SITE DOCUMENTATION CU 23
BRISBANE 2057 AD John Byrne Sustainable city-making is a complex thing. It is multidimensional, interdisciplinary, twisting and turning…needing to be both reactive and proactive…and, ideally, both motivated by and aimed towards a coherent if not clear idea of what would constitute a better outcome. Some things change quickly, perhaps without much notice, and need to be responded to. Other things evolve more slowly and inexorably and can be seen coming or while happening, and the call must be whether to promote them, head them off, ignore them, or accept them.
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Trends intersect and interact. Cities and societies are complex things, not a series of parallel, one-dimensional processes. The economic, social, cultural, political, and environmental spheres interact, and they do soon local, regional, and global levels. In the context of city-making and city governance, it is important to identify and understand the complex processes of change and the identifiable strands within them, and to have a logical and vision-inspired response. In doing that it is sometimes useful to analyze trends, whether individually or in small groups, and extrapolate from them to see where they might take us…a kind of city science fiction. This is not a new process and indeed has a long and honorable literary tradition, evolving eventually into the world of utopian and dystopian dramatic fiction, but it seems these days to be made more use of in the wonderful, technologically spellbinding world of the cinema than in city planning and governance or any other social -policy arena. There is probably not much debate about the sorts of changes that might be relevant to our cities, even if there are different political views about their appropriateness or acceptability. In Australia, for example, we have witnessed in the last decade or so our democratically elected national government deny for too long (and therefore fail to address) the reality of global warming, preside over the widening of the gap between rich and poor, weaken or strip the funding from a variety of decent, humane fundamental social support, housing, educational, and universal health programs (while talking
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