Someone said to me the other day that Sydney “isn’t really a city”. It’s more like a collection of villages; little hamlets spread over a vast plot of land, and separated by bodies of water and big freeways and idiosyncratic identities – and money.

We love to split ourselves up, whether it’s by local government area, or school catchment, or train line – or a more general divide between east and west, north and south, urban and suburban. And this, my friend observed, makes planning especially difficult.

A city of villages, or a city of fractured fiefdoms?

All cities do this to a degree, and it’s inevitable that in a metropolis as geographically large and sparsely populated as Sydney, some subdivision will take place, whether official or colloquially.

But this sectarianism has contributed in a very real way to the housing crisis that is threatening home ownership, smashing renters and starving our city of key workers and creatives. Boosting supply became an us-versus-them proposition. In a city divided, it’s easy to cast something as someone else’s problem. But as we all know, a house divided must fall.

Enter the Greater Cities Commission. The extra-government agency was created in 2015 to be a “link” between councils, the community and state government agencies regarding big-picture planning. It would sort out where our homes, jobs and infrastructure needed to go – ideally in alignment – to build a successful city.

It created a plan for “three cities”; an eastern harbour city anchored by the Sydney CBD, a central river city around Parramatta, and a western parklands city spanning Penrith to Macarthur and the second airport.

The three cities plan divided Sydney into the Eastern Harbour City, Central River City and Western Parklands City.Credit: Greater Sydney Commission

Later, this remit expanded to include Newcastle, the Central Coast and Illawarra, and a new “six cities” plan was hatched for a mega-region akin to San Francisco’s Bay Area or the Netherlands’ Randstad.

That plan is now theoretically in the hands of the Department of Planning and, realistically, in the hands of politicians after the Labor government announced it would abolish the GCC, reportedly underwhelmed by draft housing targets served up by the agency.