A Liveable City
Last year, August the 14th was a disappointing day for Melbourne. The Economist’s Intelligence Unit had released its annual Liveability Index, and its citizens discovered that, after seven years at the top, Melbourne was no longer the world’s most liveable city.[i] After being in second place for seven years, Vienna took the top spot. Many Australians were disappointed (except for those living in Sydney, who were relieved Melbournians could no longer boast).
Close examination of the scoring, which cover a number of assessments in five areas, revealed what had happened. On four areas, the two cities are just about indistinguishable – healthcare, culture and environment, education and infrastructure. But on stability, which takes into consideration the threat of petty and violent crime, terror, and military and civil unrest, Vienna’s low crime rate, as well as measures to reduce the likelihood of militant attacks, made the difference. Vienna scored 100, but Melbourne scored 95.0 (it was slightly ahead of Vienna on culture and environment, and they were the same in the other three categories). You can be confident the City of Melbourne staff are looking hard at what they can do to recover the top spot: the search is on to find more effective ways to stamp out crime and eliminate any risks of terrorism. Can Melbourne regain the top spot? We’ll see.
Setting aside the scoring system, what does it mean to say a city is ‘liveable’? Melbourne’s RMIT has suggested that “Liveable communities create conditions that optimise health, resilience, and sustainability through the provision of supportive infrastructure, including walkable neighbourhoods, public transport, public open space, affordable housing, healthy food, local amenities, accessible employment, and social and community facilities (which are in themselves major sites of local employment).” [ii] Is that possible in major cities with millions of residents? Walking around Melbourne’s CBD provides an opportunity to think about those criteria and the challenges they present.
Before we start, we need to clarify what constitutes ‘the city’. There is an area called the City of Melbourne. Fairly small, it covers 14 square miles, with a population of a little under 140,000. This was the City hoping to keep Melbourne on top in the liveability ratings. However, the wider metropolitan area of Melbourne, covers nearly 3,900 square miles, with a population of 5 million. I’m well placed to observe the City’s liveability, as I am staying in the central area during the week, less than half a mile away from the main Post Office (why do we always decide this marks the centre of a city?). However, I will comment on the broader metropolitan area, too.
We can begin with “walkable neighbourhoods”. Melbourne’s Plan is guided by the principle of 20-minute neighbourhoods. The 20-minute neighbourhood is all about ‘living locally’ – giving people the ability to meet most of their everyday needs within a 20-minute walk, cycle or local public transport trip of their home. [iii] In the CBD, shops, workplaces and study locations are all within 20 minutes, but there’s more. For people living in the city, there’s also easy access to park areas. Going round clockwise from Flagstaff Gardens (at about 11 o’clock, as it were), we have Carlton Gardens (at 1 o’clock), Fitzroy Gardens (at 3 o’clock), Yarra Park (with the Melbourne Cricket Ground included) at 4, Biarrung Marr at 5, which leads into the tennis complex and Olympic park, and Alexandra Garden at 6 o’clock, which lead into the Botanic Gardens. Wherever you are in the CBD, most of these are easily reached in considerably less than 20 minutes on foot. There are even two smaller parks close by, Batman Park at 7 and Docklands Part at 9. If Victoria is the ‘Garden State’, Melbourne is clearly a city of parks.
Accessibility matters. Compared to many other cities, Melbourne has an excellent public transport system. It includes a train network, a tram system, and a bus network. The city centre has five railway stations serving 15 lines, and no less than 24 tram routes service the city. Only the bus system is more dispersed, although a significant proportion of that is also radially organised. A recent survey found of the 3 million people (aged 18 years and over) living in the inner Melbourne Public Transport Zones, 1.1 million (37%) used public transport each month.
Metro Trains Melbourne operates on 600 miles of track with 219 stations (just boasting!). If we concentrate on the three major railway stations (Flinders Street, Melbourne Central, and Southern Cross), over 200,000 arrive every weekday (more than 260,000 for all five CBD stations). The Melbourne tramway network consists of 160 miles of double track and is claimed to be the largest operational urban tram network in the world (yes!!). Trams are the second most used form of public transport in Melbourne, and it is estimated 200,000 tram passengers arrive in the CBD on weekdays. Finally, the bus network includes 346 routes and it, too, is predominantly a means to get to the city. Daily, around 40-50,000 commuters arrive in the centre by bus. Through these three means of transport, half a million people arrive in the CBD every working day. Including residents, public transport commuters, car drivers and users of other means of transport, on an average weekday the CBD has approximately 900,000 people present. [iv] Busy, but not overcrowded. [v] Even at rush hour, public transport is effective: only car drivers might find the situation less enjoyable, but, clearly, they should be using public transport anyway!
As it happens, there is a small supermarket inside the Melbourne Central complex, one level down (there are smaller Asian supermarkets the next level down from the ground, and the train system itself runs on the third and fourth basement levels). Standing in front of it, an observer would see a steady stream of people leaving and entering the station, many setting off to study or work close by, while others are accessing the shopping complexes and food courts, all within easy reach. Busy, very busy at rush hour, but almost always there is steady movement, a testimony to the careful design of the station, tram, shop and office interface.
This year, Melbourne is in the middle of a major change to train services. The current system has all the lines run into the CBD, and a city ‘loop’ acts like a roundabout, so that trains enter or leave through one of three stations in the loop (another two are loop connectors). To relieve pressure on trains in the loop, and on the trams above ground, some commuter lines going to the northwest and south east will no longer use the loop, but go straight through the city centre, with five new underground stations, including two right in the centre of the CBD, all part of the Metro Tunnel project, due for completion in late 2025 or 2026. It represents a massive rethink of how the system will operate in the future. A further development of the logic underlying the development of Metro Tunnel could see a second stage, linking northeast and southwest lines while also avoiding the loop (a proposal hotly debated after the election, as this would require funds going from a Coalition federal government to a Labor state government).
You are probably wondering why I am spending time on infrastructure. There are two reasons. First, the development already under way will have a dramatic impact by improving public transport for the city area. If liveability is about supportive infrastructure, this is a key component. Moreover, building underground transport systems leaves the surface available for other uses. Surface space saving is important, and one good demonstration of this is to look how younger people live in the city, an approach one writer has called the ‘great reset’. [vi]
Richard Florida is an urban studies professor who first achieved fame by writing about the rise of what he called the ‘creative classes’ (knowledge workers, and the IT specialists who enable knowledge work). These areas of employment have continued to grow both in numbers and in salary levels as creative and supporting service jobs are increasingly sought in cosmopolitan cities, whose economic future is largely based on knowledge work. In recent years, Florida has observed consumption habits are changing, particularly among the younger generation, which he claimed was less interested in owning a car or purchasing luxury goods, and more interested in new experiences and social activities. As part of this, he foresaw a shift of people away from the suburbs, and back into city centres, living in apartments rather than individual homes.
As an illustration of his views, let’s look at students in Melbourne’s CBD. Wandering around Melbourne Central or the QV building, you can see they consider their living room is the city, while their apartment is only a bedroom. They meet, work, and socialise in public spaces (as well as in university meeting rooms). Not a bad living room, as it is full of restaurants and cafes, pubs and cocktail lounges, cinemas and clubs. Since the public transport system is underground, there’s even more space for them to live, work and play! Will they change as they get older? I don’t know, but I am certain some won’t. Although I have been talking about students, I am using them merely as a convenient example. Increasingly, people are living ‘in the city’, and new apartment towers attract single people, married couples of all ages, and even small sized families, clear evidence some are shifting back to the centre, away from life in the suburbs.
However, building the Metro Tunnel does have another consequence. To get to the point where it is in place and working, construction is currently having a major impact on the CBD. Some roads are closed, massive work below ground is bringing trucks and equipment into the city every day, and life is noisy and frustrating. To make Melbourne more liveable is the aim, but the short-term consequences are having a major impact on peace, quiet and enjoyment!
Perhaps the Metro Tunnel holds another lesson. While Richard Florida saw city centre regeneration as a likely trend, he didn’t discount the continuing role of the suburbs. At stake is a rethink of the nature of the city, one based on the view the radial model is becoming increasingly untenable. We recently saw chaos in Sydney when a train on one inner-metro line broke down. [vii] The fragility of the train systems in many cities is stark evidence that rethinking is required. The challenges to improving the subway system in New York is another example of this. [viii] As another strategy, Melbourne continues to build tunnels and freeway links to keep cars out of the centre.
Maybe we should look at the rest of RMIT’s definition of liveability, which ended with “affordable housing, healthy food, local amenities, accessible employment, and social and community facilities (which are in themselves major sites of local employment)”. [ix] Rethinking the public transport system is part of this, and Melbourne is clearly on to something. Moving away from a reliance on a radial system means it becomes possible to reconfigure a metropolitan environment, and rethink how people live. The ‘Australian model’, where everyone lives away from the CBD and owns a detached house with a garden, looks increasingly unsustainable. Rather, it is possible to conceive of a series of cities inside ‘the city’, not just local government areas, but actual mini-conurbations, with accessible services and facilities close by, covering jobs, shops, cafes, schools, parks and community facilities, each with its own green spaces.
Traditional city planning has often been based on the idea of a central business district, where major employers are co-located, along with major shopping precincts and even business parks. While that concept might linger in some planners’ minds, reality has been slowly diverging. In Melbourne, some major employers moved out of the CBD years ago: Shell was early in this, taking its head office away from a purpose-built tower in the CBD to a smaller complex in Hawthorn, a few miles away. Similarly, smaller shopping complexes have appeared in various locations, bringing back shoppers who had been lured over to the mega-malls years before.
Looking ahead, that is only one indicator of change. Major but isolated shopping centres are becoming part of the past, as online shopping is eats away at these archaic consumer palaces: why battle the challenges of parking to visit the massive mall when you can see more, and buy more cheaply through Amazon and other e-tailers? In the same way, today’s huge hospital complexes are likely to change as online health care and patient monitoring grows. Research has shown that patients using virtual visits had their problems resolved at similar rates to those treated at hospitals and medical centres and not using virtual visits as a first step for care. “Virtual visits are growing rapidly, and … they are inexpensive alternatives to acute care administered at other locations. Patients receiving care through virtual visits seemed to have adequate clinical resolution compared with patients receiving care elsewhere.” [x]
Those young people, many of them students, who use Melbourne’s CBD as their living room and their classroom may be providing evidence of Richard Florida’s Great Reset in progress. Melbourne might be fragmenting into a series of walkable urban concentrations, where people can work, live, learn, eat and play. It makes good sense. The massive costs in reconfiguring the public transport system appear to be a far-sighted recognition of this, anticipating rather than resisting the pressures coming from climate change, digital businesses and a gig economy where employment is contractual, jobs short term and skills constantly renewed. Experience a little short-term pain for a necessary realignment for the future. Why, finish the construction work and in a few years’ time, Melbourne could be the world’s ‘most liveable cities’!
[i] https://www.businessinsider.com/melbourne-liveable-city-vienna-2018-8; the key source is Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Liveability Index
[ii] This come from RMIT’s Futurelearn online course on Melbourne: a most liveable city.
[iii] https://www.planmelbourne.vic.gov.au/current-projects/20-minute-neighbourhoods
[iv] These figures are drawn from Public Transport Victoria statistics, and from the City of Melbourne’s Daily Population Estimates and Forecasts
[v] In terms of residents the City of Melbourne has a population density of 3760 per sq. km, compared to 6,300 for Hong Kong, 26,000 for New York, and 4,300 for Vienna.
[vi] Richard Florida, The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Society, Harper, 2010
[vii] https://www.news.com.au/national/nsw-act/a-broken-down-train-has-sparked-commuter-chaos-in-sydney/
[viii] http://gothamist.com/2019/04/15/mta_monday_switch_hell.php
[ix] RMIT Futurelearn, op cit
[x] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5336603/
