Parramatta 2050

Draft Parramatta 2050 is an initiative of City of Parramatta Council (Council) to prepare a long-term strategic vision that guides our City’s future.

The City of Parramatta (Parramatta) is undergoing significant transformation at the centre of one of Australia’s fastest growing regions. 

As Parramatta continues to grow and change, we require a visionary document that takes a future focus beyond our current work program and capitalises on our City’s unique strengths and opportunities. Draft Parramatta 2050 reimagines our City's future and will help to guide its progress towards recognition on a global scale.

Our draft tagline:

Start your story at Parramatta.

Our draft vision: 

In 2050…Parramatta is a global city that invites people to gather, create and accelerate. 

By gathering a world of stories and experiences in one place, Parramatta creates space for expression, connection, and opportunity.

The dynamic fabric of our City represents the acceleration of Parramatta beyond the bounds of current thinking. 

We respect our past, embrace today, and work together to create a better, bolder tomorrow.

A vision document provides an aspirational description of what an organisation wants to achieve or accomplish in the long-term. In this case, it outlines future objectives and goals for Parramatta, and provides a roadmap to guide the City’s future within a specific timeframe.

Draft Parramatta 2050 outlines six major Game Changers:

1. A World leader in First Nations Partnerships – seeks to establish clear, robust, and respectful partnership agreements between the Council and the Dharug People, the Traditional Owners of the lands, waterways, and skies we call the City of Parramatta today.
2. Western Sydney’s jobs engine - commits to ensuring that Parramatta is a driving force for economic development and employment growth for all of Sydney.
3. The epicentre of creativity - embodies Council’s commitment to embedding culture into Parramatta’s fabric, solidifying Parramatta’s position as a global beacon of creative excellence. 
4. The home of festivals, sports, and entertainment – envisions Parramatta as a premier national and global destination for sports, conventions, and year-round festivals.
5. Asia Pacific’s centre for best-in-class education – aims to revolutionise Parramatta’s educational landscape, to offer the finest educational experience in the Asia-Pacific, position Parramatta as the most globally connected university city in the nation, and drive our City’s economic transformation towards knowledge sector jobs. 
6. An unrivalled River City – central to this vision is the development of the Central River Parklands, a prominent green and blue network serving as a hub for recreation, ecological resilience, and connectivity.

Draft Parramatta 2050 includes five major sections - these are as follows: 

• Vision - including tagline, vision statement and spatial vision
• Strategic directions
• Game changers and future opportunities
• Enablers
• Implementation tools

See the document for more information on each section.

Draft Parramatta 2050 is an externally-focused and higher-level Council visioning piece that helps frame conversations within the remainder of Council’s strategic governance framework. Draft Parramatta 2050 complements Council’s Community Strategic Plan (CSP) and other key strategic documents by serving as our global vision and explaining what Parramatta will be known for on a national and global stage. The CSP will translate this global vision into local priorities and outcomes. This relationship is explained in further detail in the below image:

Council conducted an extensive engagement program prior to and during public exhibition which involved:

• Broad promotion through social media and print advertising, Council communication channels and media coverage.
• A variety of methods including Council ward workshops, 15 x  pop-ups across the Local Government Area, Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) focus groups, activities for young people, external focus groups and webinars, an online survey and webinar (circle-back to Council ward workshop participants).

Community engagement led to greater emphasis on a range of community priorities. For example:

• Greater emphasis on Parramatta 2050’s benefits to the local community by adding a new spread with maps to show Global Parramatta within the context of Parramatta LGA, Greater Sydney, and the broader region, which explicitly highlighted the local and regional benefits of the vision. ‘By 2050...’ statements were added to the end of each Game Changer to clearly articulate benefits for the local community. Parramatta 2050 was more clearly introduced as Council’s global city vision, outlining the rationale for the vision and clarifying how it relates to Council’s Community Strategic Plan.
• The proposed Game Changers are now grouped under the Strategic Directions - ‘Gather’, ‘Create’ and ‘Accelerate’ which has improved the clarity of the document. 
• All five Districts within Global Parramatta resonated with our community, revealing a missed opportunity to deal with all five Districts in more detail in the document. The treatment of the Districts has now expanded to include a standalone page with key moves for all five Districts within Global Parramatta (rather than just Camellia-Rosehill and Silverwater as included in the publicly exhibited draft). 
• The introduction has been reframed to strengthen the narrative about Parramatta’s story so far, and to better recognise Parramatta’s history and heritage, unique strengths, and global positioning. A key move ‘Cultural and heritage tourism’ was introduced. 
• Transport was elevated from being an enabler to a Game Changer in response to community feedback that transport was a key priority and should be given more prominence in Parramatta 2050.
• To more clearly address sustainability and climate change, a new key move ‘Climate action, resilience and regeneration’ was added to the Game Changer ‘An unrivalled river city’.