The sprawling metropolis Melbourne, more liveable 20 years ago than today, has again been judged the world's most liveable city. That's six years in a row The Economist Intelligence Unit have made the decision based on a rather inscrutable series of factors. As everybody knows these evaluations are highly subjective and are taken with a grain or two of doubt by the average resident and a heavy dose of salts by town planning experts.
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As one astute Melbourne journalist noted; “To be fair, the EIU liveability index isn't really trying to assess what life is like in the outer suburbs of Melbourne or anywhere else, because the target market for its findings isn't the urban fringe dweller – it's the international business executive being relocated to a branch office on the other side of the world, and his or her HR department, which needs to know at what level to set relocation and hardship allowances.”
What this means is the title has nothing to do with what it is like to live there. More particularly those who live outside the ring of affluence and infrastructure would probably not even recognise the city as depicted in the Economist
This is not to say that Melbourne is not a great city with some fabulous assets, the envy of the world, but when this kind of award leads to a kind of self-congratulatory myopia, you know the real problems are only going to get worse.
The problems are there and they are many. Most stem from the old adage of being a victim of its own success. But key to this failure is the inability to plan and deliver so that there are not two stark cities. The issues are familiar to all large cities; affordable housing, impossible congestion, high-costs of living, crime and alienation. When it comes to issues as simple as access to a first or even a desirable home within a family budget or the slice of life that the purgatorial commute takes from every day, then Melbourne is certainly gaining a far from enviable reputation. It clearly creates two circles of affluence and further cements social problems and isolation.
Ballarat is in luck in this regard. It is a growing city but not one suffering the unsustainable nightmare happening on Melbourne’s fringes. It is still,in a sense, in the planning stage of greatness and as such has the time and breathing space to balance the much desired growth that feeds prosperity and diversity but without sacrificing the liveability that makes a real community.