Image Credit: Mike Chorley
The city was the second European settlement in Australia, founded as a fertile breadbasket for nearby Sydney soon after the First Fleet arrived on the coast in 1788. Called “head of waters” in the tongue of Australia’s aboriginal inhabitants, Parramatta’s rich soils and abundant fresh water soon gave it a greater population and commercial importance than Sydney.
Today, this city of 280,000 expects a nearly 50% increase in population by 2045. That pace of change will bring major stressors, from employment and affordability to mobility and sustainability. Employment in the city is currently dominated by public funding. Public administration and safety, healthcare, social assistance, education and training make up 42% of all jobs. While providing a stable base, these sectors will not generate sufficient job growth to match the population rise. The city also has a significant low-income population whose position is threatened by rising cost of living and severe weather. Parramatta’s challenge is to accelerate private-sector growth and use the resulting rise in public budgets to pay for the infrastructure that population growth will demand.
Digital and Human Assets
Comparing employment in Parramatta with that of Sydney highlights the need. In the former, employment in growth sectors including manufacturing, financial services and professional and technical services makes up 21% of the total. The equivalent for Sydney is 49%.
The educational attainment of its people, however, already exceeds that of Sydney and New South Wales, with 44% of residents holding a Bachelor or higher degree. With six universities in the city, there is clearly even greater potential to serve local economic development needs. In the pandemic year of 2022, Western Sydney University introduced Launch Pad, which builds foundations in entrepreneurship through degree programs and innovation projects. To help students launch local careers, it offers micro-credentials in entrepreneurial and career skills including additive manufacturing, product management, autonomous robotics and business formation. Competitions, innovation challenges and workshops engage students in hands-on learning, while startup accelerator and internship programs support the transition from school to local work. By 2024, Launch Pad had engaged 6,700 students from 19 different fields of study.
Launch Pad also operates, in partnership with state government, a Women & Multicultural Program to address the disparities in entrepreneurship among women and migrants. Research shows that only one-third of company founders in Australia are women – a percentage that has hardly changed in 20 years. One-third of Australian businesses are owned by migrants, who face barriers to growth in language, culture, market and regulatory knowledge and access to capital. The Program provides training and development workshops, and access to funding, mentoring and co-working space. In its first 18 months, it served nearly 1,500 participants and issued A$150,000 in grants to founders and students.
The City Council extends the same approach to public schools, vocational education and adult learning. The Early Careers Strategy works to develop apprenticeship and trainee opportunities as well as internships and work placements. For those needing work experience, it makes available internships in local government, including a program tailored to students on the autism spectrum.
Innovating on a Digital Foundation
Digital connectivity in Parramatta was transformed by the National Broadband Network, championed by Stephen Conroy, former Minister for Broadband and the Digital Economy. (Minister Conroy was named ICF’s Visionary of the Year for his contributions.) Most premises now have NBN connections, whether fiber or coax, and multiple carriers including Telstra, Optus and Aussie Broadband have stepped in to compete for the market that NBN pioneered. After decades of sub-par service, this competitive marketplace provides the foundation for Parramatta’s economic success.
Putting it to good use is the Western Sydney Startup Hub, operated by SpaceCubed, which provides 1,500 m2 of affordable co-working space with programs and events to support tech startups, scaleups, small business and corporates on their growth journey. In its first two years, the Hub filled half of its total office capacity and guided 34 founders through a structured mentoring and business development program.
Parramatta is also home to the Westmead Health Precinct, one of the largest health, innovation research, education and training hubs in Australia. Spanning 75 hectares, it encompasses two major hospitals, five medical research institutes and two universities that, together, are conducting 3,000 active clinical trials at any point in time.
The Western Sydney Tech Innovators group provides local startup founders with a technology meetup group to share knowledge and build professional networks. It partners with local stakeholders to deliver programs including an AI Lab to build AI literacy, a community forum on AI, an 8-week AI Innovation Studio and an AI Innovation Workshop for young people interested in the technology. It is sustained by partnerships with City Council, the Startup Hub and Launch Pad.
Engagement and Inclusion
To serve those less technically savvy, Parramatta’s libraries offer a range of digital literacy programs for young people, university students and adults. They range from beginner classes to Tech Savvy Seniors taught in English, Korean, Cantonese and Mandarin. Residents can learn 3D design and printing, how to build an app with AI, VR game design, robotics and coding. Over a recent three-year period, the libraries delivered nearly 700 programs to more than 5,000 residents.
Those digital skills enable entry into Participate Parramatta, the city’s online engagement platform. With the city launching over 100 medium-to-large-scale projects every year, the platform gives residents user-friendly tools to provide feedback on what matters most to them. An accessibility widget provides a built-in screen reader and other features to assist people with disabilities. In its first two years, the platform delivered more than 1.1 million page views to 244,000 unique visitors. This stream of data is enriched by Ward Workshops, in which 50 demographically-representative residents are recruited in each of five wards to share their views on community priorities and satisfaction with services.
Resilience and Adaptation
Much of Australia is on the leading edge of climate change impact. The Parramatta River and its tributaries are subject to flash flooding, which threatens the central business district (CBD), residential areas and transport networks. FloodSmart Parramatta is a warning system that ingests rainfall forecasts and live data from rainfall and river level gauges into a modeling system covering the entire municipality. Subscribers to the system receive automated warnings of flooding in advance. In its first three years, FloodSmart send over 300,000 emails and text messages to subscribers.
Sustainability in Parramatta is about more than reacting to climate change. A home energy advice service launched in 2025, Our Energy Future, provides easy-to-understand advice on energy-efficient products and renewable energy systems. It aims to help residents identify value for money and pick the right options for reducing home energy usage. Buying decisions in just its first four months will make possible nearly A$150,000 in cost savings over the lifetime of the products installed.
Even greater impact will emerge from a CBD Planning Framework. It specifies the use of sustainable building technologies, design of building surfaces and materials, urban heat mitigation solar reflectivity and wind mitigation. It identifies the principles behind high-performing buildings and promotes all-electric buildings and electric vehicles. The Framework was developed through a public exhibition and engagement project that attracted hundreds of comments from residents, interest groups, developers and public authorities. These led Parramatta to become one of the first councils in Australia to specify environmental conditions in the formal Development Control Plan that emerged from the process.
Standing in the shadow of Sydney, its much larger and more famous neighbor, Parramatta is making the investments in people, technology and infrastructure to prepare for a much bigger future – as a global city that, in its own words, “does global differently.”
Population: 269,134
Website: www.cityofparramatta.nsw.gov.au
Smart21 2025