Melbourne suburb identified as potential 15-minute city

A spokesman for the government says its vision for how Victoria would grow over the coming decades is set out in Plan for Victoria, released last year, with housing targets for every municipality and clear guidance for delivering homes near transport, jobs and essential services.

“Victoria continues to build and approve more homes than any other state – but we know there is more to do,” the spokesman says. “We’ve passed the biggest overhaul of Victoria’s planning laws in decades to give more people the opportunity to live close to what matters to them.”

Jane Keddie, the Victorian vice president of the Planning Institute of Australia, says planners are very concerned the government is so focused on the number of homes approved rather than the quality of the places in which those homes are being delivered.

“It’s fair to say 20-minute neighbourhoods still exist as [government] planning policy, but the government has shifted focus a bit,” she says. “Because of the nature of how Melbourne has developed, which is quite an American, car-based type of city, it’s a little bit harder to retrofit because we’re so low-density, and we don’t have good density of jobs right near where people live.”

Infrastructure Victoria chief executive Jonathan Spear also sees the divide between where people live and where they work as a major barrier to achieving the aims of a 15-minute-city or 20-minute neighbourhood in Melbourne’s suburbs.

“That is a really difficult thing to shift the dial on in Melbourne, because of the realities of where a lot of the higher-value jobs are located versus the reality of where at least currently a lot of housing is located,” he says.

Spear says 15-minute-cities are aspirational, but “a bit tricky” to implement.

That’s the reality for residents of Croydon South, where the transformation of Paris into a 15-minute-city, with boulevards devoted to bicycles and streets outside schools given over to pedestrians and greenery seems a long way away.

At the Eastfield shops, the car park is still full of cars rather than pedestrians, and weeds grow through the concrete basin of Tarralla Creek.

Melbourne Assembly will be held from October 19 to October 21. More information is available on the Melbourne Assembly website.