Fluid City traces the transformation of the urban waterfront of Melbourne, the re-vitalization of the Yarra River waterfront, Melbourne Docklands and Port Philip Bay. As the financial and industrial centre of Australia, in the late nineteenth century, Melbourne developed a new world exuberance. Yet the twentieth century saw Melbourne suffering from a declining industrial and economic base. The city in the 1980s was de-industrialising, and the re-facing of the city to the water was a key urban strategy of the 1980s and 90s and a catalyst for economic transformation. This book bridges significant gaps between different discourses about the city and to challenge singular ways of viewing the city.

This book presents a new paradigm of knowledge and action with respect to urban waterfronts and the “fluid city paradigm,” explaining its methodological framework and describing an integrated and creative planning approach in which waterfront regeneration is pursued as a key urban-renewal strategy. It focuses especially on the WATERFRONT project (“Water And Territorial policiEs for integRation oF multisectoRial develOpmeNT”), which was funded jointly by Italy and Malta with the goal of developing common guidelines, strategies, and operational tools for the planning of coastal areas, based on cross-border exchange of experiences. In the described approach, the waterfront is recognized as having a broad identity, acknowledging the complexity of the relationship between seaport and town and taking into account the physical and environmental components of human settlement, infrastructure, and productive and recreational activities. It highlights details of the process of renewal in the port city of Trapani, with discussion of the implemented actions, plans, and programs. The book also examines the practices adopted to transform city–port relationships across Europe in pursuit of innovative and sustainable development.

This book discusses the role of regional design and visioning in the formation of regional territorial governance to offer a better understanding of (1) how a recognition of spatial dynamics and the visualization of spatial futures informs, and is informed by, planning frameworks and (2) how such design processes inform co-operation and collaboration on planning in metropolitan regions. It gathers theoretical reflections on these topics, and illustrates them by means of practical experiences in several European countries. Innovatively associating ideas with knowledge, it appeals to anyone with an interest in planning experiments in a post-regulative era. It aims at an increased understanding of how practices, engaged with the imagination of possible futures, support the creation of institutional capacity for strategic spatial planning at regional scales.

This book embraces the idea that in today’s complex world, multiple, emerging perspectives are critical to the design fields, the environment, and society. It also brings authors into conversation to focus on the built environment from the perspective of critical practice. The authors take as a starting point Jane Rendell’s ground-breaking work, which defines critical spatial practice as “self-reflective modes of thought that seek to change the world.” In opposition to conventional conceptions of architectural education and work, this book reflects how socially engaged architects, landscape architects, designers, urbanists, and artists take up critical spatial practice. Bridging ideas from multiple countries and approaches to design scholarship, each chapter seeks to find places of convergence for the multiple strands that form around themes of practice, equality, methods, theory, ethics, pedagogy, and representation. Rendell’s foreword and postscript provide context for these themes and suggest a way forward in today’s challenging, changing times.

As Australian cities face uncertain water futures, what insights can the history of Aboriginal and settler relationships with water yield? Residents have come to expect reliable, safe, and cheap water, but natural limits and the costs of maintaining and expanding water networks are at odds with forms and cultures of urban water use. Cities in a Sunburnt Country is the first comparative study of the provision, use, and social impact of water and water infrastructure in Australia's five largest cities. Drawing on environmental, urban, and economic history, this co-authored book challenges widely held assumptions, both in Australia and around the world, about water management, consumption, and sustainability. From the 'living water' of Aboriginal cultures to the rise of networked water infrastructure, the book invites us to take a long view of how water has shaped our cities, and how urban water systems and cultures might weather a warming world.

'The Complex City: Social and Built Approaches and Methods' explores different ways of understanding the city. The social city approach proceeds from the ground-up, it focuses on human interactions shaped by economic and environmental processes. The built city method looks through a top-down lens, examining policy and planning for buildings and infrastructure, including utilities and energy networks. This volume is different from other city anthologies in that it explores them through their differences, by presenting each chapter in one of the two categories. While there is invariably an overlap between the two areas, they are distinct positions. In doing so the book identifies how, despite their often adversarial approaches, they both belong to the same city. As essential components of the city they should not necessarily be resolved, as it is in this friction where creativity and innovation happens. 'The Complex City: Social and Built Approaches and Methods' is concerned about the ideas and solutions that they both offer. The book’s originality stems from this duality, and from its recognition that cities are living, organic, protean places of opportunity, crisis, conflict and challenge. The chapters demonstrate the complexity of cities as a set of ideas concerning what they engender, how they function and why they continue to act as a catalyst for different kinds of human activity. They explore issues of socio-political import and questions of the city as a physically constructed space. The themes are diverse and include the inception of the city as a place of competition to centres of regeneration and urban withdrawal. They cover a range of city and urban regions from Athens to Wellington from site specific singular perspectives to comparative assessments. The questions they raise include how do we inhabit urban areas, how do we make plans for them, and how do we, at times, ignore them entirely.

For the first time at the beginning of the twenty-first century, urban dwellers outnumber rural residents and this trend is set to continue. Consequently one of the most pressing issues of our time is how to square the social and economic development of cities with their environmental limits and those of the wider environment. The theme of the environment and city is topical at every level, from the politics of global trade to local community networks. Environment and the City looks at the evolution of cities in the developed and the developing world and the implications for resource consumption and environmental impacts. It takes a cross-cutting approach with new thinking on multiple geographies – the configuration of networks, exclusion, consumption, risk and ecological footprint. Urban environmental themes and their related social, economic and political agendas are outlined. In turn the environmental impacts and environmental agendas relating to key sectors of the urban economy are discussed. The global context to such issues is then explored before the practical tools and methods of urban environmental management are investigated. The theme of the sustainable city emerges from this – not so much as a standard menu, but as a learning process between all sections of society. This book, a valuable resource, provides a concise, accessible route map for all students interested in the environmental issues emanating from our urban society. Written to aid student understanding, the easily navigable text features boxed practical examples, discussion points, signposts to reading and websites, and a glossary.