Since the early 1990s Sydney has experienced a prolonged period of prosperity underpinned by dramatic economic transformation and producing major economic reterritorialisation. Yet the spatial impacts of this economic change are not well understood, have not been mapped and, consequently, have been poorly recognised in public policy settings. In this paper, we present an argument for the need to develop a more sophisticated and much needed understanding of the economic role of Sydney within the contemporary Australian eastern seaboard economy as a prerequisite to the development of appropriate urban and regional physical, economic and social development policies. But first we need to attend to what we mean by reterritorialisation—the changing territorial organisation of economy and governance and the associated shifts in the cartography of related accumulation and distributive flows. The starting point here is to assert the spatialised nature of contemporary accumulation and distributional processes at a global scale and to focus then on the role of territorial reconfigurations in the production and reproduction of these processes.

The paper has four main sections. The first section explores the relationship between the changing form of global capitalism and the reterritorialisation both of territorial economies and state spaces as a prelude to considering the reterritorialisation currently reconfiguring Sydney and Australian space economies. The next two sections investigate the processes and impacts of remapping the accumulation and distributional flows of the Sydney economy. Finally, the fourth section explores the reconfiguration of governing institutions concerned with urban and regional development—another reterritorialisation. In concluding, the paper argues that we currently face significant empirical problems in generating adequate understandings of the changing spatiality of Sydney’s territorial economy. Failure to build these understandings will have major implications for development along the eastern seaboard and creates a major obstacle to the development of adequate management policies.