More than half of us live in cities, and when I say ‘us’ I mean ‘absolutely everyone’. This has only been true for a short while – a couple of years – but barring global pandemic and a jarring return to subsistence agriculture, there would appear to be no going back.
I live in Melbourne city, a fine settlement laid out in Victorian times and built on gold wealth, located in State of Victoria on the southeastern edge of mainland Australia. I share Melbourne with 3.996 million neighbours and counting, making the city kind of small on a global scale, but still big enough to be interesting and diverse while remaining relatively comfortable. At this point in its history, Melbourne is growing by 1,500 people each week.
Of course, Melbourne is comfortable for me partly because I don’t commute in a vehicle, as I live walking distance from my studio. This kind of arrangement – a sustainable ideal – would help make any city easier to live in; in Melbourne, the walker is richly rewarded.
Melbourne figures in this blog – in words and images – because this place, and by extension the concept of the city, are the creative framework for my design practice. Melbourne is where I think, the context of what I think, and in some strange way it is how I think as well. It is said that we cannot escape who we are. I would add to this that we cannot escape where we are, either.
Recently, for a client’s benefit, I described urban design as the stuff of the tiny narratives that link parts of the city in our daily lives, and that link city-dwellers and visitors to a place and each other. These stories of the City illuminate our design practice, and we will share them here around the digital campfire.
