The newly-opened Sydney Fish Market in Australia on Jan. 21.Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images
A new fish market just opened in Sydney, Australia. It’s a wild success.
When I visited on a drizzly Sunday earlier this month, the sprawling complex was packed with visitors: couples, groups of friends, families with kids, tourists from Asia and Europe; the whole gamut, milling around under the market’s enormous, 20,000-square-metre roof.
Some watched fishermen hoist big tuna from the hold of their boat onto the wharf. Others shopped for the lobster, prawns and clams arrayed on crushed ice at the fishmongers’ stalls. Many came to lunch on oysters, sushi or grilled calamari from one of the many fast-food joints, parking themselves on the terraced seating outside.
The project, a successor to the historic fisherman’s wharf nearby, was plagued by delays and cost-overruns, like so many are. Once the cost of a ferry wharf and commuter-rail stop are figured in, the price tag will be pushing $1-billion. But it is a tremendous new asset for Sydney, capital of New South Wales. Premier Chris Minns crowed that the vibrant harbour city now has the “biggest and best fish market in the world.”
A visitor from Canada can’t help but ask: why can’t we be that ambitious? Canada’s big cities have lots of places worth visiting. Stanley Park, the aquarium and the anthropology museum in Vancouver. The Islands, the CN Tower or City Hall in Toronto. But they lack big fresh attractions, the kind of crowd-pleasing, must-see, Instagram-worthy hotspots that 21st-century cities need to qualify as top rank.
Australian cities are building plenty of them. Governments have spent roughly $1-billion expanding and improving Melbourne Park, home of the Australian Open tennis tournament. They are spending $1.6-billion building out the nearby Melbourne Arts Precinct, which will include a museum of contemporary art and a huge urban garden for performances and public art exhibitions.
Sydney expanded and modernized the Art Gallery of New South Wales, a 10-year, quarter-billion-dollar project that added a spectacular new building next to the grand old neoclassical one.
Even little Hobart, Tasmania, with a population of just a quarter-million, has an eye-popping attraction. The Museum of Old and New Art houses the impressive collection of antiquities and modern art put together by a local plutocrat who made his bundle devising a system for gambling on horse racing. Its cavernous underground galleries are buried in sandstone cliffs. You can get there by a fast ferry that takes you up the river from the city’s waterfront. Say you visited Hobart and everyone asks: Did you go to MONA?
If Australia can do it, why not Canada? We are sadly behind Australia – and, to be honest, most of the world – in developing urban attractions. Vancouver has dithered for years over creating a new art gallery to replace the cramped current building. The latest design was abandoned in 2024 when the cost estimate ballooned. Two years earlier the British Columbia government scrapped its own plans for redesigning the outdated Royal B.C. Museum in Victoria, also over cost concerns.
Toronto’s redeveloped central waterfront is hugely improved in recent years, with a series of creative parks, including the lovely new Biidaasige Park at the mouth the Don River. But it still lacks a big draw like Sydney’s Circular Quay and Opera House, Oslo’s equally stunning waterfront Opera House, Lisbon’s Museum of Art Architecture and Technology or Chicago’s Navy Pier, which draws about 9 million people a year and is undergoing a staged, multi-year update.
It doesn’t have to be so. Toronto, for example, could replace the pathetic Toronto Island ferry terminal and combine it with a public wharf that juts into the harbour. Or build a new modern-art museum in the Port Lands, the evolving old industrial area at the east end of the harbour.
Or establish a museum of immigration. Melbourne has a great one that tells the story of how waves of immigrants came to Australia. Canada’s story is just as dramatic. Famously multicultural Toronto, the landing place for so many newcomers over the years, is the perfect place for it.
Prime Minister Mark Carney is promising to come up with tens of billions of dollars to bolster Canada’s military and build up its infrastructure. He should put urban attractions on his spending list. They are often expensive, but deliver lasting returns.
Canada’s vibrant cities are one of its greatest strengths. Investing in great urban parks, transit and cultural assets has a double payoff, improving the quality of life for residents and drawing free-spending visitors.
Time’s a-wasting. Smart, forward-looking cities like Sydney are outdistancing us with projects like the wonderful new fish market. Let’s get on with it.