As Melbourne grapples with issues around housing affordability, homelessness, sustainability, carbon emissions and technological changes, we asked seven designers and educators to welcome 2025 with some blue-sky solutions for a better way forward. From pulling up roads to communal front yards, their answers to our five big-picture questions suggest it’s time to think outside the grid.
Our commentators are:
James Legge is a director with Six Degrees, which took out the Australian Institute of Architects’ 2024 award for multi-residential housing. The jury described its Ferrars and York project in South Melbourne as “an important model for current and future housing in Australian cities”.
Nigel Bertram is a director of NMBW Architecture Studio, a professor of Architecture at Monash University, and a director of Monash Urban Lab. The Lab’s designs for a terrace and mid-rise apartment were two of six winning proposals for the NSW government’s Pattern Book Design Competition providing templates for streamlined planning approval.
Karen Alcock is a principal of MA+Co and previously a director with multi-residential developer Neometro. She is an active member of the Office of the Victorian Government Architect’s Design Review Panel.
Mark Loughnan is head of design at Hassell. The firm recently identified some 80 buildings in the CBD suitable for retrofitting as residential.
Mike Macleod is a director of architecture at Kennedy Nolan, part of the team behind Brunswick’s Nightingale Village, which won the World Architecture Festival’s 2024 housing award.
Jefa Greenaway is a director of Greenaway Architects. A co-author of the International Indigenous Design Charter, Greenaway is co-recipient of the World Architecture Festival’s 2024 Cultural Identity award for the National First Nations College at the University of Technology Sydney.
Ross Harding is founder of environmental consultancy Finding Infinity, which envisions cities as self-sustaining ecosystems. He leads A New Normal, a $100 billion strategy with more than $200 million in active projects to transition Melbourne towards self-sufficiency.
Collectively, the ideas they outline below represent a challenge to traditional approaches and allow us to imagine a better future for the city they, and we, all love. Many of their projects have already begun the process of transformation. So what should happen next?
1. You’re given a blank cheque to transform the city – where do you start?
JL: Affordable and widespread public transport, allowing us to rip up half the bitumen across greater Melbourne and replace it with trees. Money spent on walkable neighbourhoods, streets and precincts. Having leafy green neighbourhoods with fewer cars, better amenities and quick access anywhere, by good public transport, is at least halfway to having better homes for people to live in. And also, build many, many more homes!
NB: Buy back land along rivers and creeks to make room for water, naturalise and accept more regular flooding, and increase public access to these veins and arteries as connective tissue and lifeblood of the city. Allow Melbourne’s lost swamps to regenerate.
KA: Put a stop to poor-quality speculative apartments. Establish a joint funding model for affordable housing delivery between the government and private investors, including superannuation funds. Set up a delivery authority that focuses on design excellence (not design as a commodity). Identify precincts where mid-rise residential developments can thrive, such as around stations and nearby amenities, then acquire and develop the land. Similar to the Metro Tunnel but for housing.
ML: Adapt and re-use city towers for residential; plant resilient/restorative parklands over the rail lines between Richmond and Flinders Street, and Southern Cross to North Melbourne to connect and add life. Build the civic precinct addition to Flinders Street Station with concept intent of our 2013 competition-winning scheme; build the airport rail link, Metro 2 and make Avalon a “world-class” airport.
Mark Loughnan is keen to see the realisation of Hassell + Herzog & de Meuron’s winning entry in the Flinders Street Station redesign competition. Credit: Hassell + Herzog & de Meuron
MM: You can never have too much investment in good housing or canopy trees. Also, Finding Infinity’s “New Normal” report of 2021 suggested 10 projects using available and profitable technology to transform Melbourne into a city that produces more energy and water than it consumes. We immediately start them all.
JG: Social housing which is actually affordable. Increase canopy cover to manage urban heat island effects as we grapple with increasingly extreme temperatures.
RH: Build 10 major projects across Greater Melbourne to exemplify the policy changes required to transform the city to become completely self-sufficient. Ensure each of the projects is culturally connected to give the transition a feeling. Ensure they are all profitable to unlock a tidal wave of pipeline projects to implement the transition.
2. You’re asked to identify Melbourne’s greatest untapped potential – what’s your answer?
JL: The fresh air above us! Greater Melbourne covers almost 10,000 square kilometres. It is larger than London, Paris, New York and Tokyo, but has a population density that is dwarfed by these cities, so we spend hours in our cars. If we built with considered density, around good public transport, we could have a much better city with way better facilities and amenities for everyone.
James Legge was involved in the Ferrars and York project in South Melbourne, described as “an important model for current and future housing in Australian cities”.Credit: Dan Preston
NB: The millions of passive front yards and deep setbacks that collectively add up to a huge resource. Make front yards active social space and allow building right up to the front lot line as a right. Our old inner suburbs show it can be done.
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KA: The bay: It’s undervalued. How can we use it for transport? Are there more opportunities like the Westgate Punt? How can we use it more for recreation? How can we celebrate it? Or our landscape: Maintain it, enhance it, and give it equal significance to buildings. Once you create space for the landscape, it tends to remain even after the buildings have been demolished and rebuilt. Even poor housing can be improved with a strong landscape.
ML: Convert CBD vacant space into housing, creative spaces, and/or primary and secondary education – if more kids are in the city, their parents will follow.
MM: Acres of roof and bitumen: we’ve embraced small solar panel systems on houses; why aren’t we covering commercial buildings and carparks with panels?
JG: Our greatest untapped potential is the creativity and skills of our design thinkers. Creative problem-solving which prioritises humanity is the only way to navigate the existential challenges we face.
RH: Architecture is the vessel for the environmental transition ahead. But not the kind that simply responds to a brief. One that optimistically looks into the future and proactively solves some of the greatest problems in the city.
3. Picture an ideal Melbourne in 2050 – what’s changed?
JL: Housing is no longer a giant Ponzi scheme. All the levers, including the tax levers, have been pulled to change housing from a wealth-generator for some to a human right for all.
As a director of Monash Urban Lab, Nigel Bertram was involved in these winning designs for the NSW government’s Pattern Book Design Competition.
NB: Streets are no longer thought of in terms of aesthetics or neatness, but valued for the way they perform ecologically and socially. Melbourne’s local government boundaries have been redrawn in accordance with creek catchments, aligning with the natural structure of place.
KA: See Question 1 – Change requires vision.
ML: A cultural shift has occurred. Our buildings work as a true shared economy – sharing spaces and resources to reduce the built volume, materials and the cost of living and increase social cohesion. Ecosystems are protected. We have a public transport system supported by bicycles and sustainable transport and a connected high-speed rail to Sydney.
MM: A treaty has been in place for decades, (and) all our children are proud of their connection to the oldest continuing culture on Earth. More than 20 years of regular investment in public education has resulted in a world-leading system, and we no longer burn stuff for energy. Myki has been replaced with a system that works.
JG: Treaty has been ratified, the urban sprawl has been curtailed, sustainability has been harnessed to create a city which is a net producer of energy, and homelessness is a thing of the past.
RH: It transformed from a consumer to a producer of unlimited resources. A self-sufficient city with a positive impact on the environment. A city that gives back to nature and future generations.
4. Pick one thing each from your five favourite cities that would work here.
JL: Copenhagen: walkable and rideable; designed for the pedestrian, not the car. Tokyo: incredible density and intensity of life and activity. Paris: all buildings are seven storeys, giving residents a connection to the activity and life of the light-filled streets below. Barcelona: five to eight-storey buildings, with tree-lined streets wide enough for cars, bicycles and pedestrians, and equitable light and ventilation for all. Sydney: can we import the harbour?
NB: Tokyo: mix small businesses freely through residential areas; no minimum sizes for anything. Seoul: leave lumps of wilderness within the metropolis. Paris: retain and renovate social housing. Prague: keep all the old buildings, and the modernist ones too. Amsterdam: let residents dig up sections of footpath to grow plants on their walls.
KA: Paris, Barcelona: consistent height. London: parks. Berlin: precinct housing in landscape. Melbourne (credit where credit is due): trams. New York (infill landscape however you can); The High Line.
ML: Copenhagen: a deep respect for design and its impact on the liveability of the city. Tokyo: a super-connected and simple metro system. Basel: more culture and cultural/public river-edge activity. New York/San Francisco: density around large, beautiful parklands.
MM: Barcelona: super-blocks, ie treating the city street as a destination, not a thoroughfare. Vienna: diverse types of quality social housing (assisting up to 60 per cent of the population). Taketa, Japan: a declining regional city transformed by attracting residents from overpopulated urban centres with support for craft businesses, cheap space in public buildings and even an “embassy” in Tokyo to help with the move; Melbourne doesn’t need to get bigger if we invest in regional Victoria. Copenhagen: it’s the ultimate cliché, but I do love my bike. Surely we still have more to learn from Copenhagen? Venice/Sydney/Brisbane: Water transport always seems a better way to get around, whether it is a Venice vaporetto, Brisbane CityCat or Sydney ferry. Can we get more of this happening in the bay and the Yarra?
JG: Athens: the visibility and celebration of the layers of history and memory of place, millennia in the making. Barcelona: the quality of the urban realm and vertical proportion of the city which facilitates optimal solar access and eschews super-tall towers which seldom give back to the city. Copenhagen: the innovative and experimental models of housing which elevate design, particularly for the benefit of social and affordable housing. Orvieto: this small city in Umbria is perched on a cliff, and focuses on the pedestrian scale. Singapore: the urban greening and sustainability initiatives are compelling, particularly given the focus beyond short-term election cycles to a 50-year plan.
RH: Amsterdam: pedestrians, bicycles and public transport are so easy and cultural that any other option seems illogical. Copenhagen: food waste is converted to heat and power for the city. Singapore: sewer water is treated and reused to provide an unlimited supply of water for the city. Oslo: natural gas is removed from all existing buildings and hardcore energy efficiency is law. Adelaide: power is supplied entirely by renewable resources.
Mike Macleod is a director of architecture at Kennedy Nolan, part of the team behind Brunswick’s Nightingale Village, which won the World Architecture Festival’s 2024 housing award.Credit: Tom Ross
5. A disaster strikes Melbourne tomorrow and it’s time to start again – what’s the first step?
JL: This time, listen to Country.
NB: Walk on Country with Indigenous elders and listen to their advice. Ask them where to build, and, more importantly, where not to build. Observe where the water flows and pay attention to the soil.
KA: Salvage what you can and infill.
ML: Work with Melbourne’s natural resources – free the river under Elizabeth Street; make Birrarung suitable for swimming; power the city by sun and wind; primarily build from renewable products. Rebuild as a self-perpetuating circular economy – when one building needs to be deconstructed, its resources can be reused. Radically – rebuild/redesign this sustainable, active, dense city on the Bellarine Peninsula – create a combination of Barcelona (city/density) Basel/Amsterdam (river/canals), San Francisco (bay) and Sydney (surf).
MM: Learn from the First People, who have maintained an ongoing connection to Country for thousands of years. We could then start with a much healthier relationship with water – don’t turn our back on the bay and river, don’t drain the wetlands or concrete the creeks.
JG: Create a plan which places equity, environment and wellbeing at the core, rather than the economic drivers which can stifle innovation and the true needs of community.
RH: Have dinner with the 10 best architects in town. Work it out together over a meal.
