Melbourne’s vertical expansion and the political economies of high-rise residential development

Abstract

This article advances understandings of Melbourne’s dramatic vertical expansion over the last decade by attending to the political economies of its high-rise housing development. Melbourne’s major high-rise development in the wake of the financial crisis represents a radical yet poorly understood departure from the city’s traditional patterns of suburban development. This article applies an existing conceptual framework for residential vertical urbanisation informed by heterodox political economy and critical geography. Drawing on secondary sources supplemented by supply-side stakeholder perspectives, the analysis shows how Melbourne’s high-rise development assisted in syphoning significant investor capital into the city. This not only expanded the local housing stock but, in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis and later, amid ongoing economic uncertainty, Melbourne’s high-rise construction served both economic and geopolitical/symbolic functions in the city’s ongoing inter-urban competition for hyper mobile flows of capital and highly-skilled workers. Large apartment projects fuelled the Victorian economy and filled state coffers through property-related revenue. Meanwhile, the city’s dramatic vertical expansion helped project a powerful image of Melbourne around the world. Its crane-filled skyline heralded a thriving economy, and its new thicket of towers rendered a striking impression of urbane high-density living. Together these representations helped promote Melbourne as a vibrant, desirable place to live, work, and invest. Looking beyond the planning failures and planning politics identified in planners’ critiques of Melbourne’s vertical expansion, this article showcases the state’s considerable stakes in this development, and its role in smoothing the way for this expansion to occur.

Disorientation in the unmaking of high‐rise homes

“…In London, rapid residential verticalisation in the wake of the global financial crisis (Craggs, 2018), particularly through projects of urban “regeneration,” has had ripple‐effects on city residents' locational preferences, mobilities and households trajectories. In Melbourne, new typologies of high‐rise apartments built in a hyper‐dense city centre (Nethercote, 2019) have partly reshaped housing trajectories, while also exposing design, build and maintenance quality concerns (Johnston & Reid, 2019). Although high‐rise residents are a heterogeneous cohort, recent studies have homed in on families (Kerr et al., 2018; Nethercote & Horne, 2016) to the exclusion of other key demographics.…”

“…Thereafter, research on the vertical city has illuminated the myriad ways these relations are constructed (Graham, 2016; Harker, 2014; McNeill, 2019). Relevant studies have homed in on the urban scale, rather than household scale, and have largely overlooked those cities traditionally characterised by sprawling suburbanisation, such Melbourne (Australia), albeit the research tides are turning (Kerr et al., 2020; Nethercote, 2019). This paper centres on the experiences of residents living in recently built high‐rise housing and specifically residents' experience of disorientations within these vertical homes.…”

“…This paper centres on the experiences of residents living in recently built high‐rise housing and specifically residents' experience of disorientations within these vertical homes. Our research focuses on Melbourne and London as cities that have witnessed considerable growth in the number of residential high‐rise buildings, especially following the global financial crisis (Appert & Montes, 2015; Craggs, 2018; Nethercote, 2019). Our approach builds on emergent literature on home‐unmaking (Baxter & Brickell, 2014) and understandings that verticality shapes distinct experiences of home (Baxter, 2017).…”

Vertical informality: The case of Kufr Aqab in East Jerusalem

“…Verticality has also been explored from the perspective of 'home' and the different meanings, embodiments and practices attached to living in high-rises (Baxter 2017;Blunt 2008;Ghosh 2014). Importantly, while verticality is a global phenomenonwith cities across the world competing for the tallest skyline-it is not uniform in its characteristics, design and scope (Nethercote 2018).…”

Plans and situated actions in urban renewal projects: The role of governance devices in realizing projects

“…Time is crucial here, but not all involved actors share the same timeframes (Bastian, 2014). Since the financial crisis of 2008, cities have sought ways to liberalize their planning in order to improve competitiveness (McCann and Ward, 2015;Nethercote, 2019;Raco et al, 2018). This has rapidly resulted in new policy agendas and development models and in 'consistent efforts to put in place successful policy 'solutions' that will promote and facilitate development' (Raco et al, 2018(Raco et al, : 1180.…”