We take it for granted now that Melbourne is a thriving 24-hour city, with bustling laneways full of bars, clubs, restaurants and ever-so-photogenic street art. We take it for granted that it's a place humming with a resident population and economic activity, with cyclists, pedestrians and trams jostling for position on a car-free Swanston Street. We take it for granted that Melbourne is alive. But it wasn't always like this. When I arrived in late 1990, fresh off the plane from London, Melbourne was a city in freefall. The unemployment rate was soaring, office blocks were emptying, businesses were closing. The manufacturing sector was being gutted and, after Jeff Kennett's government was elected in October 1992, with unemployment in Victoria north of 11 per cent, the public sector felt the sting of the axe too. It was a grim time for the city. But if the recession shunted Melbourne from marvellous to morose, it also gave it an opportunity to rethink its identity. The gold rush on which it was founded was long gone. The industries that had sustained its waves of immigrants were fading. What could take their place? The imminent passing of the bar known simply as Meyers Place - named for its laneway location just off Bourke Street - is worth noting, and not just because it has for the past 23 years been a great Melbourne watering hole. I don't want to overstate its significance, but it does say something about how Melbourne avoided the fate of other faded industrial giants (like Detroit and Pittsburgh in the US, for example). Here was a dilapidated warehouse space in an unglamorous side street dominated by a multistorey car park. Featureless, with a cracked concrete floor and few windows to light its long space, it was suitable for a mechanic or a machinist, perhaps, but hardly the place for a macchiato or a martini. But the potential in the place lay precisely in the elements that seemingly made it unappealing. Out of the way. Industrial. A little shabby. How very Melbourne. It's impossible to imagine the potential in Melbourne's laneways would have gone unnoticed forever had Six Degrees and their partners not given us Meyers Place, generally regarded as our first new-wave laneway bar. Who could fail to see the romance inherent in a cobbled street built for carting away crap by night, right? But someone had to be first, and thankfully they got so much right that soon imitators - bars, cafes, restaurants, shops - sprung up everywhere. There's something fundamentally important about scale in the success of our laneway culture. Predominantly, the places that succeed are small, spaces that feel intimate and welcoming and busy, even when they're not. You can contrive a laneway in a modern development - lots of places have done it, some successfully - but if you fill it with 200-seat venues it's not going to work (hello, Docklands). The emergence of this thriving city of tiny public spaces didn't happen completely by chance. Changes to our licensing laws (making it permissible to have a drink without ordering a meal), the boom in CBD residents (from a few hundred in 1990 to 37,000 in 2016, two-thirds of them under the age of 35), and a deliberate strategy to focus on education, hospitality, culture and design have all shaped Melbourne's modern identity. It's easy for us to focus on the negatives, and right that we should do so lest they overwhelm us. But there's a lot to celebrate in the way this city picked itself up by its bootstraps, embraced its heritage and remade itself for a new age. To Meyers Place and all those it inspired, I say cheers. Karl Quinn is on facebook at karlquinnjournalist and on twitter @karlkwin

https://nnimgt-a.akamaihd.net/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-feed-data/c35fdebd-16ce-4d59-8653-b8e235736fd6.jpg/r0_36_729_448_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg