The vitality that defines central Melbourne today did not emerge overnight. Rather than being born of one grand vision, it’s the result of many astute, incremental changes that revitalised the city.
It took Melbourne a very long time to create a civic square that served the citizens rather than commerce. Now an Apple store is to be built there, unless parliament supports a disallowance motion.
Cities all over the world are facing growing challenges to provide clean, reliable water. And many of the fixes, such as desalination plants, have a huge carbon footprint.
The situation in Perth in particular has some parallels to that of Cape Town, but Australian cities responded to the last big drought by investing in much bigger water supply and storage capacity.
The Victorian government isn’t alone in seeking private partners to renew public housing. What is notable is its lack of transparency by comparison with such arrangements elsewhere.
Looking back through all Melbourne’s strategic plans from 1929 onwards, it becomes clear that the 20th-century legacy of car-centric planning and its focus on parking is still deeply entrenched.
Sunanda Creagh, The Conversation et Jordan Fermanis, The Conversation
The Flinders Street incident, in which a car was driven into pedestrians on a busy Melbourne street, underscores the need for new ways to design cities to protect pedestrians from vehicle attacks.
European ideas of the campus as a place apart shaped Australia’s “sandstone” universities. Now universities are adopting urban regeneration strategies, bringing the city to the campus and vice versa.
An innovative collaboration between government, a non-profit group and philanthropists has found a way to provide urgently needed housing on land that would otherwise be left vacant for years.
Traditionally, new communities first get hard infrastructure – schools, hospitals, transport – and ‘soft’ social infrastructure comes later. Liveability and public health suffer as a result.
A decade after Toronto produced the first Vitals Signs report, community foundations in Melbourne and other cities are using these reports’ up-to-date data to inform their decisions.
Tree plantings are making a visible difference to Melbourne’s west. It’s the result of a collaborative model of greening, one that Australian cities need to apply more widely.
No matter whether competitive tendering or negotiation is used, operators that do not meet clear and transparent service benchmarks should be shown the door.
There is more to bike-share schemes than first meets the eye. As they grow in global popularity, the economic models behind them become increasingly diversified.
The neediest suburbs get a much poorer deal in Sydney than in Melbourne. A new study provides a suburb-by-suburb breakdown of state investment, including what facilities and services have been funded.
Melbourne has seen tens of thousands of new apartments constructed over recent years, and apartment brands are flourishing. We can see striking typographic similarities with another economic frenzy: the 1870s cattle boom.
Even where communities are mixed, many inner-city families go to extraordinary financial and geographic lengths to ensure their children do not go to school with children from ‘the flats’.