| FLUID CITY: TRANSFORMING MELBOURNE’S URBAN WATERFRONT
Kim Dovey, Routledge, 2004
This book is tantalising. It presents a tale of modern city history, market forces, popular and political activity, urban design and academic theory. However, the book itself is off-putting, and fails to get the reader hooked on what is a fascinating commentary of regeneration processes. This is primarily due to its format as a small paperback with black and white photos and diagrams that rarely fill the page, despite the wealth of information in them. While this may seem a superficial opening point, this publication style results in the power of the story being lost.
Nonetheless, the reader is treated to a well informed story about the image of a city, Melbourne, and the role of public and private interests in city planning in the period 1983-2003. It charts the transformation of Melbourne’s waterfront from the once ‘marvellous Melbourne’ in its glory days of the 1880s, through its period of decline by 1980, then into the places that visitors can see today.
The book is divided into three sections:
‘Riverscapes’, which takes the Yarra River from being the butt of many jokes to being a seductive urban landscape, whose transformation was led by a commitment to design and vision. The book offers an interesting critique of the implementation of this vision, and the area’s role as a scene of protest at the 2000 World Economic Forum conference with the casino being the icon of globalisation, and Federation Square as a new major public place for protest meetings.
‘Dockscapes’ examines the redevelopment of the docklands to the parcelisation of vast areas of land for large scale development. Interestingly, there is a reproduction of the 1993 Proactive Context Map (not a masterplan) which designated land use areas and broad principles, but not the glue to bind them together (the infrastructure) which was to have been provided by the developers as the market dictated.
‘Bayscapes’ examines Port Phillip Bay and its redevelopment, stretching from Port Melbourne to St Kilda, and deals with integrating and managing existing heritage and local character with the introduction of new development in small fragments to larger housing areas.
Throughout these three areas the book explores the issue of relationships to existing adjacent areas, and presents before and after photos to show what the transformation has been; for me this highlights the lost opportunity in its presentation.
(This review was first published in Urban Design Quarterly 95, Summer 2005 and is reproduced with the Editor's kind permission) |
