For Bella Pihema and James Kewley, Perth's northern satellite city has just about everything they need.
The pair both grew up around Joondalup and now live right near its heart.
"There's so much here – we have such big stores, and everything is very close together, like it is in the city," Ms Pihema said.
That ease of access was no accident.
On the banks of Lake Joondalup, about 30 kilometres north of Perth's CBD, Joondalup's town centre was master-planned from the ground up.
It's just passed 30 years since the city centre was officially opened in June 1991.
So, how is the satellite city of the north holding up?
The seeds for Joondalup as a major community hub were planted around 1955 – that's when the first proper plan for the Perth metropolitan area was drawn up.
University of Western Australia urban geographer Paul Maginn said even then, planners had tipped a huge population surge in Perth's north-west.
"The plan was basically, how can we manage that growth better?" he said.
Come 1970, the corridor plan was released, designing viable alternatives to the Perth CBD, including Armadale, Midland, Rockingham and Joondalup.
While the majority of hubs were already established, Joondalup had to be planned from scratch.
Things looked very different when Edgewater local Regina Dixon moved there in the late 1980s.
"They said it was going to be a new city, something like that," she said.
"All where the shopping centre is, it was just grass."
'The Parramatta of Perth'
That's what one of Joondalup's original planners thought when his firm won the bid to design the satellite city.
"Joondalup was just bush, with the City of Wanneroo council chambers sitting in the middle, with a tiny little road going to it," Hames Sharley founder Bill Hames said.
"How the hell they went there I'm not sure, but that's another story.
"The Mitchell Freeway didn't get to it, and definitely the rail didn't get to it."
For the architect and urban designer, it was time to get to work.
"It's a bit frightening, because you're going to put things on to paper that are going to become reality," he said.
"When you sort of make a stroke like this on a piece of paper, and you colloquially call it the Grand Boulevard … it's actually called the Grand Boulevard today."
Mr Hames said in the 1980s, he could see a big future for the satellite city, likening it to the major hub of Parramatta, around 25 kilometres west of Sydney.
"I used to call Joondalup the Parramatta of Perth," he said. "I still think it's the Parramatta of Perth."
"And look what's happening in Parramatta – now they're building 50-storey buildings."
What makes a good satellite city?
Dr Maginn said satellite cities were a particularly common solution to managing growth in the mid 20th century.
But along with numerous other factors at play — population flow, good house prices, attractive spaces — a diverse employment base is needed to keep a new town ticking along.
Dr Maginn pointed to the satellite city of Elizabeth, to the north of Adelaide.
"It was a success until the car industry folded and left," he said.
"Wider global processes, economic transformation and change has put a city like Elizabeth under immense pressure.
"Joondalup on the other hand is really dominated by retail and allied employment – there's public administration, the university's there, the hospital's there."
Shopping centre domination
Thirty years since the city centre opening, Dr Maginn said if success was measured by housing and population growth, Joondalup had ticked those boxes.
"It's basically built on land that was agricultural and forests — if you think that you've gone from that to what it is today, I think that's a pretty major success story," he said.
And more people are expected to live and work in the area.
A railway extension that will see the last stop pushed to Yanchep, 30 kilometres north of Joondalup, means people living along the city's north-west coast have even less reason to commute into Perth.
Now, attention has turned to making the Joondalup city centre more vibrant.
Some street-facing shop owners the ABC spoke to said they were concerned about the lack of people in the area, while both Ms Pihema and Mr Kewley wanted to see more to get the city's heart beating.
"Activation of the city centre would be good, get the community more involved in things," Ms Pihema said.
Dr Maginn said the dominance of the shopping centre was very clear in Joondalup.
"Joondalup was planned to have [a city centre], and there is one there, but it's rendered invisible – it's overshadowed basically," he said.
"The shopping centre is the de-facto town centre."
Activating the heart
Getting people to step outside the boundaries of what was up until recently WA's biggest shopping centre is a now key focus for the satellite city.
"If you walked over to Lakeside Shopping Centre right now, I bet you it's as busy as Murray Street, Hay Street Mall," said Mayor Albert Jacob.
"We don't want to take away from that success, they're great partners of ours, but we want to fray the edges of the shopping centre, blend the general CBD in with it a bit better."
The mayor wants to see more business come to town, pushing local employment up, and growing the satellite city's skyline.
"There are no height limits in the Joondalup CBD," Mr Jacob said.
"We're setting out to be the CBD of the northern corridor – we've come a long way, but there's still a long way to go."
