How the car prevented the birth of a high street culture in Brisbane

A common refrain among those from the Deep South of Australia (i.e. Sydney and Melbourne) is that Brisbane lacks the kind of distinct, vibrant neighbourhoods that are so ubiquitous in the southern capitals.

Think Lygon Street in Carlton and Brunswick Street, Fitzroy, in Melbourne; Oxford Street in Darlinghurst, and King Street, Newtown, in Sydney. Further out from their respective city centres, High Street in Armadale, south-east Melbourne, and Haldon Street, Lakemba, in Sydney’s west.

That refrain is, of course, not entirely correct. But there is a kernel of truth to the perception; while high streets are not uncommon in Brisbane, they are certainly not as prevalent – or of the same scale – as those in the southern capitals.

And experts have laid the blame at the feet – well, the tyres – of the family car.

Professor Matthew Burke, a deputy director for Griffith University’s Cities Research Institute, says Brisbane’s divergent evolution was a matter of timing, its growth coinciding with the rise of the automobile.

“The southern capitals were both much larger cities by the 1920s when streetcar [tram] systems started their decline in Australia,” he says.

“As such, more of their inner and middle suburbs have an urban fabric built before the invention of the freeway. They enjoy small street setbacks and little porches out front. These suburbs tend to have a footpath on both sides of every street, something missing in mid-suburban Brisbane.

“Melbourne kept its trams running, which meant they retained their more vibrant high-street shopping streets.

“Brisbane’s neighbourhoods just 10 kilometres from the city centre have good cafes and craft breweries but aren’t within cooee of a high street.”

That lack of suburban vibrancy is something that makes Ross Elliott a very busy man.

Elliott, chairman of the Lord Mayor’s Better Suburbs Initiative, says more established Australian cities’ head starts led to not-so-subtle differences in their suburban sprawls.

“By the time the motor car became widely available, if you had taken an aerial shot of Sydney and Melbourne at the same time as Brisbane, they had developed much more during the interwar period and in the early postwar period,” he said.

“All three cities were doing the same thing at the same time. Sydney and Melbourne had already developed in the interwar and postwar period, but then in about 1960, all cities saw the explosive growth of suburbia.

“That was driven not just by the car, but a desire back then to escape crowded inner-city living.”

The end result? The “spatial logic” of new suburbs became very different from their older counterparts. And, in that postwar era, those big yards, fences and Hills Hoists in the new suburbs were enticing.

It became the Australian dream.

“I’m reminded of [former NSW premier] Neville Wran, who grew up in Balmain and said ‘Balmain boys don’t cry’,” Elliott says.

“Balmain is a classic example of what was a very working-class, very tough, very congested, low socio-economic profile area.

“In that postwar period, people left the moment they could afford to leave. They left for new suburban homes because the lifestyle was simply better.

“They got more space, they got a yard – yes, it required a car in most cases to get there, but it was a vast improvement on what they left behind.”

Elliott says the irony now is that Balmain has become “completely off-the-charts expensive” and one of Sydney’s most sought-after suburbs.

“We’ve got the same example here,” he says.

“If you think about New Farm and look at the numbers, 25 years ago, it did not even feature on the top-25 list of median house price suburbs in Brisbane.

“I was actually back at the [Real Estate Institute of Queensland] doing research back then in one of my first jobs, and the number two suburb on the list was Mount Ommaney.

“If you fast-forward 25 years, Mount Ommaney has fallen right off – it’s down at number 35 or something – and New Farm’s now number one.”

Elliott says those inner-city vibrant neighbourhoods are driving that renaissance.

It is the access to a “third place” – such as bars, libraries, restaurants and other places people can socialise – that are so intrinsic to suburban high streets.

A third place for people to belong – the first being home and the second work.

University of Queensland urban sociologist Peter Walters has a particular interest in third places, having studied the evolution and homogenisation of Australian suburbia.

Walters says one of the biggest losses for Brisbane has been the lack of obvious third places in many parts of the city, built within walking distance of the people they serve.

“I lived in London for about six years and the corner pub is a real institution there – it’s almost an extension of people’s lounge rooms, whereas we just don’t have that here,” Walters says.

“Brisbane has never had the concentration of pubs that other cities have had, except maybe in places in the inner city.”

Walters says councils need to rethink their zoning laws to allow for more third places within walking distance of people’s homes.

But he concedes it is not for everyone, and it could be a difficult sell for those who prefer their surrounds to be a little more on the quiet side.

“The reality is that people have a certain expectation as well about what a suburb looks like,” Walters says.

“People aren’t sitting at home saying, ‘geez, I wish we had more third places’. People have an expectation, they tend to live private lives and the need for privacy is a big enemy of social encounter.”

If third places are not already part of a neighbourhood’s fabric, Walters says, it’s a challenge to shoe-horn them in.

In most cases, doing so would require rezoning areas to allow commercial tenancies on sites that once would have only allowed residential development.

“It’s really difficult to retrofit places,” Walters says.

“If you change planning laws overnight and say you can turn your house into a bar or a cafe, chances are the neighbours wouldn’t appreciate it and would complain about the traffic and noise, so you’ve almost got to do it from the word ‘go’.

“That’s what’s good about the inner city. Because these places were designed before cars, everything is walkable, and you’ve got these little clusters of shops and little pocket parks and all that sort of stuff that generate a sense of community.

“You see the same people there all the time, you develop a sense of belonging because you have these casual encounters.”

Associate Professor Debra Cushing, from Queensland University of Technology’s School of Architecture & Built Environment, agrees. But she says it’s a challenge that can be met.

“You’re always going to piss off people, there’s always going to be opposition. NIMBYism and that kind of thing was probably always going to happen,” Cushing says.

“It’s got to be a shift in multiple ways – not only allowing it to happen, or even letting it happen organically in some places.

“A community group might want to start something up and then, seeing where that more organically happens, the planning could follow suit.

“It’s also shifting kind of the behaviour of people so they see the value of moving some of those activities into a suburb, or shifting the zoning so different activities are allowed, enabled or even promoted.

“It’s got to be multilayered. You’re always going to have the opposition, but I think it’s shifting the behaviour, but then also shifting the built environment – the physical representation of that.”

Because Brisbane’s evolutionary road has been very much car-driven, we got major shopping centres, with their hectares of parking, rather than local high streets.

Given that history, it’s perhaps no surprise that Brisbane built the first such major shopping centre in Australia.

Chermside, in what was then the city’s far north, opened in 1957. Others soon followed.

Elliott says hindsight is everything, but it’s now clear Brisbane has suffered as a result of that trend.

“Gympie Road in Chermside is not only one of the most butt-ugly sections of Brisbane, it’s also every year rated the most dangerous,” he says.

“You just wonder how we got there. You’d look at that and think ‘this is 2023’ – it’s just appalling. And why would anyone want to work there as it is?”

But Elliott says it’s not without potential. Changes in employment trends over the past two decades mean such centres can be rethought.

“Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne largely developed in the days of the Bundy clock, where legions of people would commute into the city, clock on and clock off at five, and go home by public transport,” he says.

“Those jobs have changed now.”

Elliott says authorities need to recognise today’s job market is seeing most growth in health, education and social infrastructure.

And those jobs are not in the central business district.

“The CBD jobs market is not growing. It hasn’t for a long time,” Elliott says.

“I would be investing in infrastructure to support a range of suburban hubs, not just retail.

“So if you use Chermside as an example, that opened as a shopping centre, and later on in planning schemes going back probably 30 years, they started calling it, and Carindale, Indooroopilly and Mount Gravatt, ‘regional business centres’.

“But they’re still just shopping centres.

“What we need to do is evolve some of the centres of that scale, and of a smaller scale, into mixed-use developments that provide a lot more of that local social infrastructure much closer to where people live.”

Walters, the UQ urban sociologist, hopes planners will learn from the lessons of the past, but he says he hasn’t seen much evidence of that yet.

“We do a lot of work with companies that develop places like Yarrabilba and Springfield, and they say it’d be great to have corner cafes and little local libraries, and a public swimming pool, and all these great things that we have in the inner city, but it’s basically a business proposition,” he says.

“Councils are not interested in underwriting this, and people who live in the outer suburbs generally don’t have the disposable income that we might have in the inner city.

“They’re going to buy their food and shop at a Westfield every time before they’ll buy local and independent.”

That is where, Walter says, local governments need to step up.

“You can’t compete with Westfield if you’re a small, independent business, and that’s why these sorts of places need to be subsidised,” he says.

“Perhaps the council needs to be the landlord and offer them cheaper rents than they do to the big franchise commercial outfits.”

All solutions that would require political courage.

“Maybe there will be an economic imperative,” Walters says.

“Maybe the price of fuel will become such that people have to lead more local lives, that our economy will transform the way people use space.

“But I think it will take some shock to stop this model of development that we’ve seen.”