Australia : Melbourne

Melbourne has a strikingly diverse multicultural population of around four million people, but is founded on an Anglo-European heritage that, until the late 1960s, fiercely attacked multiculturalism as anathema to its cultural-political harmony. It is a densely urbanised and vibrant city of high-rise buildings, restaurants, parks and bluestone footpaths yet its metropolitan footprint radiates outwards into a region of ever-stretching car-dependent suburbs, mixed-use peri-urban zones and a hinterland of temperate dry-land farming where most of the trees have been cut down. It is a trading city with a global port, although its manufacturing base for export has steadily declined since the 1970s. It is the administrative and service centre for the south-east corner of Australia, and yet 90 per cent of traded imports stay in the metropolitan area. It is a global city with a well-educated population who have growing and sophisticated public consciousness about climate change, recycling and water consumption issues although it is becoming less sustainable, even as it maintains a high quality of life. The focus of this chapter is upon Melbourne's 'development path'. It aims to outline some of the possibilities and problems that have been created in relation to the collective task of steering development onto a sustainable footing. By focusing on continuities and discontinuities of urban social changed this chapter explores a series of historically framed and locally embedded development paths that have had a major influence: first on continuities of urban development; and second, on discontinuities (often globalising in their nature) that have impacted on urban development generating substantial tension in the process. In order to treat sustainability in a holistic way, we draw on an orienting method called 'circles of sustainability' which suggests that the social can be understood in terms of four domains: economy, ecology, politics and culture. Thus, to explore the question of Melbourne's development and sustainability, the chapter first contextualises the general history of the city in a global context, and then maps the contemporary shapes of the metropolis through the various domains of social life.