Check out this great video of the street life in Melbourne, Australia, which is my new Place I Want to Move:

From the accompanying post on StreetFilms:

Your support powers solutions-focused climate reporting — keeping it free for everyone. All donations DOUBLED for a limited time. Give now in under 45 seconds.
Secure · Tax deductible · Takes 45 Seconds

Stories like this don’t tell themselves.

Make others like it possible. Your support powers solutions-focused climate reporting — keeping it free for everyone. Give now in under 45 seconds.
Secure · Tax deductible · Takes 45 Seconds

Melbourne is simply wonderful. You can get lost in the nooks and crannies that permeate the city. As you walk you feel like free-flowing air with no impediments to your enjoyment. For a city with nearly 4 million people, the streets feel much like the hustle and bustle of New York City but without omnipresent danger and stress cars cause.

There is an invaluable lesson here. In the early ’90s, Melbourne was hardly a haven for pedestrian life until Jan Gehl was invited there to undertake a study and publish recommendations on street improvements and public space. Ten years after the survey’s findings, Melbourne was a remarkably different place thanks to sidewalk widenings, copious tree plantings, a burgeoning cafe culture, and various types of car restrictions on some streets. Public space and art abound. And all of this is an economic boom for business.

Grist thanks its sponsors. Become one.

To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. Here's How

This Streetfilm is vitally important in another way: Melbourne is a new world city, it has a modern grid much like a typical American metropolis. Naysayers who do not believe a city can be radically transformed say that the already narrow streets of many European cities make it easier to have good pedestrian environments there. Melbourne proves that isn’t necessarily so.