This paper presents preliminary findings of a project investigating the integration and application of ecological public health principles in Melbourne 2030, the Victorian Government’s urban planning blueprint for Melbourne for the next 30 years.

The paper draws on the preliminary results of two scoping studies that provide a case study exploration of urban greenspace and the connection between people and nature in Melbourne.

This paper is part of a larger research project which seeks to explore the phenomenology and discursive construction of urban character and place-identity.

A number of voices in the 1970s and early 1980s forecasting the deindustrialisation of the Australian economy and the coming of a post-industrial economic future based on knowledge industries, consumption and the service sector.

The paper explores metropolitan strategies' misfits, and their occasional felicitous connections, in the context of greater Sydney, metropolitan Melbourne and SE Queensland, where there are now headline debates about the way we wish to live in those cities and about the standards and modes of procurement of urban infrastructure to support such life.