ROB ADAMS: A LESSON IN CITY DESIGN
It’s hard to picture Melbourne in 1983, when Professor Rob Adams first arrived to join the project team tasked with writing the City of Melbourne Strategy Plan (1985). Thirty- four years on, Melbourne has flourished and the City Design team that he leads at the City of Melbourne has accumulated 160 awards and delivered a suite of key policies and built projects, including the Postcode 3000 planning policy, Birrarung Marr, the Urban Forest Strategy, Swanston Street and the Places for People study.
Adams had arrived in Melbourne with a growing sense of disquiet about the types of places being built. A study tour of Europe taken in 1969 for a fourth-year architectural research project called “Town Planning in Scandinavia and the Hill Towns of Italy: a comparative study” catalysed his changing attitude.
“I went to Scandinavia and looked at the satellite towns being built and they felt soulless. Then as I travelled through Germany and
