http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/new-vision-for-city-of-5-million-people-20131006-2v2dm.html#ixzz2h0alm7lT

At the Festival of Ideas, http://ideas.unimelb.edu.au, held last week at the University of Melbourne, Rob Adams spoke of options for Melbourne as we approach 5 million people. With a geographic area to rival the largest cities in the world, Melbourne has space within its existing built boundaries to contain many times its existing population, but continues to sprawl. If we take into account the intensive development opportunities around transport nodes and routes, there should be no reason for Melbourne to continue to spread at such a rate. Using intelligent intensification could create neighborhoods with distinctive character, local identity and varieties of activity, throughout the major transport corridors of the city.

At AOS, we have been working on ideas for the edge treatment of the city- as Norman Day says in our previous linked article (The Age, October 1^st 2013 http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/back-to-the-drawing-board-20130930-2uokg.html), plans for cities need to be drawn, not described. In the same way, edges for cities may need to be solid- built in place, and appropriate transitions between city and surroundings. It is harder to leap development over an existing edge than it is to leap over a notional boundary written in policy. These solid edges may contain community centres, pockets of appropriately dense development and opportunity to support the communities living at the edges of our cities as well as in the centre.