Why Brisbane is like a self-conscious, truant schoolgirl
by Colman Ridge, founder and director of Greenfest
and participant in the final Shape Your City Heart forum on Monday 10 November
What I love about Brisbane is its grassroots people, ingenuity, colour, effervescent innovation and potential. What I hate about Brisbane is the corporatised civic patriotism that instills a fear of cultural development and individuality garnered to manage progress benchmarked to some undeclared ideal.
Brisbane is like a 13-year-old girl considering a wagged day off from school with her best friends, early in the morning by sms and insisting she’ll go if they don’t act silly. She behaves like her parents and teachers are forever watching when in fact it’s really only the city council. The police are interested but only for her to come home safe, the state’s alarm clock did not go off so they are sleeping securely and The Courier Mail already had today’s paper written yesterday but might report on her tomorrow if they stop by a pub in the valley.
Young Brisbane and her mates head off into their personal plan and sense of independence monitored Baghdad-style by rolling patrol cars donning the iconic “tickler” logo of her namesake home town. After a while the young group discounts the ineffective civic stalking and begin enjoying their power, to be promptly fined for concealing a dog (Pomeranian) off leash under a jacket and creating audible noise over 3 decibels between the hours of 6 and 10am and then being asked to complete a neighbourhood development survey for building a better Brisbane. On completing the survey Brisbane and her friends find it’s time to return home with fines in pocket, pondering the meaning of those questions on housing density.
This is a city with infinite edges that touch the world, called people. It is not a building for which we all have to hold our breath while it goes ever higher. We know each other yet we act with a degree of discomfort like we are on a stage.
The issue is not development, it’s what are we developing.
No other city sits watching us, they are dancing the samba in those other world cities and hoping we are too, knowing dancing is more sustainable than holding your breath. If the dance has broken down then let’s find some inspirational projects that deliver on community need and put that pumping heart into progress. Instead of another play-safe-get-nowhere London Eye why not:
- Dreamtime: Cultural centre for South Pacific Indigenous Peoples based in Brisbane built over the Maritime Museum hosted by our local Aboriginal people. Provides a real local, relevant, authentic major tourist attraction for the world to appreciate the richness and diversity of South Pacific Indigenous culture. It also provides a positive community development enabler for Aboriginal people to host their region and an independent interface for them to network other issues commonly faced by Indigenous people.
- Green Economy Hub: The world needs industry to work together faster to build the greener economy. We have all the ingredients in land, ingenuity, intellectual capital, open political economy, and respected and secure law but not the political vision. Let’s invite global companies, universities and government agencies to work together in a hub of excellence and interaction to invent and commercialise the solutions we need rather than be perpetual risk-averse fast-followers. The Green Economy Hub will be an example of hotel, office, convention centre, residences, retail, entertainment and transport that are sustainable and will by function be a catalyst of change by the tenants within.
- Green Colloseum: Time for an entertainment centre of 10 000+ to be built next into the Green Economy Hub both annexed to the transport infrastructure of Roma Street Station, over the rail yards and busway. When the students of QUT graduate and invent the new economy with opportunity at the Green Economy Hub, they can feed the fossil fuel industry to the lions at the Green Colosseum.
We have all the ingredients in land, ingenuity, intellectual capital, open political economy, and respected and secure law but not the political vision.
I grew up in Mount Gravatt and prior to arriving at my 8th jumbo passport through a career in marketing, worked in the factories and foundries of this city. Brisbane is unique, its region has the ingredients to lead in a most authentic and valuable way but it will lead by respecting the treasure under its feet, its people and interpreting the best fit of those abundant talents with the needs of the world around it. These ideas are suggested as things to get us started on that track.
After reading Patrick Suskind’s Perfume I remember thinking, “wow 18th Century Paris and the lovely Seine was a stinking river valley stewing in class war and ruled by mad merchants and emperors … we should let our guard down and go for it.” I salute the French strength in understanding individuality.
Brisbane is a wonderful swaying, fertile, abundant river mouth that needs more carrot and less stick.
