Category: Publications

Why heritage protection is about how people use places, not just their architecture and history

9 July 2020 admin Publications

The roar of the crowd at the stadium. Jostling to see the New Year fireworks in the public square. Captivated by the band at the pub. Meeting mates outside the train station. These experiences conjure sites of importance for each of us.

One of Melbourne’s worst planning mistakes at risk of being repeated

3 July 2020 admin Publications

A development proposal for the Jolimont railyards has the potential to be one of the biggest planning mistakes in Melbourne in a generation.

Our cities owe much of their surviving heritage to Jack Mundey

11 May 2020 admin Publications

Jack Mundey, who has died at the age of 90, was a pioneer of the Australian heritage movement. As well as contributing to labor and environmental politics, Mundey reconceived of the ways that Australians related to their cities and heritage places.

Road to nowhere? (on the Eastern Freeway heritage listing)

16 January 2020 admin Publications

Melbourne’s Eastern Freeway is likely to be state heritage listed next year. Heritage Victoria has identified it as aesthetically and historically important. But should freeways be managed within the heritage system? Or is a freeway the kind of 20th century relic which we should be prepared to let go of?

How can a place be heritage-listed after 17 years? What it means for Melbourne’s Fed Square

27 August 2019 admin Publications

Federation Square in Melbourne has been listed on the Victorian state heritage register just 17 years after its completion. The push for heritage status was provoked by the now-abandoned Apple store proposal for the city centre site. Heritage considerations will now guide this important public space, widely known as Fed Square, as it evolves now and over future generations.

Forty years of the Burra Charter and Australia’s heritage vision

14 July 2019 admin Publications

As the Burra Charter turns 40, James Lesh looks back at the global influence of its innovative approach to heritage value and asks how it may need to evolve to meet the challenges of future conservation and changing sensibilities.

“I’ve just discovered my building is covered in flammable cladding”

25 March 2019 admin Publications

Last week I found out that I am one of potentially hundreds of thousands of Australians who live in a fire-prone and unsafe apartment.

Once a building is destroyed, can the loss of a place like the Corkman be undone?

13 March 2019 admin Publications

Since the illegal demolition of the historic Corkman Irish Pub in Melbourne in 2016, debate has raged about the best way forward for this historic place. The state planning minister is pursuing an order, via the Victorian Administrative Appeals Tribunal, for the two-storey pub to be rebuilt. This final legal case is set down to be heard in June 2019.

Academic conference review: Remaking cities: the fourteenth Australasian urban history/planning history conference, Melbourne, 2018. By Lauren Pikó, Victoria Kolankiewicz and James Lesh.

12 January 2019 admin Publications

Almost one hundred urban and planning historians and practitioners met in Melbourne at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) University for the fourteenth biannual Australasian Urban History/Planning History (AUHPH) conference between 31 January and 2 February 2018, hosted by RMIT’s Centre for Urban Research.

BOOK REVIEW: City Dreamers: The Urban Imagination in Australia (NewSouth, 2016).

16 November 2018 admin Publications

Here is my book review of City Dreamers: The Urban Imagination in Australia by Graeme Davison. This review was published in Urban History journal in 2017, and reflects both on Davison’s important book and his broader contribution to the practice of urban history.