The forum's final day, focused on healthy places and people, and on sports and the arts, heard from civic, sporting and cultural leaders.
Kieren Perkins, swimming champion and chief executive of the Australian Sports Commission, said sport in Melbourne had morphed into a 'streamlined, hyper-competitive' and talent-obsessed version of its former self. 'The way communities are starting to view the point of sport has shifted. We're becoming more consumers of it,' he said. People were now more likely to gamble on games than participate in them, he argued, while new suburbs in growth corridors were being deprived of sporting facilities and the opportunity for children to try a variety of sports was 'dramatically diminishing'.
City of Sydney councillor Jess Miller, who was born in Melbourne, told the forum her council had paid $70 million to secure 7000 square metres of open space from a data centre operator. 'It's a decision that says this is so important that we're willing to blow $70 million,' she said, so that residents in nearby towers would wake up to a park rather than a data centre. With 'all the money in the world', her top investment would be community sport.
Kate Duncan, chief executive of youth music charity The Push, drew the same lesson for the arts. 'You don't get the MCG and the tens of thousands of people that go there every weekend without the community clubs and junior youth participation underneath that,' she said, arguing the same long-term logic was not always applied to creativity and culture. Duncan asked whether Melbourne would still be a vibrant cultural city by 2050 if today's teenagers lost their connection to it.
Franco-Colombian urbanist Carlos Moreno, who pioneered the 15-minute city model behind Melbourne's '20-minute neighbourhood', urged the city to adopt a 'participatory budget' like Paris, where since 2014 residents aged seven and older have submitted and voted on thousands of projects, funded from about 5 per cent of the city's annual budget, a third of them in working-class areas. In times of crisis, he said, proximity was 'the only possibility for continuing to have a connected quality of life'.
Kelvyn Lavelle, of the West of Melbourne Economic Development Alliance, cautioned against rushing decisions without a cohesive vision and said Melbourne's west, Australia's fastest-growing region, should be central to any plan. 'The people in Melton have an aquatic centre for every 20,000 people,' he noted. City of Melbourne chief executive Alison Leighton said it did not have to be an 'either/or' question, and Yorta Yorta and Dja Dja Wurrung academic and artist Tiriki Onus said: 'If artists were to be making a living wage, I'd put up with potholes on the road.'
The discussion comes as groups compete for state funding ahead of the November election. Miller urged the city not to 'let perfection get in the way of the good' and never to lose its grit, the source of its creative tension. 'It's not always pleasant to look at,' she said. 'But it makes the city feel real.'