Coding the Garden Metropolis Restructuring Melbourne's Suburban Environments

Abstract

Melbourne’s early speculative urbanization was intricately tied to the promotion of, what was then, a fashionable ideal of a tranquil and healthy suburban lifestyle. The promotion of a “Melbourne retreat” was one of the engines that established the suburb as the long-standing template for the city. While the suburbs still dominate the public and cultural imagination and still constitute the vast majority of the city’s sprawling footprint, a compact and infilled urbanism has gained a foothold in some of the city’s suburbs. Differences between the inner-city and “middle” suburbs have been established for a long time and can be seen to have been shaped by the differing motivations of its..