From Prisons to Penthouses: The Changing Images of High-Rise Living in Melbourne

Abstract

The high-rise housing market in Melbourne has been undergoing dramatic growth in the last ten years. This emerging housing style is in stark contrast to the familiar traditional lowdensity suburban dwelling scouring Australian metropolitan cities. This paper traces the representations of high-rise housing since its first appearance in the 1960s to today. Discourses of high-rise housing that have seen this housing type change from one characterised by urban decay and family disorganisation to that which unproblematically glorifies this new housing form will be explored. These new and inviting images of high-rise living today are juxtaposed with the understandings of high-rise public housing that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. High-rise public housing was once seen as a solution to housing the impoverished and arresting the spread of slum conditions. High-rise housing today is being celebrated amongst government, developers, planners and occupiers as saving the inner city from decay and indicative of a re-vitalised CBD.

Same Neighbourhood … Different Views? A Confrontation of Internal and External Neighbourhood Reputations

“…Besides the construction quality, also the dominating architectural style of a neighbourhood influences the image people have of a neighbourhood (Costa Pinto, 2000;Skifter Andersen, 2002;Murie et al, 2003;Brattbakk and Hansen, 2004;Wassenberg, 2004). Many city residents consider large housing estates to be massive, monotonous, and alien, because of their deviation from other residential areas (Costello, 2005). The quality of high-density neighbourhoods is often rated as lower than the quality of neighbourhoods with extensive open spaces (Garcia-Mira et al, 1997).…”

Towards sustainable urban development: the social acceptability of high-rise buildings in a Ghanaian city

“…The latter period of the century saw major advancement in construction technology, which together with booming population, urbanisation, and land scarcity, especially, in Asia, accelerated the development of high-rise buildings (Lee et al 2011;Mahgoub and Abbara 2011). During the same time in Australia, growth in slum population had been a contributing factor (Costello 2005).…”

“…Also, high-rise living is seen by many households with children as less safe (Costello 2005). Indeed, many of the high-rise council housing, which were constructed in the 1960s in the UK, have been socially unpopular, and are treated as market residue (Turkington et al 2004;Jones and Murie 2006).…”

“…Afterwards, in the 1970s, many of the criticisms of vertical development emerged (Yuen et al 2006). Most of the criticism were centred on the social effects of high-rise living (Costello 2005;Gifford 2007). The pace of high-rise development slowed down in many cities in the 1970s and few decades afterwards.…”

“…For instance, in response to massive urban population growth, urbanization, scarcity of land, the city authorities of Singapore and China have promoted tall buildings (Chen et al 2012;Choi et al 2012). The economic viability of tall buildings, as well their perceived manifestation of economic power, has catalysed vertical development in Australia and the gulf region in the twenty-first century (Costello 2005;Short 2007). …”