A Greater Melbourne: Moving Towards the Compact City

For six years running, Melbourne has been The Economist’s most liveable city in the world. It is a city of broad appeal, with a thriving economy, diversity of retail and services, supportive infrastructure, and good local amenity. The population is growing at a significant rate as a result, with ever more people calling Melbourne home each year. For both structural and economic reasons, however, this growth has been increasingly accommodated at the city’s fringe, a place that continues to move further from the central city and the features that make Melbourne so liveable.

Government response to this issue, through a number of plans, policies and strategies, has been focused on ‘moving jobs out’ or ‘moving people in’ in order to create a more compact city that can be better serviced and connected. An example of such a policy is the City of Melbourne’s Postcode 3000, a 1990s program to attract residential activity to the recession-affected ‘donut hole’ of Melbourne’s city centre. Since then, the number of inner city apartments has grown considerably.

While a considerable degree of developmental focus has been on ‘super high-rise towers’ in the CBD, we have also seen incremental increases in density within inner and middle ring suburbs over the last decade. It appears that after decades of planning for more infill development, Melbourne’s housing market is finally responding. Through a combination of planning regulations and housing preferences this higher density has largely been focused around major centres and public transport corridors.

This map illustrates that high-rise apartments are primarily being developed within the CBD and surrounding suburbs including Docklands, Southbank and Carlton. Mid-rise apartments span across a slightly wider distance, reaching inner city suburbs such as Richmond and Prahran. A little further from the city centre, low-rise apartments are spreading from their traditionally more inner city suburban locations, such as Brunswick and Abbotsford, to middle-ring suburbs, such as Preston. Semi-detached and detached housing are spread more evenly across the urban footprint of Greater Melbourne.

The dashboard below enables you to explore the data in the map in more detail.

Demand to live close to the high-amenity, job rich core of Melbourne has helped to shift preferences and increase the feasibility of denser development forms. Importantly for policy makers, our analysis shows that this has not happened overnight, nor has it been contained to neatly defined activity centre boundaries. It is the well-connected inner and middle ring suburbs that have incrementally become denser, with each new development leveraging the precedent set by the previous.

This incremental progression towards larger scale developments is important to the community, developers and planners alike, as each of these groups has a stake in the shaping and function of a location.

Specifically, incremental densification:

• Enables the community to adapt to, push back or embrace the changing role of the area
• Enables developers to test the market and provide evidence of demand for bankers, investors and homeowners alike
• Gives signals to policy makers on where the market sees an opportunity and where design, planning, and infrastructure investment should be focused.