The paper explores metropolitan strategies' misfits, and their occasional felicitous connections, in the context of greater Sydney, metropolitan Melbourne and SE Queensland, where there are now headline debates about the way we wish to live in those cities and about the standards and modes of procurement of urban infrastructure to support such life.

This paper briefly reviews the relationship now between ICT and the cities, particularly in Australia, and surveys the role that communication and information infrastructure might now play in the future form and function of cities.

This working paper describes the development of the 1988 metropolitan strategy for Sydney, its planning objectives and instruments. A comment on the paper focuses on the six major pressures on the formulation of the strategy and asks a series of critical questions of each.