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Melbourne: 175 years old and with more work to do
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For more info about Professor Miles Lewis go to http://mileslewis.net/.
Melbourne Day information can be found at http://www.melbourneday.com.au/
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On the 175th birthday of the city of Melbourne, Professor Miles Lewis says the city needs to overcome a long history of 'planning anarchy' to continue to grow.
"Planners have lost their vision of what planning needs to be. When town planning was introduced here after World War 2 it was seen to be a rather socialist activity, where you distributed the goods across the community in the best possible way. Now it's seen to be a task of facilitating development, which it shouldn't be."
"What needs to be done is a revived policy of decentralization where we encourage people to live elsewhere."
"In other words, when you build a new estate you pay your share of the original water supply - electricity and so on - so in fact prices are allowed to rise and people have a real incentive to go somewhere else if they don't need to be in the metropolis."
Professor Lewis, speaking on Melbourne Day, says that for what was an illegal settlement back in 1835, the city has turned into something very livable. "Despite all that illegal history, we somehow became very respectable and very English."
