School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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Item“More than an engineering project”: How the Melbourne Underground Rail Loop shaped a modern city( 2022)From 1970 to 1983, the Melbourne Underground Rail Loop Authority (MURLA) oversaw the construction of three central city underground stations linked to Melbourne’s nineteenth-century suburban railway network. Melbourne’s City Loop was built in a global moment where the modernising potential of underground railway systems was promoted as a response to the challenges of economic instability and renewal of inner urban fabrics. In the Australian context, it was a significant financial and cultural investment in public transport, in a city dominated physically and socially by the private motor car, and during a period of considerable uncertainty about the future of inner urban spaces. Literatures of urban infrastructure in this period have focused primarily on political, economic and institutional narratives, with limited reference to social and cultural histories of technology and urban environment. This thesis argues that the City Loop was the product of a dialectic between the cultural significations of urban change and the physical transformation of urban spaces. It draws on the records of MURLA and popular media sources to examine how the Loop became a locus for discourses of modernity, through its advertising campaigns, the experiences and impacts of worker deaths, and finally in the physical spaces it contributed to the city of Melbourne. These findings contribute to the broader fields of Australian and international urban history by demonstrating how urban infrastructure is both influenced by and influences cultures of city life. The findings offer further opportunities for research into the role of underground railway projects in shaping twentieth century cities.