ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the redevelopment of Melbourne’s waterfront in the context of the city’s history of strategic planning. It presents the case that despite endless participatory visions and revisions of metropolitan and local plans, none of the key decisions for the inner-city’s largest regeneration projects accorded with anything previously agreed. Melbourne was founded in 1835 by white settlers in what was named the state of Victoria in 1851. It became a prosperous city during the gold rush, contributing many fine public buildings to the Commonwealth. The competing political ideologies have far more in common than differences is evidenced by the same key individuals continuing to circulate in the murky realm of government-appointed planning and development corporations, producing and re-producing the same sets of assumptions and aspirations, regardless of the increasingly disappointing outcomes on the ground. Melbourne’s waterfront regeneration projects – Southbank, Docklands, and Fishermans Bend – have transformed the city more comprehensively than any other single project.
