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Sometimes we need to be reminded just how profoundly different Melbourne is in 2032, in its structure, in its economic base and in the nature of daily life, from the City that it was at the turn of the century.
Many of the significant changes to Melbourne over the last 25 years can be understood in retrospect as the outcomes of certain critical events as well as the changing nature of community concerns, over the intervening period. These events and concerns shaped the way that social, political and technological developments unfolded during and after the decades 2000¬-2020.
The years 2007-2015 are frequently identified as an era of significant structural change in the economy of Victoria (along with much of the rest of Australia) and historians rightly point to this period as a flowering of ‘innovation for sustainability' across all sectors of society.
Five years after the turn of the century, even before the change of government in 2007, public awareness of the implications of various environmental issues, most notably climate change and water supply/consumption, was shifting rapidly. No amount of political obfuscation was able to quell a growing sense of the degree of change to past patterns of resource use necessary for a sustainable existence. A ‘business as usual' trajectory for future development was demonstrably not an option. The future could not, in any meaningful sense, be assumed to be a continuation of the past. Government priorities and policy (at local, state and federal levels) were framed against dramatic long term targets for reductions in per-capita consumption (particularly for water and carbon-based energy) .
Much has been written about the impact of carbon pricing and the various trading systems trialled in different regions and markets during this period. Clearly these did have a significant long-term affect, progressively and decisively restructuring much of the economic and physical systems of the city. But governments quickly discovered that increasing the price of carbon and water was not enough to deliver necessary change. Other policy mechanisms were necessary to limit and shape consumption patterns.
Hindsight shows that there were other more significant, more diffuse, dynamics at work that influenced change. Following a well understood pattern in technological and social development, it is clear that the shape of Melbourne over these past 25 years was affected by a ‘disruptive paradigm' that was to fundamentally change ideas about the organisation of systems of production and consumption, and the infrastructure needed to support sustainable economic activity.
Many terms have been used to describe that paradigm change - ‘multi-local', ‘networked local', ‘networked decentralisation', ‘glocal' - but the term distributed has been the most consistently used: distributed energy, distributed water systems, distributed development, distributed production, distributed economies . The potential for this paradigm change was sufficiently evident in 2006 that a number of future scenario exercises, which were conducted at that time, sketched out visions of Australian identity and economic development that projected aspects of that shift .
Before elaborating on the nature of the new disruptive paradigm it is worth briefly reviewing a number of other factors that were influencing the direction of Melbourne's development.