She recites a litany of depressing examples. The dual WestConnex motorways that have destroyed hundreds of inner-city houses, trees and lanes, leaving a Geoffrey Smart landscape. Hundreds of fig trees slaughtered to allow for the light rail system. Redfern’s Block, once the centre of a vibrant Indigenous community, rezoned in favour of residential towers. Huge hastily spec built apartment blocks looming over railway stations. Public buildings sold off to private enterprise. And that’s just the start.

If Farrelly were content simply to trash Sydney urban planning, Killing Sydney would be little more than a reprise of the cogently expressed, indignant articles she has been writing for years. But the titles of her chapters – Solid and Void, Fast and Slow, Public and Private, Nature and Culture, Then and Now, Inside and Out, and Primate and Angel – show that she is after something more than simple polemic or lamentation. Her book combines several things: the history and philosophy of city-making from earliest times to the present, observations about humans and nature and culture, assertions about reasons for inner-city destruction, bits of autobiography, snippets of information from her time as a city councillor.

These different preoccupations don’t always sit comfortably together. Farrelly has a tendency to slide into academic prose, occasionally failing to make a direct connection between theoretical statements and their relationship to the Sydney architecture she is deploring: this can dull the impact of her otherwise pointed criticisms. She can also overegg the aesthetic pudding: ‘A huge chasm separates contemporary Western culture from ancient cultures. The name of that chasm is Modernism ...’ Other things too, perhaps?

When Farrelly does describe what is happening in Sydney, she writes forcefully and well. Yet even in discussing the harbour and beaches (yes, they do get a mention, though mostly she concentrates on the built environment) she says this: ‘Pretty much every centimetre of Sydney’s shoreline, harbour or beach is crammed with cheek by jowl bug-eyed square-jawed concrete mansions of the greediest, grabbiest kind.’ ‘Pretty much every centimetre’ is really overdoing it.

She is very good on the mechanics of city development, including the provenance and history of some of Sydney’s more intrusive bits of development. For instance, she flags the consequences of replacing architects with ‘project managers’ and the legal loopholes allowing virtually limitless ministerial discretion in developing major city projects. She usefully points out what may flow from the state government’s assumption that its wishes and the public interest are the same. Her discussion of Sydney’s apparently limitless appetite for housing is also clear and thought-provoking; she observes that the appetite for housing does not have a natural per person limit. And her comments about heritage can be forceful: what we want to keep and why, how older buildings may be repurposed, and even why developers put up hoardings with old photographs of streetscapes they are busily obliterating.

Killing Sydney is sometimes a maddening book. In some places, Farrelly’s mixture of academic prose and provocative journalism make it feel like two different books pushed together. The presence of flat and sometimes fuzzy photographs and diagrams makes it look like a textbook. And what is Farrelly’s Sydney, anyway? She writes almost exclusively about the CBD and the inner eastern and western suburbs, though she does cover Parramatta. But the area north of the Harbour Bridge scarcely gets a mention.

What makes this so annoying is that so much of Killing Sydney is persuasive, and the discussion of what is happening to much of it is quite rightly enraging. But in Lenin’s words, what is to be done? Farrelly’s answer is predictable: ‘Make noise. Get engaged, get elected, get your local hero elected. Make the issues matter.’ Well, sure. But I wish she had gone more fully into this, perhaps looking in more detail at local council and city planning laws that stand in the way of effective action. The book’s subtitle is also over-enthusiastic: Killing Sydney does not really describe ‘the fight for a city’s soul, however that may be defined.

The soul of this city is much more clearly Delia Falconer’s concern in Sydney, the paperback reissue from a series about Australia’s capital cities originally published in 2010. She seeks to contradict the prejudice that Sydney is a shallow place where, in Patrick White’s words, young people stare at the world through blind blue eyes. Falconer’s aim is to see how people, have thought and dreamed in Sydney, this city of writers: Slessor, White, Park and now herself. For her Sydney is a city of strong and deep physicality, a place of water and sandstone, of changeable skies, humidity, breathless bush, and steep terrain. It is a place, she says, through which runs a strain of melancholy. Her book interweaves her own perceptions of growing up on the north shore, Sydney’s maritime history, its extraordinary and disturbing events, the characters that have enriched its fabric over the years, what makes this place special.

So here we have two completely different takes on this most exasperatingly beautiful, physically confronting, much loved, and occasionally loathed city. Farrelly and Falconer are both on the side of those who love the place, though they express this in different ways. They come together in recognising Sydney’s possibilities – whether these are fulfilled or not.