Whatever the result of the election, Victoria has seen the last of Matthew Guy as planning minister. Bigger things await him from a Napthine government win. A loss would send him to opposition. But no planning minister since the Hamer years of the '70s has left such a radical or lasting legacy.

Guy's main legacy is reshaping inner Melbourne as a high-rise city. In four years he has approved about 90 inner-city high-rise towers with about 85,000 apartments completed or planned between 2011 and 2021. Few cities outside China equal this scale of high-rise approvals.

Illustration: Matt Davidson.

Melbourne has shifted to a new type of city, which will leave a terrible legacy of inner high rise and outer sprawl. Inner Melbourne is being delivered to international investors. But their demands are not our needs. Tiny apartments performing worst on every building criteria will not prepare Melbourne for coming environmental change. They will separate hundreds of thousands of people in enclaves from street life. Neither will they cater for the needs of large numbers of emerging new family households.

There is no lack of land for development in Melbourne. A European model of dense, well-serviced low to medium-rise housing on brownfield and infill sites would make Melbourne a world model for new best-practice housing. Instead, 310,000 new high and medium-rise apartments will stretch from Footscray to South Yarra and St Kilda, and eventually along Melbourne's arterial road and tram routes. This will be a city doomed to fail.