Fluid City: Transforming Melbourne’s Urban Waterfront

Kim Dovey with Leonie Sandercock, Quentin Stevens, Ian Woodcock, and Stephen Wood
Routledge, New York, 2004
Reviewed in: Economic Development Quarterly (EDQ), 2005, 25: 340
 

Review Excerpt:

In Fluid City, Kim Dovey uses the case of Melbourne, Australia, to examine the powerful and increasingly fluid forces that have dramatically transformed urban waterfronts around the world in recent decades. Dovey considers how global flows of capital, changes in planning and regulation processes, new uses of design imagery, and the evolving quality of the spatial experience combine to reshape urban environments. In so doing, he makes an important contribution to an understanding of how cities are redeveloped today.
The strength of this book lies in the extraordinarily comprehensive and detailed case study that pulls together many threads including planning, architecture, design, finance, and politics, in practice and theory, over a twenty-year period. Through intertwining narratives, Fluid City tells a very good story about how large-scale waterfront redevelopment occurs over a long time frame. Finally, Dovey succeeds in his goal of presenting a broad and multidisciplinary view of waterfront redevelopment that blends theory and practice.
 
— Peter Hendee Brown