|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.