The Ugliest City You'll Ever Love
Written: Dec 30 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: A fine city that is working hard on itself.
Cons: A lot of damage from the mid-20th Century.
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| Urbanist's Full Review: Brisbane |
Brisbane is a hard city to hate, even if you have a miserable time there.
When I first saw Brisbane on a muggy summer day, it made a terrible first impression. Unable to make sense of the public transport, I trudged in the hot rain, rode the river ferry for a bit, then climbed under the elevated freeway that blocks off the city center from the waterfront (much like the one that San Francisco recently tore down). Finally, I confronted a downtown of glassy towers and grim facades that was about as charming as, well, Dallas. (If you live in Dallas, then I meant Houston. I know how touchy you Texans get.)
Until recently, Australian architecture tended toward imitation of European forms. When brutalist glass boxes and elevated urban freeways were all the rage in Europe and North America, no Australian city copied the fad more enthusiastically than Brisbane. The conservative government of the time sometimes even resolved its historic preservation battles by sending out the bulldozers in the dead of night. Around downtown, only a handful of great historic buildings remain, surrounded by considerable automobile-oriented bleakness that reminded me sadly of the damage inflicted on many American cities in the mid-20th-Century. Sydney and Melbourne were certainly not immune to brutalist architecture and the fad of urban freeway-building, but they resisted its worst excesses.
Like many American cities, Brisbane is so torn up by freeways and bleak, pedestrian-crushing arterials that it must now struggle really cohere as a city. Sadly, many of its visual pleasures are vignettes, bits of magnificence that survived the bulldozer or were erected more recently when architecture regained its sanity.
And yet … Brisbane is somehow a city of great charm, not the least of which is that it is sincerely trying. The people are friendly, of course – that’s true of most of Australia – but more than that, they are working hard to make Brisbane a better place.
Brisbane can now take pride in Fortitude Valley and New Farm, formerly dangerous neighborhoods that are now chic and vibrant. Brisbane’s public transport take a while to figure out – no map of it was available when I was last there – but their plans for bus rapid transit, coupled with the existing rail and ferry systems, all point to a new centering and enriching of city life. By Australian standards, Brisbane’s greatest glory may be its sheer existence as a city government. The “City of Brisbane” actually covers most of the city, whereas the equivalent municipal governments in Melbourne and Sydney cover only what we would think of as the downtown, so that in those places it falls to the state government to do any rational planning.
Like all of Australia, the Brisbane area has preserved an extraordinary amount of land as parkland and open space, but Brisbane’s comes unusually close-in. The colossal Brisbane Forest Park begins not far from the city center and flows right out of the city well past the last suburbs, a huge preserve of magnificent subtropical rainforest that anyone can get to by bus.
On my last day there, I did a rainforest hike in Maiala National Park, a contiguous part of this vast forest expanse just west of the city. Maiala is an especially dramatic canyon, with a soaring canopy of eucalypts, a second canopy of tree-ferns perhaps 10-20 feet high, and life crawling all over life everywhere you look. I was in a bad mood, brooding about things, but now and then, the beauty of the forest would punch through, and my self-absorption would collapse. I was suddenly penetrated by my smallness, yet comforted, almost in tears with this complex feeling. I returned to the city with the forest still in my heart, and the city’s display – it’s searing wounds and it’s boundless hope – seemed to acknowledge that we are still small in the eyes of nature, but that fortunately, like everything else, we continue to evolve.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
Urbanist
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Location: San Francisco
Reviews written: 78
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Streetwise, academically credentialed gay renaissance man. For real bio, click "more" in profile.
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