Future Brisbane: Brisbane is no longer a big country town, it’s a big city on the move
THERE was a time when Brisbane was fondly regarded by locals as a big country town. No more. Brisbane is now a city on the move.
Future Brisbane
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THERE was a time as recently as the late 20th century when Brisbane was fondly regarded by the locals as a big country town. Brisbane was different to Sydney and Melbourne and proudly so.
Expo 88 catapulted the city in a different – some say more metropolitan – direction. Then in the 1990s came the casino, South Bank, the riverfront redevelopment and after the turn of the century the apartmentification of the CBD and city fringe.
The Brisbane I was visiting in the early 2000s was no big country town; it had an energy about it; it was a city on the move. Turn up to a fashionable restaurant in New Farm at about this time and everyone was dressed in black; men shaved their heads and wore edgy black glasses; you could have been in Sydney’s Paddington or Melbourne’s Chapel St or in the laneways off the Galleria in Milan.
The turning point in how I thought about Brisbane was an interview I heard with members of the pop group Savage Garden who unassumingly said that not only did they come from Brisbane but they still lived there. I was shocked. Brisbane’s cool set no longer made a beeline for Sydney or Melbourne; they were staying put and reimagining the city of their birth.
And then there were creative businesses based around gaming technology emerging in Woolloongabba of all places and which seemed to stem from the development of the Movieworld production facility opened on the Gold Coast in the late 1980s. Who would have thought such a spin-off could have occurred a decade later?
However, to be completely fair both Sydney and Melbourne were also evolving at this time with inner-city redevelopment projects like Darling Harbour and Docklands. It could be said that Brisbane’s new urban energy was merely “keeping up with the Joneses”. But the transformation let alone the future trajectory of Brisbane is more than this. There was a bigger cultural gap between Brisbane and Australia’s larger capitals a decade ago let alone a generation ago, than there is today.
I see the apartmentification of Brisbane as a social transformation that will deliver a new way of living and working in the 2020s.
The suburban model worked well for families for a century but it doesn’t suit today’s couples and singles and downshifters and the lifestyle that they want to lead. The same thing is happening in other cities; it’s just that Brisbane is coming off a far more suburban base.
It’s almost as if the Australian nation is now being led by a tripartite of eastern seaboard capitals all heading in broadly the same direction. Each, including Brisbane, is evolving as a big, broad car-based city but with a beating, creative, pedestrian, liveable heart. Brisbane is being reimagined between Teneriffe and West End.
The economic base of our biggest cities is shifting – out with manufacturing; in with the so-called knowledge worker industries. Brisbane’s universities, hospitals, research labs, corporate head offices and support services are key to delivering skills as well as jobs.
Everything that Sydney and Melbourne has or has in train, Brisbane is also developing. Melbourne’s Metro and Sydney’s WestConnex are balanced by Brisbane’s Cross River Rail. Fluidity delivers livability in a big city.
Melbourne and Sydney have Crown Casino and Barangaroo; Brisbane has Queens Wharf. Brisbane Airport connects into the same number of overseas cities as does Tullamarine.
Sydney and Melbourne are morphing from an Anglo-Mediterranean base to include Asian, Indian and Arabic influences. So too is Brisbane but it is coming off a more Anglo base. By 2031 Brisbane along with Sydney and Melbourne will be more Asian cities, rather like Auckland and Vancouver today, as a rising middle-class diaspora from China and elsewhere reaches out to Western lifestyle cities across the Pacific Rim.
The Brisbane of the future will be more cosmopolitan and even better connected to emerging cities across Asia and the Pacific. The city’s suburban way of life will still be popular but new tribes will emerge including the couples of this decade and singles in the next decade. Singles will surge as baby boomer men die off. Brisbane might be far more creative and more skilled by the end of the 2020s but it could also be lonelier for isolated singles.
Amid the hype and the hubbub for new pieces of infrastructure required to keep Brisbane in touch with Sydney and Melbourne there needs to be investment in social infrastructure. Volunteering and civic-mindedness build resilient communities. Strategic planning on a grand scale ensures that there will be sufficient land for new housing estates in a decade’s time thereby avoiding the unaffordability crisis that has beset Sydney.
But above all the single most important investment any community can make in its future is to remain united and galvanised by love of city and of country. Brisbane may not be the big country town it once was but it can and it should remain proudly different – and perhaps with just a hint of “attitude” – to those other big cities on the eastern seaboard.
* Bernard Salt is managing director of The Demographics Group
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