state government. So the city governance was broken up into lots of little neighbourhood councils that couldn't fund infrastructure. With a number of laws limiting the city's growth. Like the height restrictions. By the 1960s Sydney had become a major financial centre of South East Asia. Making the rural elite largely irrelevant to state politics. There was a huge boom in civil infrastructure and commercial construction. Which ripped up huge swathes of the old city, since there weren't any heritage laws. Things like a plan to bulldoze the Domain (the park next to the Opera House) to build a parking lot. In the 1970s this lead to the Builders and Labourers Federation (a construction union) putting "green bans" on a lot of construction at the requests of residents actions groups. These eventually translated into fairly conservative heritage laws. These were weakened in the 1990s to build the Star City casino mentioned in the video. And now, many of the height restrictions have also fallen.

7:35 Why would developers want to increase the floor space by 1,000,000 ft.², when the current commercial occupancy is still only at 70%

A massive omission to this video that is also a huge factor in why these 'rules' exist to begin with is the fact that Sydney's airport is EXTREMELY close to the centre of the city. At least compared to where major international airports are respective to the major cities they serve elsewhere in the world. The two north-south runways line up almost perfectly with the CBD, so glide slopes and approach vectors overfly very dense areas of central population density. People who say "but it's 8 kilometres away" - underestimate JUST how comprehensive and far-reaching the CASA (Civil Aviation Safety Authority) regulations are for international airport final approaches and flightpaths. If anything, it's quite possibly still to this day, the biggest and foremost reason why Sydney's skyline isn't any taller than Centrepoint Tower. While some of the rules pre-date the CASA regulations, I would say that the reason they never really bothered to update the height laws, or updated them so slowly, was that they automatically meant none of the CASA regulations for unobstructed final approach glideslopes to the airport were breached. If Sydney's main international airport was located in an entirely different place, or the runways faced entirely different directions so that it didn't mean that final approaches lined up with overflying parts of the CBD, I'd imagine the height restrictions would have been abandoned decades ago. You will still notice that NONE of the new buildings proposed in this video are taller than Centrepoint Tower.

Love learning new things about the city I call home!

As a Melbournian.. please, don't do this. Melbourne has completely changed, and not for the better... even from a long distance away, Melbourne now looms menacingly on the skyline as what can only be described as a 'wall' stretching ever across the horizon. The Skyscrapers are all so close to each other that they block out the sun, nearly all of Melbournes once teeming laneways are in permament shadow, along with many of its streets. The city has taken on an ugly, cold atmosphere which has driven many people away from the City, which is essentially dead from Tuesday through to Friday during the day. Keep your height limits in place, protect your skyline, don't end up like Melbourne... :(