Lilith’s story

The Chinese language character for ‘country’ has several elements. Look closely. At its heart is the small rectangle that represents the city.

The city is what gives meaning to the region in which people live.

Cities define us. They are the central point that links the past and the future.

Lilith knows this because it’s her job.

In a fourteenth floor apartment in Docklands, Lilith Gee is fiddling with a scarf, checking herself in the wardrobe mirror as she struggles to place it with just the right mix of informality and decorum.

Lilith doesn’t usually suffer indecision, but today is different. At thirty-four, she is a child of the 1990s: clear, sharp, able to operate in multiple worlds – both virtual and real – and not feel overwhelmed by choice.

Her parents are the ones who tend to vacillate. The arc of their lives together seems to be a gentle and planned progression through study, career, marriage, family and retirement. But Lilith knows them better.

Where Byron was the slim aesthete, a lawyer, amateur linguist and later property developer, Ruth was the dark-haired down-to-earth Western District girl from Geelong. An upbringing on the land can make people either comfortable with change, or desperate to keep and mould what security they can into a bulwark against the world. In a moment that had probably been no more than a minor rebellion, Ruth had encouraged the young Chinese boy who wanted to make her his friend, And the rest was history, or fate, or hormones. While her parents saw only the gulf between the two, Ruth saw the similarities, especially the sense of importance in family and connection; the sense of collective work and even a shared willingness to contribute to the community. Perhaps these things were so important to Ruth because she had lost many of them when she married Byron, or rather traded one form of tightly knit culture for another, albeit an alien one peopled by new relatives whose language she couldn’t speak.

Lilith tossed the scarf aside and selected another. She knew enough about people to know that it didn’t matter how much security you had, the world could still be a dark and confusing place. She thought for a moment about her brother Adam, seven years her junior. He’d almost given up coming to the weekly family dinner at their retirement place out in Wantirna – he and Byron just ended up fighting. Lilith half hoped he’d be dumpster diving in some Fitzroy laneway – as he proudly professed he’d prefer to do – than eating the choy sum and eggplant from the Church gardens.

She settled on the burnt orange pattern – it had an organic quality she liked, grabbed her backpack and headed for the door. She paused for a moment and looked out the window to the north, appreciating the morning sun.

About two kilometres away, the fuzzy green outline of the old Kensington high rise flats rose up above the streetscape. Thirty years ago, her father Byron, as an energetic young lawyer, had worked with the communities in those flats, at that time the poorest and most futureless of the perennial migrant waves.

Maalin wanagasan. Iska waran? He would still sometimes greet Lilith in his rudimentary Somali.

Nabad he had taught her to reply, when she was ten, assuring her it meant Good. She’d always thought it sounded like standard Australian – Not bad.

The Commission flats, a bold social vision of inner urban harmony concocted in the sixties and failing dramatically through the eighties, nineties and noughties, had been rethought into a bold social vision for a post-greenhouse world.

Now a sought-after address, the blocks of flats had been retrofitted for sustainability, and with vertical farming pods fitted to the outside, the harsh external facades had morphed into a fractal, living exoskeleton that stood up like a poorly trimmed hedge twenty stories high. A direct light rail extension had been installed up the middle of the Citylink tollway in 2023.

Lilith remembered the fracas when the redevelopment plans had been announced: the outrage at taking one of the last public housing sites, poor as it was, and turning it into yet another gated community for the privileged.

But they’d found a solution by converting some of the site into community housing that reflected a great deal of diversity.

Lilith had been lucky enough to work on that solution, and she believed in it so much she had staked not just her career, but her happiness on it. And mum always said that happiness was the most important thing, the one thing you didn’t risk.

She smiled as she left her flat. Today would tell whether she had been right to take the risk.

The Chinese character for ‘connect’ also means ‘grafting’, as in the practice of propagating plants by uniting a shoot and an older, more established plant. It can also mean ‘welcome’ as when we take each other’s hands.

Grafting takes time. So, the city planning changes in the first decade of the twenty-first century, at the confluence of many great issues such as peak oil, climate change, transport gridlock, water resource problems, energy insecurity and global finances, were still unfolding into the third decade.

By 2020, eighty thousand more people lived within the CBD than had at the turn of the century. Life lived within the confines of apartments and laneways was the norm, not the edgy experience it had been a decade or so earlier. At the same time, demand for housing, health and energy services was soaring. The City had not been a major residential centre for almost a hundred years.

The groundwork for Melbourne in the third decade of the century was laid in the plans of the first decade. Ironically, at the same time the Eddington Report (2008) was proposing more and bigger freeways, the City of Melbourne was embarking on a strategy to radically re-shape parking in the city with priority for car share and small vehicles such as mini cars, bikes and scooters.

Shared bicycle units began to be set up around the CBD. Two hundred bikes in 2012. Two thousand bikes by 2016. By 2020, there were five thousand for hire at 50 cents an hour. You could pick up and leave the bike at any registered bike rack. Payment could be made by swiping any credit card or by mobile phone debit. Using GPS locators and shut down timers almost eliminated theft. Most of Docklands was, in fact, car-free, with the community relying only on bicycles, public transport and walking.

There were also disincentives introduced – carbon charges and congestion fees within the city area that varied with the size of the vehicle. People still drove Hummers and other Urban Assault Vehicles but they paid for it – often through social ostracism as well. In fact, Lilith had an uneasy feeling that her brother Adam, as well as his dumpster diving antics, took part in the occasional TA, or Transition Attack, which involved small groups of young people ‘tagging’ cars they were offended by with ice picks.

By 2020, fewer than 40% of city residents owned a car. Car sharing companies took care of most people’s needs with large fleets of hybrids, electrics and even a few battery/solar scooters. It was, as Dickens said, the best of times and the worst of times. It was a time of grafting.

The Chinese character for ‘harbour’ also stands as shorthand for Hong Kong, the harbour of all the world’s harbours.

Lilith lived in Docklands, the redeveloped harbour area on the City’s western edge. She had worked for the Future Melbourne Institute (FMI) since 2015 as an urban ecologist, mixing the skills of sociology, anthropology and semiotics with the more traditional components of planning. To Lilith, the City was both a physical thing composed of buildings, roads and other paraphernalia, as well as a City of spaces, of possibilities that emerged through the interaction of people. The City might provide a locus, but the people gave the City meaning.

FMI was a think tank and catalyst for change in the city. Funded by forward thinking businesses and the City of Melbourne. Some developers thought its existence and aims heretical. But its initiators took seriously the mantra that cities must work for people, not just short-term profits.

Sustainability, across all aspects of human activity, was no longer an option. There was no business-as-usual scenario. If the City could not achieve environmental viability, there would be no business in the medium-term.

By 2015, a second front had opened up in the Oil War and fuel, including tax and carbon penalty had hit $5.00/litre. Australia’s lethargic entry to Kyoto had cost it dearly in exports to Europe. Although the introduction of a carbon tax in 2013 had started to generate revenue for the government on a scale not seen since the introduction of the GST.

Changes by some inner suburban Councils had increased the range and possibilities for home and collective agriculture within the City’s sphere of influence. Supermarkets were working on a foodmile rating and had also begun to shift upstream into growing fresh produce locally and at the peri-urban fringes. Docklands had Australia’s first urban hydroponics tower in 2021.

Air freight costs were surging and people were just starting to rediscover the concept of seasonal availability. Dredging of Port Philip Bay had been completed and container throughput at the docks had increased. More freight moving by ship meant lower greenhouse emissions and a move away from just-in-time logistics to a more resilient balance of freight and warehousing.

Against this background, Lilith’s daily work involved development of workable elements of a plan to graft Docklands to Melbourne.

The Chinese character for ‘together’ carries within it the concept of collaboration underpinned by sharing. It has two strokes, perhaps representing people or ideas, that support the weight of a solid construction, blending the ephemeral and the physical.

Grafting Docklands to the City provided an opportunity to road test some ideas about the future.

First, there was the suburb of Docklands itself. Initially, largely run by an authority, by 2012, it was becoming obvious that Docklands needed work. A city within the city - two-thirds the size of the CBD with a population as large as many regional cities: high-income population, twenty-four seven operation; and yet so little of the infrastructure now essential for central city life. Schools, health services, serendipity, surprise, the stuff of community, was strangely absent. Cross Spencer Street on the western fringe of the CBD and it was like you’d stepped through the looking glass. Warm welcoming public spaces by daylight, cold barren concrete plazas by night.

Second, there was the innovative but easily misunderstood ambition to become a ‘Knowledge City’. In 2010, a consortium of business, universities and government were planning the building Melbourne’s first Supercomputer. Eventually, they would position it in Docklands. Around this core piece of infrastructure, capable of linking up to 50 major academic institutions, a range of enterprises was planned. By 2014, a knowledge cluster had become established, with dedicated business incubators for water services, retail sustainability, fashion and textiles, and IT solutions. A data pipe ran across the river to the global connections of the western suburbs universities. This in itself was a symbolic statement. For the first time since the Westgate Bridge was opened fifty years earlier, a major infrastructure project led to the west rather than the east of Melbourne. By 2025 the Footscray transit city had mushroomed as the junior twin to Melbourne CBD after the east-west rail tunnel was opened in 2018.

The high performance Computer and Communications Centre set up in Docklands in 2014 put Australia in the top 100 world sites. By 2025 Docklands housed a quantum supercomputing capability that ranked in the world’s top ten. This research and development honeypot had attracted the top R&D corporates such as GoogleAI? , to Melbourne.

In 2018, a private consortium purchased an unused drilling platform off Warrnambool. Simpatico Ltd established an independent data haven using high speed transfer equipment and a dedicated mini satellite. The platform increased the security of data storage as well as facilitating financial transfers across the Pacific, with Melbourne being the key gateway point.

Wifi coverage of the CBD reached 100% in 2014. Anyone with an account could use a laptop or mobile phone anywhere in the city and achieve high download rates. Work. Play. Anytime. All the time. Anywhere. Nowhere. Docklands was the first residential part of the city to have comprehensive open access broadband wireless connectivity.

Besides the infrastructure and hardware elements of the grafting project, there were many social ones as well. And this was where the FMI team probably did their best work…

The Chinese character for ‘wind’ can also mean ‘reputation’, an interesting link because neither can be seen, and both can disappear in a moment.

Lilith had made a deliberate decision to live in Docklands, not because it was an upper class neighbourhood, rather the reverse. She lived in one of a group of apartment towers that had changed hands a few times and, after twenty years, were approaching their first refurbishment. There was, however, a strong sense of community that had built up in this one small area.

Lilith stepped up to the podium and stared out at the audience in the FMI auditorium and thought of the other 100 groups logged into the meeting through the neighbourhood network site This was it. The previous year had been spent giving form to an idea, then introducing that idea carefully to a range of stakeholders. Then she and the team had pushed and pulled the idea through the usual regulatory and bureaucratic swamps that beset any new proposal.

Eventually, the venture capitalists had accepted the business case and the residents had accepted the social argument. The tail sniffing was over the parties conceptually agreed they could work together. Today would determine if the project went ahead.

Lilith began her presentation, describing first the ESD (environmentally sustainable development) actions that had so far taken place in some of the towers of Docklands.

Energy reduction, natural light and air, water collection and reuse, medium-level retro-fitting, these had all been successful. Now, a group of five apartment towers, with a total of 2000 residents were willing to move to a more collective relationship with cogeneration of electricity, shared on-site black and grey water treatment, and a dividend structure that would see both community and developers reaping long-term profits.

‘We are proposing a co-operative funding model with the first $3 million provided through venture capital with the rest raised by subscription or purchase of shares in the collective. We anticipate a household-level investment of around $1,000. Payback is three years. It is also anticipated that over a ten-year period, the project will add 5-8 percent to property values.’

‘As you know, the electricity generation system is under pressure, and has been for some time, especially in summer peak-demand periods. These systems give us – and the tech-spaces – greater resilience and security of supply as well as reducing the cost of energy for all.’

Lilith stopped, waiting for questions. She briefly turned to her boss, sitting on the podium stage and raised her eyebrows. She was the project face, in part because she had done a great deal of the development work, but also because she had unilaterally shown that she believed in the project. Believed in it to the extent that she would tie her reputation and her quality of life to the wind.

The questions began: hesitant, nervous, bellicose or hectoring. The agendas emerged. And Lilith felt a release of tension. Change was about people, about discussion and agreement. And it was moving forward.