Peter Berg doesn’t like the new Parramatta. He doesn’t like the new skyscrapers, the new cafes or the fact that so many streets are now pedestrian-only. Like many of his generation, Berg laments that Parramatta used to be a “working-class area, more of a village” with “street shopping, none of these big centres”.

“It was like a bomb hit it a couple of years ago,” he said, remembering when development of the city’s new square started in 2017. “They’ve turned it into something else now, something I can’t relate to.”

Berg’s story – in the 63 years of owning his hobby shop of model trains and aircraft, he has been forced to move multiple times to give way for new developments – reflects the upheaval of the region.

And its most recent leap forward is striking. Parramatta being Sydney’s “second CBD” felt like a pipe dream for a long time, until skyscrapers burst from the ground, reshaping the suburb’s identity. And now there are pockets of Parramatta that feel plucked out of any major city anywhere in the world, complete with convoluted pieces of public art, expensive restaurants and carefully manicured laneways.

Parramatta Square, opened in 2022, sits at the centre of the suburb’s transformation, a modern, open public space that connects many of the large workplaces that have recently opened in the city. The transformation was supercharged after the pandemic, with the opening of multiple highrises, the new light rail and the new stadium, alongside major banks and government agencies formally moving in.

The changes haven’t overwhelmed the suburb though, leaving Parramatta somewhere between suburban shopping district and skyscraper-streaked city. But they have changed its identity. Where does it go now?

Development that would scare the rest of Sydney

Until 2009, Parramatta had one tall office tower, housing the council. Today, there are dozens of office and residential high rises, the tallest of which stretches to 225 metres. The development has cemented its promise as Sydney’s second CBD: it follows only the Sydney CBD for office floor space.

Responsibility for that transformation can be pinned largely on one person: the late billionaire property developer Lang Walker, whose eponymous company purchased virtually all of the land around the train station from Parramatta Council.

In his years of lobbying premiers, councillors and bureaucrats to allow him to transform the area into the second CBD, he was said to often repeat a stark warning: Sydney would fail unless a new CBD was created closer to the geographic heart of the city.

Sydney’s original CBD was too far east to be reached each day by workers in the west, he argued. Presentations to government claimed that half a million people were passing Parramatta each day on the train as they travelled to Sydney for work. Soon more people are expected to live west of Parramatta than east of it.

“We cannot be dragging people out of Western Sydney into eastern Sydney forever,” said Jessica Jordan, the group executive of development at Walker, who oversaw the project and gave the Herald a tour of the vicinity. “I don’t think you could get a better connected site at the centre of the light rail, the metro, bus, train [and] ferry.”

Walker won a contract to develop most of Parramatta Square in 2015. After Western Sydney University’s main high-rise campus opened in 2016, Walker’s first buildings opened in 2017 and 6-8 Parramatta Square, the country’s largest commercial building by floor space, opened five years later.

But unlike other parts of Sydney, where residents have often taken a NIMBY approach to new buildings, Parramatta’s residents see it differently. It’s a core aspect of western Sydney’s aspirational culture, said Andy Marks, executive director of the Centre for Western Sydney.

He pointed to the fact that western Sydney accounts for 10 per cent of Australia’s population, but has not received “anywhere near 10 per cent of the country’s resources”.

“It comes down to feeling neglected for so long,” he said. “There is a receptiveness to change and improvement you don’t see elsewhere.”

That receptiveness has also included an embrace of greater housing density that Marks said would “send hearts in Manly or Ku-ring-gai aflutter”, but meant there weren’t “tumbleweeds floating through the city on weekends or at night”.

And for many in the west, Parramatta is better than Sydney’s rival city centres.

Ross Grove, the western Sydney regional director for the Property Council of Australia, said Parramatta’s strength had been in that it was “much more of a 24-hour economy than say North Sydney or Chatswood”.

“Some of those locations all you see at 4.45pm is a mass exodus of cars, whereas Parramatta has that blend of Church Street, Eat Street, which is bouncing back quite well,” he said. “It’s got the Riverside, it’s got a number of events in town, it’s got plenty of attractions around it, which means it’s a vibrant centre beyond 9 to 5.”

Stark demographics shift

In the last decade, the shift in demographics across Parramatta has been impossible for locals not to notice. White-collar workers fill Parramatta Square on their lunch breaks, students occupy the $136 million PHIVE building, and restaurants serving every cuisine you can imagine line Church Street.

It’s no surprise: a new commercial and business precinct and multiple university campuses were always going to attract a new group of people to Parramatta.

Although families still make up a good chunk of the area, Parramatta has seen a huge increase in younger, more educated and culturally diverse people choosing to make the city their home.

“It is a place of young, educated professionals, increasingly coming from India and coming from China, and living in smaller apartments but still maintaining a family structure, but also renting more so than buying their homes,” said Caroline Deans, the head of census dissemination at the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Dr Sarah Barns, an urban strategist and researcher who has previously analysed the demographic changes in Parramatta, thinks the changes to Parramatta have brought with them changes to one fundamental part of the region’s identity: its relationship with migrants.

There was a time when the waves of migrants arriving in Sydney, such as the Lebanese migrants in the 80s or the Indian migrants in the 90s, could begin life in Australia from Parramatta. Barns said people living on the lower wage brackets including blue-collar and service workers, the kinds of jobs dominated by recent migrants, are being pushed out of Parramatta for the first time. The median price of a house in the suburb is $1.76 million, while a unit goes for the median price of $620,000.

And while she wouldn’t call it an open-and-shut case of gentrification, Barns believes that the changes have “watered-down diversity”.

“The cost of housing is redefining who can actually afford to live there, and it means people are being pushed out. And it isn’t just about those on lower wages, it also includes creatives or even people looking to start a new business.”

But despite these concerns, Barns believes that Parramatta does not fit the traditional mould for gentrification. She said shifts in the region’s identity are baked into the culture, that it is “always in flux”.

“There’s an opportunity here to reinvent itself without the negativity that can be attached to some places that go through this transition. And it is in the youthful exuberance of the place.”

Not over yet

Parramatta’s boom is far from finished. The council has approved developments for 30,000 new dwellings in the financial year to date, according to ABS data, making it by far the top approver of housing in the country.

The second stage of the Parramatta Light Rail is yet to begin construction, and the Metro West project, connecting Sydney’s CBD to Westmead, is slated to open by 2032.

Construction on the Powerhouse Parramatta, located on the former site of the historic Willow Grove, is expected to be completed this year, followed by the redeveloped Riverside Theatres in 2028. The Civic Link, a pedestrianised “green spine” connecting Parramatta Square to the Powerhouse, is also on the cards for Parramatta’s future.

Former Labor lord mayor Pierre Esber, whose council published a vision for five “interconnected districts” in the area by 2050, said change was inevitable in the region, but he still felt the area’s most defining feature – its “community feel” – remained.

“I still see people at the local shops around my area and they’re very proud of Parramatta because they can see Parramatta from their bedroom windows. They can see how it’s grown into an amazing city,” he said.

“There’s people who don’t like it, people that want it to stay the same as it was in the 70s and 80s and 90s, but it’s about progression. If you don’t move with the times, the times will overtake you.”

The sentiment is echoed by Peter Wynn, who owns his popular NRL merchandise store on Church Street.

“I’ve been here 37 years, and I have seen massive, seismic changes. But they’ve ultimately put Parramatta on the map.

“It can still feel like a very connected community though,” he said as he rifled through old photos, insisting he find one of his old shopfront.

After finding the photo, he held it up proudly, saying he wasn’t upset about the changes.

“You just can’t stop progress.”

The Sydney Morning Herald has opened its bureau in the heart of Parramatta. Email parramatta@smh.com.au with news tips.

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