Publication Date: Oct 2012
RRP: $19.95
ISBN: 9781921867668
Format: Paperback
Size: 275mm by 240mm
Pages: 96
Category: Books

Federation Square Melbourne

The First Ten Years

Seamus O’Hanlon


After a somewhat difficult gestation and birth, Melbourne’s Federation Square is now ten years old. This book tells the story of those ten years and of how a place that was once so reviled has ended up popular and successful, attracting more than nine million visitors in 2011. It locates the Federation Square story within the new role played by city centres in the economy and culture of the contemporary globalising world. While narrating the story of Federation Square, the book also asks questions about the design and management structure of the Square, the tensions between its public and private roles, and about just where in the new leisure-oriented, post-industrial ‘spectacle’ city of the twenty-first century city is the line drawn between spaces that are private and those that are public.


Seamus O’Hanlon

Seamus O’Hanlon is an Associate Professor in History at Monash University, where he teaches contemporary urban and public history. He is the author of Together Apart: Boarding House, Hostel and Flat Life in Prewar Melbourne (2002) and co-editor of Go! Melbourne in the...
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