Despite that silly little competition in The Economist over “World’s Most Livable City” between Melbourne and Vancouver, we have something far more important in common – as Brett Hamm observes here:
Having grown up in Canada and made Melbourne my adoptive home for the last decade, I must admit that it’s no great shock that Australia and Canada produce consistent contenders. Low population density, low crime rates, quality health care, education and transportation infrastructure – these are the principal criteria of The EIU’s selection process, and most Australian and Canadian cities tick these boxes admirably. Still, these criteria remain woefully inadequate in revealing anything about the soul of a city.
Is it possible that there’s something about the New World’s social structure that give it an edge in the liveability stakes? …
Melbourne, like Vancouver, is a young city founded on immigration. Its very identity is fluid, culturally plural and our city remains future-oriented, dynamic and open.
“If social wealth is also bound up with a city’s ability to generate different kinds of experiences and diversity of experiences – in other words, to generate what might be determined cultural wealth or even political wealth in the sense of the emergence of mass public spheres, the development of free flowing zones of conflict, then that becomes an interesting series of phenomenon,” says John Rundell, a social theorist at the University of Melbourne
“The New World societies are interesting in the sense that they generate multiple public, multiple cultural spheres… Multiculturalism is symptomatic of that particular kind of vitality.”
