Recently, I went into the Sydney Opera House, where my partner was briefly working, for the first time in years. I had passed it, of course, travelled by on ferry, on my visits to the city in which I spent most of my youth. On such returns, there are always things you have not noticed – or perhaps forgotten. I had certainly never properly appreciated the shade of carpet in one of its bars, a gentle red that lies perfectly at the intersection of luridness, elegance and nostalgia. And I had not for years trod its inside concrete steps. The feel of those stairs, their exact width and hardness, somehow recalled me to my childhood, the bag of Minties my grandfather shared with me when he and his wife Jo took me to hear the orchestra.

Anthony Albanese is beginning to speak to Australians about the need for change in our foreign policy.Credit: Dionne Gain

Staying in the CBD, I became dependent on the city’s public spaces. I worked in the State Library of NSW, became accustomed to its rhythms; I spotted kookaburras with my son in the Domain. These places I know from my youth, and so there was the shock, too, of just how different much of the city feels even compared with a decade ago.

It feels more exciting, mostly – which also means busy. A friend told me about the squash to get onto the Metro in the morning, the aggressiveness that can come out, the simultaneously intimate and impersonal experience of being pressed against other human beings. And these things made me feel that the denser Australian cities everybody has talked about for years – a little nervously – are upon us.

Of course, we don’t know that this trend towards greater density will continue. It is possible, say, that the work-from-home shift is only getting started; that employers’ recent push for more days in the office is merely a brief reversal, and that the........

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