If you look at the location of great Melbourne lanes, streets and retail, they have almost all been created by the flow of people from the City Loop. Parliament Station begat The European, City Wine Shop and Spring Street Grocer. Museum Station first provided the footfall to create Melbourne Central and then suffered the indignity of having to change its name to Melbourne Central. Flinders Street Station gave birth to Degraves, Flinders Lane and Banana Alley Vaults which are due for a rejuvenation.

The simple truth Melbourne’s City Loop points out is that urban success relies on access to lots of people, so of course we signed right up to help the Sydney Metro West team understand how to connect people with place via Australia’s largest public infrastructure project. Combining desktop and on-the-ground research, we developed a refined understanding of the unique neighbourhoods within which each of the nine stations exists, then began exploring how each station could provide not only a public transit service but a placemaking asset to define and serve the community for decades to come.

What has made the project most enjoyable is the breadth of our involvement. Under the aegis of “placemaking” we’ve been able to address the representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, art and commerce, efficiency and engagement, retail leasing, retail design and revenue innovation, to name just a few of the dimensions that will make the Sydney Metro West stations resonant and relevant far beyond their public transport role.

As Sydney Metro West now embarks upon the process of selecting development partners for each station, we know that we’ve helped place the experience of people into the consideration set. As Aaron Betsky, Dean of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture said, “Railway stations are our contemporary architecture of democracy. They are open and accessible, they are shared spaces, they bring us together.”