We first brought in 22 activists from both sides of the debate to help map the arguments, using pol.is, quadratic voting, and small group deliberations. Then 150 representative Sydneysiders tested what they produced. Most of it held, some of it near-unanimously. What we kept finding: objections have terms. For instance, 75% of height sceptics back a halt to massive high-rise; 81% of the same cluster accepts it in certain areas with affordability attached. The same pattern held across different themes and instruments, from permanence trades to community power. Conditional density carries people unconditional density loses. The report also debuts Uncommon Ground, a methodology for locating the questions where a person's camp no longer predicts how they respond. These statements draw nothing like the support of the consensus findings. Instead, they mark the open ground around which new, cross-cutting majorities could potentially coalesce. Our results back the shift away from exchanging vetoes and toward negotiating the terms of growth. The raw material for that negotiation, the conditions, the definitions, the questions still open on both sides, can be surfaced systematically. The same Sydneysiders who argue past each other in comment sections produced, in a different setting, a workable list of terms. The common ground a public can find depends on the infrastructure it deliberates in. We already have the technology: an abundance of open source, freely available tools that help sensemaking at scale. What's missing is the shared institutional infrastructure and deliberative capacity to run processes like this routinely — that's what this report makes the case for. Read the full report 👉 bit.ly/densityreport