Without any prompting we received this review from Michael McManus. He bought ‘Brisbane 2050: Nirvana or Nightmare?’ at the launch one Friday evening. Over the weekend he read it and was prompted to write the following. When we received it, we were flabbergasted. Until then the comments had been ‘congratulations’ or ‘well done, mate’, but these are Professor McManus’s sentiments:
‘In her thought provoking critiques of Michael O’Siadhail’s new book "The Five Quintets," Angela O'Donnell captures the essence of his poem, ‘Morning on Grafton Street’. The poet “describes his native Dublin coming awake in terms that are sensual, grounding the reader firmly in the physical beauty of the here-and-now, yet it is a sensuality that bodies forth an invisible spiritual dynamic.”
According to AJP McClintock in his new book “Brisbane 2050: Nirvana or Nightmare,” our fair city has a snowball’s chance in hell of evoking such a response. He believes Brisbane is currently in the ‘last chance saloon’ and unless we seize the moment our fragile beautiful city will be destined to become Bris Vegas, a park free city smothered by brutal high-rise ghettos.
McClintock reports that no planning document, even the Brisbane Master Plan and associated documents, have any gravitas. We are essentially living in a city with no holistic plan for itself, how it fits into Queensland, and the nation in general.
For the last 13 years of his professional life as an architect, the author held the position of Director of Property & Facilities at the University of Queensland, which took great pride in developing and enacting a Site Development Plan. Prior to this he worked as an architect in Ireland, England and Saudi Arabia, and many of the examples in the book draw on his rich international experience.
McClintock highlights Brisbane’s petulance in building tunnels at great expense ($7.8 billion) to solve significant traffic problems at the exclusion of building bridges, has only ensured we are still a city divided by a river and baffled by traffic jams.
In the process, McClintock compares Brisbane, which has five bridges servicing the CBD, to Dublin, a much smaller city, with 16. There are many similar comparisons with London, Paris and New York about green spaces, building codes, ring roads, highways and railway lines that give you an overriding impression that our architects, urban planners and civil engineers have been asleep at the wheel.
The same criticism could also be levelled at university academic schools of engineering and architecture and institutes: Planning Institute of Australia, Australian Institute of Architects, Australian Institute of Landscape Architects and Australian Institute of Civil Engineers. However, McClintock saves his most pungent criticism for politicians (Right Honourable Members) and bureaucrats in charge of the Brisbane City Council, Queensland Government and the Federal Government in Canberra.
While the Brisbane City Hall and the Queensland Government on George Street are at best a kilometre apart, he claims that no consensus planning document for Brisbane and its surrounds has seen the light of day. Canberra’s intransigence generally reflects party political politics and it has severely delayed the Cross-City Rail project.
McClintock gives you the impression that our Right Honourable Members, on both sides of the divide, lack an international perspective and have no concept of a systems approach to planning a vibrant competitive city.
While the book is written in a folksy style with lots of personal references, it nonetheless, captures the author’s helicopter view of the complexity in planning a dynamic State capital city. It’s a must read for new and old Right Honourable Members and bureaucrats. It is also a wonderful resource for the general public who take great pride in their fair city.'
Michael E. McManus BPharm (Curtin), PhD (UWA), GAICD, HonDSc(Curtin) Emeritus Professor, University of Queensland (UQ) Adjunct Professor, Queensland University of Technology (QUT)