Fluid City - Transforming Melbourne's Urban Waterfront (Paperback)

Fluid City traces the transformation of the urban waterfront of Melbourne, the re-vitalization of the Yarra River waterfront, Melbourne Docklands and Port Philip Bay. As the financial and industrial centre of Australia, in the late nineteenth century, Melbourne developed a new world exuberance. Yet the twentieth century saw Melbourne suffering from a declining industrial and economic base. The city in the 1980's was de-industrialising, and the re-facing of the city to the water was a key urban strategy of the 1980s and 90s and a catalyst for economic transformation. A range of projects collectively transformed the image of Melbourne's waterfront which has become the frontier for new forms of urban planning, design and politics. On the waterfront the rules become more fluid and create scope for the production of new forms of economic, political and symbolic capital. The This book is a thorough exploration of the complexity of place making on urban waterfronts. Melbourne presents us with an experiment in a bold undertaking and in its transformation we can see how the various entities come together and the results can be seen in both success and failure. city and to challenge singular ways of viewing the city.