Australia: Melbourne

Melbourne has a strikingly diverse multicultural population of around four million people, but is founded on an Anglo-European heritage that, until the late 1960s, fiercely attacked multiculturalism as anathema to its cultural-political harmony. It is a densely urbanised and vibrant city of high-rise buildings, restaurants, parks and bluestone footpaths yet its metropolitan footprint radiates outwards into a region of ever-stretching car-dependent suburbs, mixed-use peri-urban zones and a hinterland of temperate dry-land farming where most of the trees have been cut down. It is a trading city with a global port, although its manufacturing base for export has steadily declined since the 1970s. It is the administrative and service centre for the south-east corner of Australia, and yet 90 per cent of traded imports stay in the metropolitan area. It is a global city with a well-educated population who have a growing and sophisticated public consciousness about climate change, recycling and water consumption issues although it is becoming less sustainable, even as it maintains a high quality of life.