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Can I Please have Somewhere to Sit?

I investigate the criteria for a liveable, enjoyable public space.

By Em ReadmanPublished 4 years ago 9 min read
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Photo by Joshua Wilson from Unsplash

The benchmark for a public space is quite low where I live. Brisbane City Council has a page on their website for their publicly designed, owned and managed spaces, which features two squares, three malls, one event space, and the local cemeteries. When I think of a place I want to relax or socialise in, a cemetery is not exactly what I am aiming for. The Council must know something about a commune of ghosts that I don't.

The evidence suggests they do. When you visit the aforementioned public spaces, they’re essentially ghost towns. Chinatown Mall by day is derelict and rarely has someone visit with the intent of staying long. King George Square is a concrete wasteland, the sun bouncing off every surface, making the whole place unbearably hot. ANZAC Square is a rather sombre place, River Stage isn't open to the public except for paid concerts. Even the CBD is an unappealing space, with hostile architecture that encourages the homeless and homed alike to move on. The places you can sit in this city are mostly privatised, bars, shops and cafes – places which imply you need to cough up to be there.

My friend Jonathon explained his algorithm for paying his way through a writing session at a café.

I try and buy something once an hour, to make up for taking up space and using the Wi-Fi and drinking the water, he told me.

It's free water, I said.

Nothing's free.

He’s correct, of course. Our spaces are inherently set up with a pay per use proviso. Without a meal, a purchase or a beer, many places are simply not acceptable to inhabit. The public realm comes with a price tag. This is harmful to building the community of a city, because the expectation to pay excludes a large number of people who may not have access to a disposable income. This is especially prevalent in youth communities, emerging arts communities and marginalised communities; cost can prevent the expansion and development of culture in these spaces. Even these communities are separated by levels of privilege. University students have a stereotype of being poor, but their enrolment affords them access to computers, libraries and support. Anyone can come onto a university campus, but many facilities are under lock and key via a swipe card and login. I ran into a friend on campus who I thought was studying at my university, when she asked me for my password. She told me she was here to work late because she lived next to a construction site and our building has good security. It’s something I’ve barely considered during my degree, but peace, quiet and safety are something that a university has that public spaces cannot guarantee.

If a space is gated, it is more likely to have less visitors and less likely to build a community, creative or otherwise.

However, there is a difference in having diminished accessibility and being badly designed. Spaces in my city are dominated and blocked in by one-way streets that split my city like the brown river that snakes through it. There are paths in parks that lead to nowhere, dotted with half-baked design projects that scream, look but don’t touch. Worse than this, there’s no places to sit, no gathering points, no places to share advice and story. When a community cannot exist in a space, the community moves elsewhere, or dissipates. Unfunctional spaces pose a risk to whether a community and culture survives because the lifeblood of these groups is spaces in which to gather. I often wonder, why is the city I live in not very liveable?

American urbanist, William H. White said, it is difficult to design a space that will not attract people - what is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished. Urban planners, quite often design public spaces without the public in mind, making those who inhabit them feel like an afterthought. The only thing worse than this, I believe, is when I look at a square or piazza and it is completely empty. In Brisbane, ghosts seem to be pervading more than just the public cemeteries.

When public spaces are done well, the community thrives. The southern bank of the CBD, Southbank is somewhere I visit often, because it’s one of the few spaces I enjoy and feel like I am invited into. My family still talks about Expo 88 and what it did for Southbank in Brisbane. Before, the stretch of land didn’t know what it was – my family told me that it wasn’t particularly nice to visit. Then the world came to Brisbane, and with it, a major renovation for Southbank.

I got given a season pass for my birthday, my uncle tells me. I was only nine, I’d never seen so many people in one place before in my life.

After the major event, after the monorail was taken apart and all the international crowds were gone, a public campaign succeeded in turning it into the parklands it is today. I sit on the grass a lot outside QPAC. I watch the tourists pose for photographs by the river, watch second and third birthday parties gathered around barbeques, watch the cliques of cyclists speed along the paths. It’s nice to be around so many people and feel interwoven in my community, like bees living around a common hive. Southbank is one of those places that hums at all hours.

The parklands get one important thing right that revives Brisbane: accessibility. The terrain is level enough for mobility impaired people, full of playgrounds and supervised man-made beaches for children and there are designated areas for exercise and cultural activities. Access to a diverse space is what every city needs but often critically fails at having.

In 2018, Southbank remounted a micro fiction and poetry installation project called These Frozen Moments in the public arts space Flowstate. It was an audio exhibition made of suspended microphones featuring local writers, emerging and established, and invited the public to experience the work and their perception of the space. Exhibitions like these are what well-designed accessible space enables, free and open expression, collaboration, and meeting points. Free art is not always sustainable but having art that anyone at any time can access is special. Some regard Southbank as a tourism space, designed to encourage visitation from travellers – but I’ll take what I can get.

Most cities have a place like Southbank. Perth has King’s Park; I walk along the kangaroo-paw dotted paths with my mum when I go and visit her. The park sprawls above the city in well-designed walking routes, above the glittering Swan River and the stoic Rio Tinto buildings. The people in my city’s gardens are usually just passing through to the university or the CBD or the finance district, I don’t know anyone that stays long. Sometimes I get lost walking in circles because there’s minimal signage.

Perth has a nice library, too. It’s striking in an architectural sense, a circular building with sweeping stone columns. Inside, free internet, free events, video games and meeting rooms. My favourite part of that library is the Tree of Knowledge, a weeping fig, growing on the fourth floor that reminds me of The Red Tree by Shaun Tan. There are places to sit, to lie, to linger. Across other capital cities and regional centres in Australia there is usually a good park and a good library.

Melbourne seems like they’re doing better than other spaces, placing seventh on the Centre for Liveable Cities rankings. They have good parks and good libraries. Their Federation Square ticks all the boxes of what urban planners believe to be a good public space; it’s accessible, connecting many places to this central point and close to the annals of public transport. It’s comfortable and aesthetically pleasing, with award-winning architecture, seating and enough space that people don’t feel jostled enough to move on. It facilitates an array of activities, with a screen and stage, free art spaces and plenty of room for seasonal attractions. Finally, it’s sociable. It is a central place to meet and exists without the conditions that other spaces have, like the expectation of spending money or drinking alcohol. Most places cannot cut it against those four pieces of criteria.

Why don’t we expect more from our cities? In my city, the good park and the good library exist in the same 20-hectares of the 1.5 million my city consists of. After these spaces are built, what are we left with? Currently, our cities prioritise cars over people. They create hostile anti-homeless architecture. like benches with unnecessary arm rests, that also alienates the people who live off the streets. If our urban planners and designers do not focus on community over revenue stream, the community and vibrancy of a city comes to a standstill.

When I feel like I don’t have public spaces I feel invited to, I tend to just stay home. Most people I know have had periods of their lives where they’ve felt the same. In these periods, I feel isolated from my community events, especially since creative and queer events tend to exist in spaces which have an unspoken rule: buy alcohol to support the venue so the event can keep happening. I spoke to my friend Tayla, a local LGBTQIA+ community organiser, about her experiences with space and what disappoints her about the space we have.

Having good space, to the communities that I’m a part of, is a massive deal, she says.

How do you mean?

Community space is so few and far between, it’s hard to find good, accessible safe space, Tayla says.

And when you can’t find them? I ask.

Not having those spaces means, for a lot of people, there is no public safe haven.

Nowhere you feel that belonging, I say.

Yes, I want the spaces I organise in to be open for absolutely everyone, but they’re hard to seek out. Queer communities need safety in a space, they need to feel safe in public – it’s not always a reality.

Makes you wonder where we can gather and grow community while feeling safe.

Tayla laughs, if you find some good ones, tell me.

I have to acknowledge my privilege and note that I’m extremely lucky to have a job that I can go to and feel safe in. I’m fortunate enough that I can attend university and use the facilities. I’m fortunate enough to afford to cough up the price of a coffee most days and sit in the cafes so I can read, but I don’t think it should be this way.

I think my city, like most cities, owes more to their citizens. People should live in liveable cities, with places to sit without the worry of being disturbed. People should have access to leisure activities and hobbies without having to always pay. People should have places out of the elements to go and exist, more than just libraries and shops and homes. We deserve places to grow, to find likeminded people, to create community without barriers or price tags.

It is not too much to ask that our spaces are designed for us. Being consigned to a select few community spaces halts the progression of our city’s culture. We need places to create and talk to one another and exchange ideas, to enjoy and experience. Or, at the very least, we just need somewhere to sit.

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