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A Hundred Local Cities and the Crisis of Commuting: How Nodal Suburbs Shaped the Most Radical Change in Melbourne’s Suburban Development, 1859 -1980

The major crisis in the evolving urban form of Australian cities came in a single development: when work patterns and separation from the central activities’ districts outran walking distance. The key enabler was commuter transport, first with horse-drawn omnibuses and then with trams and suburban trains. At this point the average area of suburban lots exploded, the ‘worker’ cottage’ was eclipsed as the most numerous housing type, house sizes increased, house footprints became almost sprawling in celebration, and suburban shopping centres began to break from the long lines of shops and municipal buildings lining major road arteries to the central cities. 

 This centripetal tendency had all manner of typological and developmental results, and Melbourne is taken as an initial example in a wider Australian study. Houses entered a newly diagonal composition and connection to their streets; new neighbourhood relations focussed on garden displays and broader individual expression in specific house designs. An equally major change, though, came as railways and a series of new tram routes dragged newer shopping and municipal precincts away from simply lining arteries to the city, setting up nodal suburban centres with new, ‘hub’ plan forms that either cut across arterial roads at right angles or clear obliques, or developed away from existing arteries altogether. Each node ‘commanded’ between three to five surrounding suburbs. Suburban nodes became both service referents and impetus-centres or sources for suburban growth, and, significantly, new centres of regional dentification and loyalty. 

 With Federation comes a waning of central city significance, observed long ago in Graeme Davison’s Marvellous Melbourne, a suburbanism generated by and inflecting on nodes. This challenges the long-accepted picture of Australian cities having a small, towering central business district and encircled by a huge, undifferentiated suburban sprawl. This study also looks at what a nodal suburb generally comprises- its critical mass.
