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|23| Building Good Places in Queensland, Australia

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|23| Building Good Places in Queensland, Australia |23| Building Good Places in Queensland, Australia John Minnery (School of Geography Planning & Environme)[email protected] John Minnery’s teaching and research interests are in urban planning policy and practice, urban planning history and various aspects of housing. He was for seven years Director of the Planning Program in the School of Geography Planning and Environmental TEMA 1 Resumo The word ‘utopia’ is a brilliant pun first used by Thomas More in 1615, brilliant because it means simultaneously ‘good place’ and ‘no place’. The term has, however, acquired considerable intellectual baggage over the years, in part because it refers to an imagined good place and people imagine good places based on a plethora of social, political and other prejudices. This paper steps beyond the fiction of imagined places to explore the notion of good places that have actually been built. It does this by taking lessons from three historical and implemented schemes. Although the three are quite different in time, they have a common location in Queensland, Australia. Whilst at first the three may appear somewhat dissimilar, they are linked through the common ideal of being good places where a good life, however, defined, could be lived. There are interesting and important lessons to be learned from assessing the three. The first is the cluster of cooperative settlements set up in parts of Queensland, including the more populous South East of the State, during the turbulent years of the 1890s. An influential source of the cooperative ideal was William Lane, who in 1893 started the utopian New Australia in Paraguay. He had publicised his ideas in Australia, but the settlements started in Queensland based on his ideas were also a reflection of the terrible living conditions for working people at the time, the impacts of the 1890s economic recession in Australia and the first stirrings of the Australian Labor movement (Metcalf 1995). The second are the canal estates, initiated in Australia on the Gold Coast in South East Queensland in the 1950s, driven by a desire for a good life by the sea and a craving to emulate the golden lifestyle of Florida in the USA (Jones, 1986). The third are the master planned communities that now pepper South East Queensland, starting in the 1970s, that see the good life as one supported by a planned mix of housing, jobs, recreation and community living (Minnery and Bajracharya 1999). The three cases identify the creation of some form of community, along with a particular material lifestyle, social consciousness, break from previous ways of doing things, and the like as potential elements of a ‘good life’ in a ‘good place’. The paper draws lessons from the three cases to discuss the elements that have made up historical approaches to the idea of a ‘good place’ and how it might be created. References: Jones, M. A. (1986) A sunny place for shady people: The real Gold Coast story, Allen and Unwin, Sydney. Metcalf, William J. (1995) Utopian Queensland, Royal Historical Society of Queensland Journal, Vol. XV, No. 12, pp. 553-570. Minnery, J. & Bajracharya, B. (1999) ‘Visions, Planning Processes and Outcomes: Master Planned Communities in South East Queensland’, Australian Planner, Vol. 36, No. 1, pp. 33- 41..
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