Decades of appalling town planning brings tame CBD
TONY Cochrane’s “Future can be bright if leaders do their job”, regarding the Southport Central Business District (CBD) is on the money. However, the outcome was set in March 1995 with the amalgamation of the Gold Coast and the Albert Shire councils.
The Gold Coast has suffered for 25 years as a city built on 14 independent local villages, with Southport being the original home of business and commerce.
Successive mayors and councillors (including the current administration) need to take responsibility as collectively they have continued this trend with the establishment of competing business centres in Surfers Paradise, Broadbeach, Parklands education and medical precincts, Varsity Lakes and Robina.
Appalling town planning over more than two decades has denied the sixth largest city in Australia a vibrant CBD with a transport spine reaching into every corner of the city.
Today, we have the light rail, a predominantly coastal route to the airport under construction and we fail to have a citywide interconnected reliable transport network that allows residents and visitors transport choices around the city.
Imagine the economic activation and excitement of tens of thousands of people working in a CBD and the potential this could have delivered to any single location in the City of Gold Coast?
It’s simplistic and cheap pointscoring to now consider retrofitting Southport as a vibrant CBD with the 80 per cent of business and commerce operating successfully outside of Southport.
Businesses have made their decisions and won’t be moving into Southport any time soon, as there is not a single reason to do so other than the words of the few and those with financial interests in Southport.
New ivory towers with courts, council officers and other state and federal public servants does not make a CBD and the experts in place making all agree.
Why remove direct community services from suburbs into high-rise buildings away from the majority of our population?
The City Plan appears to have an obsession with principal or major activity centres, with 10 in a city of just over 700,000 people.
Considering the fragile state of fixed retail spaces and the hundreds of shop vacancies in the city, maybe it’s time to consider a moratorium on commercial and retail space in every new tower that’s approved in the city.
We don’t need more retail, we need a population in excess of a million people and quickly.
The city’s place making should have been enshrined in the City Plan and unfortunately the Gold Coast City Plan has been focused on the interests of developing residential and holiday accommodation and not focusing on core issues such as where do people work and live, ensuring residential amenity was the No.1 planning outcome.
RICHARD HOLLIDAY, SURFERS PARADISE