Melbourne's Fight Against Duplicate Public Art Images Puts It Ahead of London and Berlin — But Not by Much

Melbourne's City of Melbourne council confirmed this week that a formal audit of duplicate and near-identical images across its public art installations, council signage, and cultural venue promotional materials is now underway, targeting roughly 340 assets across the CBD and inner suburbs. The audit, being coordinated through the council's Creative City program, is the first of its kind in Australia and comes as comparable efforts in London, Amsterdam, and Toronto have already produced mixed results.

The timing matters. Cities globally spent heavily on digital placemaking during the pandemic years, often licensing stock image libraries in bulk rather than commissioning original works. The result, which urban design researchers have been flagging since at least 2024, is a creeping visual homogeneity — the same skyline silhouette, the same smiling multicultural crowd, the same tram-on-a-rainy-street shot appearing on everything from bus shelters in Fitzroy to wayfinding kiosks along Swanston Street. Melbourne's version of the problem is particularly visible along the Southbank precinct and inside the redeveloped Queen Victoria Market visitor hub.

What the Audit Is Actually Finding

The City of Melbourne's Creative City program, which received funding through the council's 2025–26 budget cycle, has so far flagged more than 60 instances of identical or substantially similar imagery appearing across two or more distinct public-facing assets. That figure is expected to rise as auditors work through material held by Arts Centre Melbourne on St Kilda Road and the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre on Clarendon Street. Neither organisation is under any obligation to participate, though both confirmed to The Daily Melbourne they are cooperating voluntarily.

By comparison, Transport for London completed a similar review of its customer-facing digital imagery in late 2024 and identified around 200 duplicate image instances across its network. The agency replaced roughly 140 of those by March 2025, contracting local photographers through a competitive tender. Amsterdam's city government ran a parallel process through its Gemeente Amsterdam communications directorate and reported in February 2026 that it had cut image duplication across public-facing channels by 43 per cent over 18 months. Toronto's effort stalled in 2025 after a dispute between its planning and communications departments over who held procurement authority.

Melbourne's situation sits somewhere between Amsterdam's relative success and Toronto's bureaucratic deadlock. The council must coordinate across multiple agencies — Public Transport Victoria, VicRoads successor body Major Road Projects Victoria, and the independent boards of cultural venues — none of which are bound by a single image licensing framework. That fragmentation is the core challenge the Creative City team is now trying to map before recommending any replacement procurement model.

What Comes Next for Melbourne's Streets and Screens

The council has indicated it wants a replacement commissioning framework finalised before the end of the 2026 calendar year, with priority given to imagery reflecting Melbourne's actual demographic diversity rather than the aspirational composites common in licensed stock libraries. Inner-suburban neighbourhoods including Footscray, Collingwood, and Sunshine have been specifically named in internal briefing documents as underrepresented in existing public art and signage imagery reviewed so far.

For organisations and venue operators affected, the practical advice from the audit team is straightforward: hold off on renewing existing image licensing agreements until the council's framework is published, expected in the fourth quarter of 2026. Any institution that signs a multi-year stock image deal before then risks being locked out of the replacement procurement pool, which will include a local-first clause requiring at least 70 per cent of commissioned images to come from Victorian-based photographers and visual artists.

Whether Melbourne can move faster than London managed — where the TfL review dragged across nearly three years from inception to completion — will depend largely on how quickly the council can get voluntary participants like Arts Centre Melbourne to align their own replacement timelines. The audit team has set an internal deadline of September 30 to complete the asset mapping phase. After that, the hard work of actually replacing what's there begins.