Fluid City traces the transformation of Melbourne’s urban waterfront during the period 1983 to 2004, as the city turned its face to the water and the world, re-inventing itself to attract new flows of global capital.

This is a story of a city becoming ‘unsettled’ as long-term experiences and practices were swept away in new flows of money, ideas, desires and designs. The image of the urban waterfront became increasingly important to economic strategy as comprehensive rational planning weakened and the boundaries dissolved between architecture and planning, culture and commerce, design and politics. Most important of all, a new set of relations emerged between public and private interests.

Fluid City is a story of opportunities and dangers, with lessons for Melbourne, as well as other cities in Australia and beyond. It portrays the fluid city in terms of intersecting flows of ‘desire’ – the desire for the amenities of place, for waterfront access and views, linked with desires for social identity, power and profit. And the book asks how we reconcile these ‘desires’ with public ‘interests’, in a context of flexible planning and political desires, to market a city in a global economy.

Fluid City is a story about Melbourne that is also a more general account of local struggles, global markets and the value of waterfront. Lavishly illustrated with black-and-white photos, Fluid City contains over 90 illustrations.