ABSTRACT
Melbourne is a city of 3 million people, capital of the state of Victoria, which has developed since the 1830s based on a gold rush, followed by agriculture and manufacturing. Located on a river which opens to a large port and bay, the gridded colonial city flourished in the late nineteenth century. This era, of ‘marvellous Melbourne’ as it is known, produced a substantial Victorian urban heritage with a generous and urbane public domain. Much of this has been sustained as the infrastructure of what is now a very multicultural city. Post-war migration has supplemented the Aboriginal and British with a cultural mosaic as Vietnamese, Cambodian, Greek, Italian, Bosnian, Turkish, Chinese and other cultures circulate around the city, forming hybrids and juxtapositions in different districts. While the urban life is vital and diverse, the landscape is flat and seemingly unremarkable. Melbourne has been voted the ‘world’s most livable city’ by the Washington-based Population Crisis Committee (1990), yet it is not easily marketable to tourists and investors.
