Melbourne's Suburban Landscapes: Administering Population and Employment Growth

As recently as fifty years ago, Melbourne's new suburban communities were constructed with unpaved roads and lacked many basic services. Today they often come not just with roads but virtually complete with most of the facilities and amenities needed on a daily basis. Yet architectural, planning and design professionals remain uneasy about the design and the environmental, social, and economic sustainability of the newest suburbs built in some instances up to 60 kilometres from the central business district. We locate this unease in the systemic nature of the planning and building of these new communities by an enormous public–private industry complex. Melbourne's outer suburbs could be thought to be administered rather than planned.