On 31 October, we celebrate World Cities Day. It is a timely date to revisit the question: Is the city “dead” or is its demise grossly exaggerated?    

ICLEI Oceania, headquartered thanks to the kind support of the City of Melbourne in the city’s centre, is serviced by one of the world’s largest tram networks and supported by a train network that is finally going to receive much-needed investment with the upcoming launch of new metro services. As the sun sets on a highly contested mayoral campaign, Melbourne, like all major cities, aspires to be a vibrant, bustling city where commerce, health, safety, mobility, and environmental stewardship are balanced and where innovation and diversity flourish. 

Many key indicators point to Melbourne meeting this aspiration. After reaching a record high of 31% in 2021, the City of Melbourne’s recent Melbourne Economy Snapshot reveals retail vacancy rates in the CBD have halved in the past year dropping from 13% in April 2023 to a low of 6.5% in April 2024. However, Melbourne’s office occupancy averaged just 56%. While the council acknowledged that “in the wake of the pandemic, hybrid work has become normalised for office-based workers”, it said the city was significantly behind other Australian cities regarding workplace numbers. Sydney and Brisbane, for example, were at 75%.

However, as one of the world’s leading thinkers of cities’ futures, Richard Florida and peers recently raised an important point in a Harvard Business Review article; today’s global cities are at a historical moment where a metropolis’ local workforce can participate in the economic life of a city without actually being there. For business leaders, policy makers and city planners it’s time to embrace the concept of the Meta City. 

In the Meta City, people and organisations are linked in a web that operates as a distinct unit following industry and business expertise. They are attached to a major — often global — economic hub. This research investigated city-to-city flows such as finance workers leaving New York for Miami; tech workers leaving the Bay Area for Austin, Texas; and workers in London decamping for Portugal or Spain. Melbourne and Sydney are positively highlighted in this Meta City research and are given equal standing to Hong Kong as “significant global hubs”. For these two cities, the challenge will be continuing to strengthen ties with the only major “global talent hubs” in our region - Singapore and Bangalore which have leveraged cost, business friendliness and skills to rise up the ranking of  Meta Cities.  

Singapore is a great model for future city policy. The “Garden City’s” model of urban greenery and resource efficiency, its network of parks and green rooftops and its steadfast commitment to being a city for people and not private car ownership continues to boost its profile as one of the world’s great cities. So even though Melbourne has lost the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) world’s most livable city title, it should be remembered that this ranks just 180 cities on factors like sustainability, livability, and inclusivity and in the era of the Meta City maybe this ranking is no longer relevant, and Melburnians should be looking to what is happening in large bustling Asian cities like Singapore (Pop. 6M) and Bangalore (Pop.13M) rather than Zurich, Vienna and Copenhagen.

In emerging meta-cities and megacities like Bangalore, not only are 90,000 engineers graduating every year, these professionals are making great strides in restoring nature to their city. The Say Trees Foundation in a short span of time has launched close to half-a-million trees in the city and are driving significant city greening collective action. 

In the ever-changing landscape of the city, ICLEI’s membership of 2500+ cities and regions with many members across East Asia, India and Africa is a great testbed for local action on the sustainable city that is truly global in reach.

Written by Luigi Zarro