Melbourne, the Conscious Mind

I often find the entirety of a city to be so interesting and too often to be under appreciated for its throughly intricate system.

Looking into a city is like dissecting a human body. You notice all of these shops, parks, schools, hospitals that function as if they're organs then roads that connect them and just tiny tiny people who move from one end to another.

As well made our bodies are, the functionalities that create the city all have their purpose . The distance between a coffee shop and sidewalk, the clearness of the window, how much sunlight the buildings allow to beam in, the history of the people…these are all beautiful traits that create the city and allows the city blood to flow as well as the lungs to breath.

Not one can be missing. If it were, it would be the city with the same name but in a different state of mind. Then again though, the "organs" is by no doubt a vital part of our personal lives, that it creates who lives in that city.

Often you hear people debate whether the city came first or the people. But that's genuinely just a chicken and egg discussion. The debate is endless. Both obviously affect each other.
What I'm personally more interested in is the relationship of the two and how they assist each other.

In Melbourne, I found that there was a lot of trust between the city and people.
There were not many so called chain stores but a lot more independent local stores.

Take the coffee industry for example. Australia is famous for being one of the toughest markets to crack into and that was no different for Starbucks. In 2008, Starbucks closed over 70 percent of their stores in Australia, leaving only 23 stores in the whole country, out of 8 in Melbourne. It was amidst a pretty bad recession in general but one of the reasons why Starbucks didn’t succeed in Australia is said to be because of the deep coffee culture that resided in the Australian people.

In the mid 1900s, Greek and Italian immigrants fled to Australia, bringing in their coffee culture. At the same time, coffee culture spread to America as well, creating Americanos (boiled water and espresso) and sweet lattes like Vanilla lattes. For Australia, the coffee culture was directly imported from Europe, unlike for example, Japan where it was imported from America where coffee was imported from Europe.
So yeah, Australians take their coffee pretty seriously just like Italians. They would go to their favorite cafes, to go get their favorite coffee made by the barista of their choice. One of the main reasons Starucks failed was because they didn't localize into this culture.

I went a little overboard but, the people in Australia have a culture of choosing their coffee with a personal taste and that goes beyond coffee in my theory.
Along side cafes, I was surprised to see the number of Opportunity stores(Second hand stores) and supermarket stores that solely sold organic, eco-friendly products.

Instead of simply handing out chain stores where you have a promised menu with a standard quality of products, Melbourne allows the people to make their own choices, which may involve a few risks, and also it forces the people to think, where does this actually come from? What makes this different from the similar product sold next door?

If the city didn't trust the people, this system wouldn't even exist.

With this trust, Melbourne creates the people, and the people create Melbourne.

"A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture." - Rebecca Solnit

These words are so relatable to me now and I wish we had a bit of this spirit in Tokyo too.
But at the same time, hauntingly enough, I guess the state of the city Tokyo right now, resembles who we are. vice versa