Kathleen Noonan: Why we need more high-quality, thoughtful, imaginative urban design

THIS game is one we play all over this town, based on an old developer modus operandi. Buy an old Queenslander or pre-war house. Allow it to become dilapidated. Ignore squatters when they move in. Encourage white ants.

“More” housing is not necessarily the problem. It’s the mediocrity of the projects – big and small says Kathleen Noonan

FIRST clue, the old house looks a little forlorn, unloved, grass growing long. Then my mate and I have bets: white ants or fire?

This game is one we play all over this town, based on an old developer modus operandi.

Buy an old Queenslander or pre-war house. Allow it to become dilapidated. Ignore squatters when they move in. Encourage white ants.

In a wonderful stroke of luck those pesky squatters may start a fire, and then the property is fire-damaged to the point where you have to tear it down.

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Fires are great. Especially for heritage-listed buildings. White ants are handy too.

Then you say to council, and you can read it on development applications any day of the week lodged at Brisbane City Council, oh, we’d love to have saved it but we can’t, it’s riddled. Riddled! Here’s the pest control report.

Gems like New Farm's heritage listed Santa Barbara needs to be protected. PIC Andrea Macleod

Yet another perfectly fine home, sitting comfortably on its block, as they were designed to do, is demolished or butchered.

And a brown and white tower with a squiggle of orange or avocado, which is the fad right now, or some cookie-cutter faux “Queenslander” six-pack, which are just weird as all hell, is constructed. So the developer wins.

The abandoned heritage listed Broadway Hotel in Woolloongabba goes up in flames.

Think that’s a little harsh? Have a look around your suburb and see if you’re OK with the development.

Take a walk around West End, South Brisbane, Highgate Hill, Cannon Hill, Coorparoo, Stones Corner. Check out Milton or Chermside. Whoa!

Most residents are not anti-development. Most city-dwellers understand higher density can lead to more sustainable public transport, walking and cycling, make services easier to provide for and improve urban vitality.

Illustration by Brett Lethbridge.

There’s just one big caveat – it needs to be done well. It must be high-quality, thoughtful, imaginative urban design and at its very core, have one concept: Human Habitat.

In other words, people and place matters.

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody,” wrote Jane Jacobs, the doyen of urban activism, in her landmark The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Do Brisbane residents feel their city is created by everybody? Or by the moneyed and connected few?

I am contacted often by residents distraught by a tower to be built next door, green space given over to private developers, or gracious old homes in their street to be bulldozed except for a pathetic salami-slice of their facade.

Now I tell them the brutal truth: the process is flawed, and you, my friend, the little guy, just have to suck it up.

To fight you must have plenty of money, resources, expertise and a lot of time. If you haven’t all of those things, don’t bother.

Because the developers play the long game, have deep pockets and a handy knack of hiring ex-council employees who know the process.

That’s the way it is in Brisbane. It started under then-mayor Campbell Newman and continues under Graham Quirk, 14 years of an easy ride in which we had the mad mass approval of apartment towers leading to today’s glut. Quirk now says he wants to “save Brisbane’s backyards”.

That must be some kind of joke. It’s too little, too late. The developers have won.

I say that not because we have more towers or increased density.

“More” is not necessarily the problem. It’s the mediocrity of the projects – big and small. They are so dismally unimaginative. Density can be done right.

Catching up with a senior architect, I ask why we settle for dull and uninspiring. She sighs long and hard, takes a drink: “That’s where the money is. Architects have to work on pretty ordinary projects with pathetic budgets and try to design the least awful version of them as possible.”

I like cities. Cities are central to innovation, tolerance, novelty and economic prosperity. Yet to be dynamic and interesting, it takes more than settling for “the least awful” option.

Brisbane is one of the hottest Australian capital cities after Darwin. Always has been, yet have we learnt? No.

Kathleen Noonan.

It never performs well in summer. Day and night, we melt in its heat pad because council does not demand we design intelligently, sustainably and urgently for place.

Drive west along the Ipswich Motorway, or to the northern suburbs, past all those scorched-earth, treeless new developments with air-conditioners hanging off every house.

Plonked on blocks to maximise profit, rather than consider aspect, they’ve no eaves, built to the boundary. Are we mad?

Take a look around. Brisbane looks and sounds and smells like a developers’ town.

Cookie-cutter houses and boring towers with faux-greenery walls abound. (Is there anything more depressing than a faux-greenery anything?)

Jacobs again: “From city to city … the same dreary scene; here is no hint of individuality or whim or surprise, no hint that here is a city with a tradition and flavour all its own.”

Where’s Brisbane’s whim and magnetism to attract bright young things? Cities need texture. They need to embrace their grit, their history, their grunge.

The empty house. The squatters, the white ants, the development application. Business as usual.

If these disappearing old homes were then replaced with some piece of truly modern, exciting subtropical Queensland architecture that would quicken the pulse of TV’s Grand Designs guru Kevin McCloud, maybe you would think, it’s worth it.

But no, just some boring three-pack with a faux-Queenslander facade supposedly in sympathy with the street that actually stands out like dog’s balls. The developers have won.

Did this laid-back, subtropical river city ever really stand a chance?

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