Every morning at 7.30, Sensory Lab, a small cafe on Little Collins Street in central Melbourne, opens a street-side window to serve workers and residents their morning latte. In succession, countless cafes and eateries start to open in the lanes, alleys and main thoroughfares of the CBD. By 9am, the streets are alive, crowded with people, cafe tables, bicycles and street sweepers. The air is rich with the smell of coffee; it is the start of another day in this vibrant, diverse 24-hour city.

Thirty years ago, Melbourne was a very different place, far from the dynamic, European-style centre it is today. Like so many other post-industrial cities, it was gripped by the modernist dream – a garden city in which people were promised a life in the countryside and a career in town. Suburbia was booming and the car dominated the public realm. It was this vision that confronted Zimbabwean-born architect Rob Adams when he arrived in Australia in the 1980s to work with the City of Melbourne. Charged with the task of transforming Melbourne, Adams and his colleagues set about establishing a few simple urban design principles.

“The strategy was set in 1984 in a windowless room. We asked ourselves what was needed to bring life back to the central area and we said, ‘Residential’. We guessed at a figure of 8000 and decided that would make it feel vibrant … just enough to attract cafes and supermarkets and other key resources,” says Adams, who is now the director of city design at the City of Melbourne.

URBAN DEVELOPMENT

This strategy became known as Postcode 3000, and it prompted a transformation of the central city, based on the assumption that when you put life on the street (with cafes, public spaces and activities for the 10,000-plus new inner-city residents) you breathe life into the community.

“When we started [Postcode 3000], people said Australians wouldn’t live in the central city, but they just hadn’t been given the opportunity,” says Adams, before admitting that economic circumstances aided the council’s plight. At the end of the 1980s, the central city, buoyed by a period of economic growth, was awash with new office-block construction. Then the property market crashed, along with the stock market, and suddenly there was a glut of vacant inner-city buildings.

“Most good transformational development reforms happen on the back of someone suffering a lot of pain,” says Adams. “We didn’t have to talk to the owners of the buildings [about converting the space to residential] because most of them went broke. So we ended up talking to the banks.” Almost three decades later, Melbourne is flourishing, and Adams is lauded as a global leader in sustainable urban design. In 2007 he became a member of the Order of Australia, and in 2008 was named the Prime Minister’s Environmentalist of the Year.

That accolade was cemented with the opening that year of Council House 2 (CH2) – a building designed by Zimbabwean architect Mick Pearce that stands as a pre-eminent example of ‘bio-mimicry’ architecture with its use of termite mounds as inspiration for cutting-edge climate-control technology. “Ironically, the most efficient technology was the ability to open the windows for four hours at night in summer to allow the building to cool naturally,” says Adams. Such small initiatives are the cornerstone to Adams’ design ethos, and when produced en masse, the sum might just equal a solution for a sustainable urban future in Australia.

THE POPULATION QUESTION

In the lead-up to Australia’s recent federal election, debate over the country’s rising population became feverish. Questions were posed: Can the country cope with a projected population of 42 million by 2050? Is the country’s future a big Australia or a sustainable Australia? When discussing these matters, Adams becomes pensive. He leans back and says with an almost audible sigh, “We are up against a huge fear of the future, and unfortunately architects, planners and urban designers haven’t done the public a favour because we haven’t visualised what the future can look like.”

Doug Saunders, author of Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World, suggests the great migration that began in the developing world after World War II is only now reaching its peak. For many it sounds frightening, “especially to the lucky, affluent, Western middle classes who dream of nothing so much and so often as moving to the county”, writes Saunders. The UN Population Division predicts that by 2025, 60 per cent of the world will live in cities, but in Australia more than 80 per cent of the population is already urbanised.

For Adams, the future is not a vision of interlocking mega-towers, nor is it a mega-sprawl. For the City of Melbourne’s current planning strategy, Melbourne 2030, Adams confidently details how the city can accommodate up to 5 million people by 2029 without expanding. He describes the concept as the ‘7.5 per cent city’: a network of ‘activity centres’ located along existing high-functioning transport routes featuring residential buildings between four and eight storeys high, which, over time, will become vibrant mini-versions of central Melbourne.

The remaining 92.5 per cent of the city will be protected from high-density development, and residents will be encouraged to increase tree planting, water collection and passive solar energy as well as utilise grass areas. It seems a simple solution, but not everyone concurs.

Professor Bob Birrell, co-director of the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University, believes there are better alternatives, namely infill development (building in vacant areas in urban settings) and additional development in the fringe suburbs. Adams vehemently opposes the latter, pointing to a study by Curtin University that found for every 1000 dwellings, the cost for infill development is $309 million in comparison to $653 million for fringe developments (which includes new infrastructure, increased transport and health costs).

But are economic and population concerns really the pertinent issues? Birrell is of the opinion that Adams’ initiatives will likely not be necessary, because “there is public resistance to a big Australia and immigration will be wound back over the next decade”.

Councillor Peter Clarke, a colleague of Adams, says the Melbourne 2030 plan is not about catering for population increases. Rather, “we’re playing catch-up for the population we’ve got”. Likewise, Adams says that “population is not an issue. I think we’re looking at the wrong question; we should be asking how we can use what we’ve got more efficiently”.

ENVIRONMENTAL SUSTAINABILITY

And so urban development strategy becomes ultimately about sustainability. “We no longer have the luxury of waiting for a silver bullet to halt global warming,” says Adams. “We in Australia are living out the future where most people reside in cities.

Therefore, we’ve got a fantastic opportunity to look at the situation and say, well, if 80 per cent of us live in cities now and it’s not a bad experience, then imagine if we actually improve our cities in terms of liveability and economic viability. We might actually be creating 
the model for the future.”

A EUROPEAN MODEL

The Spanish city of Barcelona is often cited as a successful example of urban design. In many ways, this identity remains intertwined with the traditional city and, above all, with the remarkable strategies pursued by the 19th-century civil engineer Ildefons Cerdà.

These included imposing a height limit and a block-like central courtyard structure for residential buildings, and developing a grid plan focused on accommodating pedestrians, carriages, horse-drawn trams and railway lines, all of which encouraged optimised use of the public realm. Now, Barcelona accommodates 200 people per hectare and is one of the world’s most dense, mixed-use cities with 40 per cent considered public space.

“We have reached an interesting time when the drivers of sustainable cities are the same as the drivers of liveable cities ... When they come together in a city, as they do in Barcelona, they provide an alchemy of sustainability, social benefit and economic vitality,” says Adams.