The Metro Tunnel Creative Strategy: Turning a $12 billion project into a cultural legacy for Melbourne

For much of the past decade, treasured parts of central Melbourne have been a construction site. Hoardings, cranes, and closed streets have reshaped the city’s daily life. For some, that hasn’t just been a temporary inconvenience — it has been their entire experience of Melbourne. A tourist visiting for the Grand Prix might only ever have known City Square as an enormous acoustic shed. Thousands of students have completed whole university degrees next to construction sites.

The challenge was clear: if this was how people were going to experience Melbourne, how could we still make that experience meaningful? Could creativity soften disruption — and even leave a legacy that would outlast the works? How could we build this next chapter for our city in a distinctly Melbourne way?

When I first came onto the project as a technical advisor, I was handed research from Deakin University and art consultancy Situations, along with insights and ideas from Creative Victoria, Office of the Victorian Government Architect (OVGA), City of Melbourne, City of Port Phillip, City of Stonnington and our delivery partner Cross Yarra Partnership (CYP). My role was to take those fertile beginnings and shape them into a coherent government-side Creative Strategy with a clear vision, objectives, and governance structures that could carry both the temporary creative program and legacy art program across nearly a decade of delivery.

Part of that shaping meant ensuring the strategy was pitched appropriately for a public project: accountable, transparent, and designed to deliver outcomes that were inclusive and representative of contemporary Melbourne. It wasn’t about imposing a single curatorial voice, but about creating a framework that gave space for many voices – from First Nations artists to emerging practitioners – while ensuring the program was ambitious, credible, and deliverable.

It also meant doing the less visible work — drafting terms of reference, helping establish governance committees, designing evaluation frameworks, and managing the program machinery that allowed artists and partners to focus on what they do best. This was essential, if unglamorous, work. Without that scaffolding, the ambition risked drifting or losing credibility.

I moved quickly from a consulting role into Rail Projects Victoria, where I helped embed the strategy from the inside. There, I established an integrated team bringing together urban strategy and design, architecture, landscape architecture, and creative strategy. The goal was to make design thinking and creative strategy part of the project’s DNA — not only for Metro Tunnel Project, but also for rail infrastructure projects across regional Victoria.

Safeguarding Ambition

The strategy was always about more than beautifying hoardings. It was about embedding creativity into the very fabric of a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure project. That required constant balance: staying ambitious while also earning public trust.

As I said in the recently published retrospective by Gehl - Making Cities for People:

“Someone needs to be asking, ‘Are we ambitious enough? Are we doing what we promised to?’ While at the same time asking, ‘Have we made a misstep? Are we eroding trust?’”

This dual lens of protecting ambition while safeguarding trust was critical. Without it, the program could easily have become either safe-but-forgettable or bold-but-unsustainable.

Governance for the Subjective

Art and creativity are wonderfully subjective. Embedding them into a major infrastructure project demanded more than enthusiasm – it needed a framework to make decisions fairly, transparently, and consistently.

I describe this in the Gehl study:

“Setting up a governance structure was key to making decisions. You need this structure to make decisions about something like art that is subjective.”

Governance gave the program its backbone. It provided clarity to delivery partners, confidence to government, provided a fair process for artists, and it helped the creative program maintain its ambition and quality through the value-engineering process. Most importantly, it protected the authenticity and generosity of the program.

From Disruption to Delight

Fast-forward to today: the Metro Tunnel Creative Program has wrapped up, and stations are all complete. Temporary works softened disruption during construction, and now permanent artworks are installed as part of the city’s legacy.

The impact is staggering:

• More than 250 projects delivered

• Over 1,100 artists commissioned

• Hoardings, sheds, and construction zones turned into stages for civic life.

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The Gehl retrospective found the program didn’t just manage disruption — it transformed sites of inconvenience into places of art, play, and pride. The study concluded that the Metro Tunnel Creative Program “is considered a benchmark for creative programs associated with major infrastructure projects, both in Australia and internationally,” demonstrating how “sustained investment, strong governance, and a clear creative strategy can achieve world-class outcomes for public art and place experience.”

Lessons for Future City-Shaping

Looking back, the lesson for me is this: strategy and governance are the quiet enablers of creativity. They don’t constrain artistic freedom — they make it possible in an infrastructure project where public spend is rightly scrutinised. The right structures, processes, and choices are what allow ambitious programs to survive the long grind of delivery, without losing their imagination or integrity.

For future infrastructure projects, five lessons are clear:

1. Treat creativity as core, not cosmetic. Creativity isn’t an add-on – it’s a driver of quality, engagement, and long-term value.

2. Pair ambition with governance to keep trust intact. The best creative outcomes balance courage with accountability.

3. Invest in the “invisible work” that makes the visible possible. Processes, frameworks, and governance may not make headlines, but they make delivery possible.

4. Retain active sponsor involvement. Success depends on having a committed project sponsor who stays engaged throughout delivery, with the right people empowered to act on their behalf. They need to bring the right mix of skills and authority – able to champion ambition, navigate governance, and make confident decisions when creative outcomes and project boundaries intersect, while respecting the freedom of the delivery team.

5. Embrace creative strategy as art, communication and design. The most successful outcomes blur the lines between storytelling and spatial experience — aligning what a project says with how it is experienced in the city.

And perhaps most importantly: success depends on champions and an amazing team. Every step forward needed people willing to back the vision, support artists to integrate their ideas into constrained environments, maintain the promise through challenges, and do the quiet work that kept ambition alive. I was proud to play my part – alongside Charmaine Kasselman, Bruce Hunt, Alan Nargessi, Sarah Robins, Mary Parker, Karoline Ware, Amanda Correy and many more – in helping the Creative and Legacy Art programs endure and flourish.

As the Gehl study put it, the team “transformed sites of disruption into places for art, civic pride, and public life. A commitment to creative excellence, relationship-building, and well-executed strategies made this transformation possible.”

The program proved that even the most complex infrastructure projects can also be platforms for imagination. And for me, the greatest pride lies in knowing that behind every artwork was a system – and a team – strong enough to let it flourish.