The article, especially in its second half, confuses the City of Melbourne municipality with the city of Melbourne.
The former is the central business district and surrounding area, the one with 33,000 open air car parks of which the local academic they interviewed appears to be proposing 11,000 be replaced by greenery. It is a nice thought, but the City of Melbourne (think Westminster or City of London in a London context) is notoriously reliant on revenue from those car parks and isn’t about kill that goose yet. Their policy [0] is to “support the conversion of car parking spaces to be used for another function where there is a strategic need to do so” - and the list of functions doesn’t include greenery for its own sake. In fairness, there are already a lot of parks within the municipality.
The latter is the metro area of 5 million people 100km across, and most of it has plenty of green space. For example, most residential streets have a wide grassed verge with street trees. There is definitely a problem with gardens disappearing under apartments and McMansions, but it’s mostly not car parking that’s driving habitat loss.
I would hazard a guess that this is a false equivalency. Sydney and Melbourne probably started out small and as they enlarged into a huge metropolitan conurbation, only the original part maintained the administrative designation "City of X".
The City of London, while making up part of the ancient city of London, usually refers to The City of London Corporation which was a financial center made (again) independent from royal authority during the reign of William III to allow its banks to charge interest rates.
From the book Where Does Money Come From (2011):
The Dutch brought the concept to England following the successful
invasion by the Dutch Prince William III of Orange in the ‘Glorious
Revolution’ of 1688, who displaced the reigning monarch. Under the reign
of William III (and Mary), the charging of interest (usury) was soon allowed and bank-friendly laws were introduced. Given the previous
repeated defaults by indebted kings and a raid on the national mint;
Parliament and creditors of the state (namely the merchants and goldsmiths
of the Corporation of London) lobbied for the creation of a privately owned
Bank with public privileges – the Bank of England – and the secession of
one square mile of central London as a quasi-sovereign state within the
state.
Australia basically only has one city per state with nothing for hundreds of kilometres in any direction so everything close to the city center is just considered part of Melbourne. With “City of Melbourne” being responsible for a small section of it.
You wouldn’t use “city of Melbourne” in conversation for any reason other than to talk about the council of that area.
Sydney (and to a lesser extent the other capitals) is massive: I think last time I looked it's the third the size of the Netherlands. There are a number of councils/LGAs in Sydney, one of which is the City of Sydney (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Sydney). There is/was an attempt to reduce that number, for various reasons. A similar attempt was done in Queensland, which did make the City of Brisbane LGA (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Brisbane) basically the same as "Brisbane".
The former is the central business district and surrounding area, the one with 33,000 open air car parks of which the local academic they interviewed appears to be proposing 11,000 be replaced by greenery. It is a nice thought, but the City of Melbourne (think Westminster or City of London in a London context) is notoriously reliant on revenue from those car parks and isn’t about kill that goose yet. Their policy [0] is to “support the conversion of car parking spaces to be used for another function where there is a strategic need to do so” - and the list of functions doesn’t include greenery for its own sake. In fairness, there are already a lot of parks within the municipality.
The latter is the metro area of 5 million people 100km across, and most of it has plenty of green space. For example, most residential streets have a wide grassed verge with street trees. There is definitely a problem with gardens disappearing under apartments and McMansions, but it’s mostly not car parking that’s driving habitat loss.
[0] https://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/SiteCollectionDocuments/par...