Murky waters: The politics of Melbourne’s waterfront regeneration projects

Abstract

This chapter examines the redevelopment of Melbourne’s waterfront in the context of the city’s recent history of strategic planning. It makes the case that despite endless participatory visions and revisions of metropolitan and local plans, none of the key decisions for the inner-city’s three largest regeneration projects in the last few decades accorded with anything previously agreed. While such megaprojects are conceived in a framework of increasing economic competitiveness (Lehrer and Laidley 2008; Oakley and Johnson 2013) the argument here is that these developments were shaped less by inter-city competition than by the increasingly toxic battle between the two centrist political groupi..