Mayor should look beyond shoreline high-rise model

GIVEN his fierce commitment to our city, Mayor Tate’s reaction to implicit disparagement of the Gold Coast by the Victorian Premier is understandable (GCB 29/9), but it might be better if he considered the message it contains before aggressively responding to it.

Many Gold Coasters do not regard Surfers Paradise as an ideal model for development in their suburbs.

This includes newcomers, not just oldies like me who can remember how beautiful Surfers was with its tree-lined foreshore before high-rise development started there.

Like many residents of the southern end of the Gold Coast, I rarely venture north of Pacific Fair if I can avoid it, finding Surfers lacking aesthetic appeal by day and basic safety by night.

The empty shops don’t appeal much either.

The “world city” status pursued by Mayor Tate with admirable energy has a focus on highrise towers lining the waterfront, and seems to be based on models found in Hawaii’s Honolulu, Florida’s Miami or China’s Shanghai – all great cities.

But why not consider the approaches adopted in such undeniably world-class tourist attraction cities as Paris, Venice, or San Sebastian, where densification has occurred without tower blocks obscuring the cities’ beauty?

This may require a little more imagination and creativity than the present GCCC approach exhibits, requiring alternative nodes of restricted height developments balanced by parks and cultural precincts away from the principal attractions.

But surely it is not beyond our architects, planners and builders to achieve such a balance.

Mayor Tate’s legacy of a firstclass cultural precinct may not be enough in the eyes of future generations of Gold Coasters to counterbalance his advocacy for wall-to-wall high-rise south of Burleigh and the negative impact on coastal environment and aesthetics that it will cause.