Potential conflicts between economic, social and environmental sustainability can cause turbulence in policy-making within infrastructure authorities as they seek to simultaneously accommodate the three sustainability dimensions.

The paper analyses the forces that have led to the NSW government’s creation of another urban development corporation in Sydney, the Redfern-Waterloo Authority.

Exploring the way in which the exercise of power by developers, stemming from superior money-based resources, distorts planning processes, this paper looks at how urban over-development can occur even when planning controls to limit development to levels acceptable to the community are in place.