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December 3, 2008
Local council elections took place on the weekend that I was in Melbourne and the new Melbourne mayor is one Robert Doyle, the ex-Victorian Liberal party Leader. His policies to improve Melbourne as a mode of urban life are pretty thin and signify a return to the past.
Doyle wants to reopen Swanston Street to cars, ban bad buskers, stop the city being a bogan magnet, and banning tram super stops that have handed more of the city back to public transport users. I was surprised there was nothing about banning graffiti or photographers taking photos on the city streets from this conservatism.
Andrew Dyson
Doyle's model of city life is the modernist American one with its predominant focus on business and financial activities — at the expense of retail, entertainment and residential uses; with transport access primarily by car; and all the people centres dispersed to the suburbs.
As with the Liberal mayor in Adelaide Doyle rejects the European model of urban life based around city centres for people by encouraging people to live, shop and recreate in the city. Access by public transport and bicycle was encouraged and by car discouraged. Pedestrian malls were widely developed and business and financial uses ware required to fit into the urban fabric in a sympathetic way.
Gary Sauer-Thompson, waste, Lonsdale Street, Melbourne, 2008
What is attractive about Melbourne--the rollback of the car to make the city more people friendly--- is what Doyle is attacking. Amazing. It's the same in Adelaide, despite more people coming to live in the city.
Sadly, under the Brumby Labor Government, Melbourne is retreating from its attempts to contain suburban sprawl on the urban fringe and high-density building in the middle suburbs. The defining principles of its Melbourne 2030 metropolitan plan (2002) were a clear urban growth boundary, development centres with medium to high-density housing dispersed across the metropolitan area and the preservation of green wedges.
The Brumby Labor Government has also appears to have retreated from a greater investment in public transport despite the choked freeways.
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An interesting account of waste