Outside the kitchen window of my apartment, not far from Flinders Street Station, Melbourne’s newest tower has reached its zenith. At a topping-out ceremony in April, Aurora Melbourne Central claimed the title of Melbourne’s tallest CBD building. This eighty-eight-storey high-rise is designed to accommodate around 2400 people in more than 1140 apartments.

Since my partner and I moved into our ninth-floor apartment thirteen years ago, around 30,000 more people have moved in around us, most of them into high-rise apartments of twenty storeys or more. The city centre has been transformed, with more life on the streets — new restaurants, bars and shops — and more crowding as well. Swanston Street, just around the corner, is often congested with pedestrians.

While the residential market has been cooler over the past eighteen months, high-rise approvals from the pre-2017 boom have been coming to completion and developments like the Aurora continue to dramatically reshape the city’s skyline, just as they are doing in other major capitals. Another twenty-four towers are under construction in Melbourne’s city centre alone.

Read the full article on Inside Story.