Melbourne has repeatedly been voted the most liveable city in the world. It is the Australian capital of modernity, a world 'City of Literature' and 'the Paris of the south.' Like Paris, it was founded among marshes and beside a sluggish stream. Like Paris, it is a city of literature and wetlands, or 'ghost swamps'. Like Paris, it is an iconic city of modernity with its arcades, boulevards, parks, gardens and slums. Like Paris, it is a city of light with a heart of darkness in its b(l)ackblocks. Drawing on a wide variety of historical, literary and artistic sources. Modern Melbourne traces the cultural and environmental history of the city and its site.

It places Melbourne within an international context by comparing and contrasting it to other cities built on or beside wetlands (such as London, New York, Paris, Los Angeles and Toronto), and by applying to Melbourne the work of European thinkers and writers on modernity and the modern city, such as Walter Benjamin (an arcades and Paris) and Peter Sloterdijk (on exhibitions, exhibition buildings and stadiums). Modern Melbourne considers the intertwining of nature and culture in people and place, and between the city and its wetlands in the past and present, and for the future. It places Melbourne within its catchment of the Yarra and Maribyrnong Rivers. It provides ways of thinking, being and living with the city and the earth in bio- and psycho-symbiosis within a bioregional home habitat of the living earth in the Symbiocene, the hoped-for age superseding the Anthropocene. Part of Cultural Studies of Natures, Landscapes and Environments series. Book jacket.