Where to from here?

Near my home in Brisbane is a small park. It has all the trademark elements we would recognise at a ‘typical’ park: a few trees, two seats, some play equipment, some shrub planting – flowering, Australian species. Money has been spent on the equipment and construction, yet during the decade I’ve lived in this neighbourhood I’ve never seen a single person visiting this park. There are plenty of obvious reasons why. The park is off the main streets and hidden from view. It is at the low point between two ridge lines, and becomes a boggy mess after not much rain; its location also ensures a near-continual lack of sunlight – not so bad in summer, but a deal-breaker in the cooler months. The lack of sun means no lawn will grow under the trees. Instead a grim puddle of dark red softfall pools like congealed blood under the playground equipment. Sadly, there is not a huge resident population of children nearby to use the swing, it’s too small for a dog to run around, and in any case, a large notice forbids their entry. Although one of its near neighbours is a hospital, there is no convenient access, not even a footpath alongside. It is surrounded by a substantial metal fence, and does not project a welcoming air. The two chairs, which could be used by countless nearby residents or workers, are the final straw. One overlooks the large rubbish bin, while the other addresses the decaying fence of the adjoining apartments. They are both of the variety that features a central armrest, that mean-spirited gesture that prevents even the local homeless from making use of the place to stretch out.

I’ve pondered whether using one of the four approaches described in this book could make something more of this forlorn park. Creating a linkage could help. Nearby is the great belt of inner-city parkland that includes King Edward Park, Albert Park, Roma Street Parklands and Victoria Park. If you know the way, they can all be accessed by following the contour line that describes itself along Wickham and Gregory Terraces in that part of the city. Many of Brisbane’s older terraces appear as wiggly lines on street maps, slicing across neatly ordered grids at odd angles, and doubling back on themselves. They do so because European settlers quickly discovered that the winding Aboriginal paths provided the driest and most expeditious route through the crinkled landscape.

Brisbane: trees and a seat do not a successful park make …

The ridge line terraces connect the city park belt, but within the parks themselves the topography is varied and dramatic. Outside the parks the local neighbourhoods also lay themselves like carpeting up and down the slopes. If you live at the bottom it can be a disheartening climb up to the bus stop in the morning. Perhaps some of these cross-contour streets could be re-imagined as green links, creating a welcoming way of negotiating the hilly streets bordered by the serenely flat terraces. My local park could then have a purpose; it would be a stepping stone on a slow, pleasant and quiet journey of homecoming, and a knot on the green guide rope connecting back up to the terrace summits.

Obsolescence is trickier. The suburb of Spring Hill was named after the source that provided early drinking water to the township, and it was one of the first to be settled after the riverside central city area. Lots in the street where our small park is today were surveyed in the 1870s, 30 years after the convict gaol closed. Spring Hill quickly became a densely populated, working-class neighbourhood, retaining a slightly down-at-heel reputation until well into the 1980s, when gentrification slowly took hold. At that stage students, artists and musicians enjoyed its low rents and proximity to the city. Celia McNally, ‘The Duchess’, ran the annual Spring Hill Fair, which provided the name for the third album by Brisbane band The Go-Betweens. Stalls spilled off the main location on Leichhardt Street and down into the steep streets and backyards.

The pro-development environment fostered by the BjelkePetersen state government saw Spring Hill suffer a similar fate to other older parts of the city. The tall, pink, faux-latticed Hotel Grand Chancellor replaced a sprawling corner pub. Other medical, commercial and residential towers appeared on the terraces, throwing deep shadows over the houses below. Workers’ cottages were bought up by those rediscovering the potential of inner-city life, and those seeking to build smaller apartment complexes. Diagonally opposite the small park is a two-storey building, visible in old photos, with a long-closed corner store downstairs. Today Spring Hill still manages to accommodate boarding houses across the road from some of the city’s most prestigious private schools, and students still live in the cold, dark valleys behind the doctors and lawyers and fine old buildings that are now heritage listed.

Our park does not feature in the first edition of the Brisbane Street Directory, released in 1955, nor had it appeared by the mid-1980s. It would seem to be a product of Spring Hill’s late twentieth century evolution – a bit of the street too flood-prone or unprofitable to build on, an obsolescence. Could its use in any way tell a part of this story?

How might co-location work? The park occupies too small an area to share with a school or a water treatment plant. Maybe it could provide both recreational value and public utility in another way. I’ve already described how this tiny park is built in a low point and becomes all but unusable after rain. If we were to get rid of the rarely used swing and create instead a landscape that was intended to catch water, and hold it, and get boggy, and then dry out again, we might find a way to re-imagine the place as a water park. There is no reason we couldn’t still have a seat or two, and we would still have planting, but now, it would be providing a function as well as visual interest. By encouraging stormwater run-off and detention, the pressure on local hard stormwater infrastructure would be reduced, even slightly, and the park would now contribute positively to, rather than adversely suffering from, its location.

Brisbane: the monthly Suitcase Rummage, held in Reddacliff Place.

Using an installation approach could be another way the park could respond to and evolve with its location. While there are not many swing-set-using children in the immediate vicinity, there are more than a few students. Crammed, as finance demands, into tiny flats and draughty houses, they can be seen in the afternoons and evenings crouched in the gutters, smoking and talking, using the kerb as a seat. Maybe our park could accommodate them. Again we could remove the swings, take down the fence and prune the trees to let a bit of light in. Then we could install some plywood platforms, like Lent Space, or some big flat rocks for seating, and a bit of lighting so it feels safe at night. Our cold, unused playground could be temporarily re-imagined as an outdoor study nook and living room.

Wherever I look in inner Brisbane I see evidence that we are more than willing to embrace and use forms of public realm well beyond the traditional concept of parkland. School kids distribute themselves along the walls of planters and rubbish bins in the Albert Street arms of the central mall, and readily spill down and onto the pavement once there’s no more room on the seats. They could all go to the Botanic Gardens and sit comfortably and spaciously on the lawn. Groups of young men meet every weekend to practice parkour on the steps and the old World War II bomb shelter bordering King Edward Park. It’s standing room only in Reddacliff Place for the monthly Suitcase Rummage, where trash and treasure changes hands from suitcases placed on the ground.

These spaces are all physically and visually different, but once we look beyond those aspects several commonalities become readily apparent. Among other things, they are all places that are well linked or connected, they provide other features or services, and they allow for varying use and occupation over time. J.B. Jackson said of his long curiosity and many investigations, ‘The greater the number of landscapes I explored, the more it seemed that they all had traits in common and that the essence of each was not its uniqueness but its similarity to others.’290 My own exploration of different landscape and park responses to very different urban paradoxes also ended up revealing many overlaps and similarities. The threads of each story frayed out beyond the edges of its own category boundaries to interweave with other stories. It was as if kin recognised kin, and reached out to connect across the borders of space and time.

And so we get the community gardens on Philadelphia’s vacant lots talking back across time to Agnes Denes’ field of wheat. Her commentary on the politics of food, on hunger and resource mismanagement is now played out as those left behind by the swinging pendulum of industrial development work to supplement their food desert neighbourhoods. We see the becalmed canals and hunkered concrete forts of the New Dutch Waterline talking across continents to the torrents gushing through WaterWorks in Phoenix. As a species made largely of water, living on a similarly watery planet, our response to water remains emotional and powerful, even as we bend it to our service. We see vegetation reclaiming the oncemighty Duisburg Nord blast furnace into the greater Emscher Landschaftspark, but also see the tiny first steps at Newtown Creek to create a new landscape that negotiates a relationship with functioning industry, and not just mitigates or hopes for its departure. These places all seem grounded in an attitude to landscape that Jackson described as ‘Landscape 1’, a system in which everything is jumbled together, and things are impermanent, flexible and mobile. During the twentieth century we evolved and finetuned a different system, Landscape 2, wherein everything was ordered, separated and permanent. Landscape 2 was a manifestation of the worldview in which the planet and its resources were to be bent to our will and controlled. As we move into this century, more people have realised that, on our planet, change is the only constant. Our efforts to more tightly control weather, climate, food, energy, economies, nations, information, property, politics and each other has resulted in unforeseen side effects or even unmitigated disaster.

Many of the projects described in this book achieved what they did, and simply came into existence, because a group of people was prepared to step, just for a minute, into a place more like Landscape 1. Given questions and impossible challenges and rules, they reframed them. ‘We can’t do that because …’ turned into ‘What if we did this …?’

Brisbane: young love at Roma Street Parkland.

In Australia we continue to have an uneasy relationship with our landscape. As soon as we ‘conquered’ the bush we began leaving it, yet the outback is the archetypal landscape we claim affinity with. We lament that the bush is dying, but in a romanticised, aestheticised way – we don’t want to live there ourselves. We love the land enough to have fought to save the Franklin River in Tasmania, and the Mary River in Queensland, yet we demand the right for our communities to make their livings from sand mining, forestry, coal seam gas extraction. And we love our ‘outdoor lifestyle’ yet demand as a birthright a vast home, requiring continuously metastasising new neighbourhoods with bigger houses jammed onto smaller lots, from which we drive further distances to schools, shops, workplaces and entertainment.

Although we are embracing and using a wider variety of public places we still love the best of our traditional parks. When not at the one-day festival, Brisbaneites love the rest of South Bank – the arbour, the lawns, the waterplay and the lagoon – all the bits that are more conventionally ‘park-like’. It’s the same story at Roma Street Parklands, New Farm Park and the Botanic Gardens on a perfect Brisbane winter afternoon. There are gatherings of 20 and 30 people, visitors from overseas, local families at the playground and young couples canoodling in the privacy that only a thronging crowd can provide.

All images this spread – Brisbane. 1. Brisbane’s oldest park, the Botanic

Gardens in the city. 2. Opened in late 2011, The Cove at

South Bank was instantly popular. 3. Late afternoon at the Roma Street

Parkland amphitheatre. 4. Spring in the air at The Cove,

South Bank.

1. 2.

3. 4.

Other couples are having their wedding photos taken, perhaps the ultimate proof that a place has been embraced by its community. At a conference in 2011, the late Spanish architect Luis Mansilla described the moment his friends started sending him copies of local wedding photos taken at MUSAC, the contemporary art museum designed by his practice. His initial mixed feelings soon changed to a sort of proud humility, that people would choose that building for the setting of one of the most important days of their lives.

It is as places become woven into our lives that they become valuable to us. Once a story is attached the place becomes more than simply the assembly of its physical features. Like so many others, my brother will now always think of New Farm Park as the place where his wedding photos were taken. In one of the wonderful pages from

the East London Green Grid Primer, John Meehan and Neil Davidson relay the story of 92-year-old Ron, who negotiates his motorised wheelchair over bumpy paths to attend the monthly gatherings of the Brookside Fishing Club at ‘I think it’s called Dagnam Park …’291 Understanding the stories of place in the first instance, and then responding to them, seems like a good way to ensure ongoing stewardship of our city parks, both existing and future. Linkage parks may be a response to an increasingly fragmented and disconnected world, but as author Robert Macfarlane observes, surely the paths that the earliest humans created, that linked their significant places, that took them from hearth to food to water, following the trails of animals, who in turn followed the ways established by the terrain and geology they traversed, were ‘among the earliest acts of human landscaping’.292

Our parks must respond to great complexity and contradiction, as they are responding to enormously challenging urban conundrums all over the world.

Our parks must respond to great complexity and contradiction, as they are responding to enormously challenging urban conundrums all over the world.

Yet it is within the challenge that the greatest opportunities lie. Cities are one of the most amazing artefacts the human species creates. City parks have always been bellwethers reflecting our relationship with each other and the natural environment. Green parks created refuge, sanctuary and relied on the uplifting and ennobling power of nature. We must remain vigilant and not take the green park for granted. The tiny, empty playground in my neighbourhood is a reminder that providing some trees and seats is not enough. Brown parks worked with unwanted places encourage us to acknowledge our role in making and re-making our cities. We must remain vigilant here, too, and ensure that our brown parks do not completely eradicate the wild and serendipitous aspects of industrial and marginal land that make them so rich – in some places, providing some trees and seats might be too much. The Future Parks each tell a story, small or large, humble or ambitious, of place and time. It is only because they have responded to the particular that they are able to provide lessons for dealing with universal challenges of globalisation, shrinkage, urbanisation and economic reframing.

Whether as citizens, policy makers or designers, we all can play a role. Enjoy your local park. Take your holiday visitors to the showpiece parks created by your city or region. Require the existing ones be well maintained. Demand that unsuccessful ones are refreshed. Insist that new ones make a contribution that your community needs. Many Philadelphia residents gained enormously once individual abandoned house lots were turfed. New Yorkers living and working in Tribeca have a place to visit and install their artwork, rather than a hoarding-enclosed no-go-zone. Atlantans have a long-term opportunity to improve the health, mobility and housing access for tens of thousands of residents. As they have always done, parks offer a way to think creatively and aspirationally about the public places in our cities, regions and countries. Look outward for ideas, listen inward for the stories of your place. We will all benefit from your Future Park.