We are half-way through the U.R{BNE} Festival for 2013! It’s been a fantastic few weeks, and we’re looking forward to the next few! Amy Saunders Grey, Vibrant Places founder, is on the Leadership Panel for the Collective. Along with her fellow leaders, Amy has assisted members in establishing their events (most of whom have never done anything like this before), working with council to get permits and producing the upcoming City Chic event. Events this week are Spencer Lane Live on Wednesday 24th, Games Night on ANZAC day (which will be at Reddacliff Place), the Bleeding Heart Space Exhibit Opening Night and a Bridges Walk on the 28th. But there are still more events coming up after this week! Plus looking back there have been some fantastic events during the Festival and below are some highlight images.
URBNE / Ideas Fiesta Albert St Picnic (photo by Jessie)
Crowds and decor of Arabian Nights in Spencer Lane
Art @ the Park
Lazy Sunday Cycle
The crowd at Scavenger Snaps
Winners of Scavenger Snaps (click to enlarge)
URBNE Film Festival organised by Yen (and Amy was part of the panel)
For the last 4 years I have been fortunate to have a job as a Project Landscape Architect at Yurrah; I have been working full time at Yurrah and doing Vibrant Places work in my spare time. By day I'm a Landscape Architect, by night ... Yurrah are an Environmental Consultancy and it's been great to get a Land Planning perspective on Landscape Architecture. I'll never forget it and I'm sure it will influence my future work. But now I'm moving on and I'm very excited to announce I will be working at the new firm Meter Design. Meter will allow me to use the skills I've obtained doing my Vibrant Places work. Their focus is on Urban Design and Masterplanning at a conceptual level. Even more exciting I'll be working flexible hours, casually, meaning I can balance my Vibrant Places work with my Landscape Architectural work. And there are some really exciting things I am working on right now including Burnett City Chic ... and the soon to be announced Seaside Dinner (more to come on that). Games Night will still be on for 2013 and we have some great Special Event ideas happening soon. Lazy Sunday Cycle has expanded to Sydney and we are getting such large numbers that we are considering seeking sponsorship. We're starting to organise Brisbane Diner en Blanc 2013 and have some great ideas to watch out for. I'll be traveling to London in September for the London Design Festival with the bursary I received for my Queensland Emerging Leader Award and will be blogging the whole time I'm there. Thankyou for following me and I look forward to contributing more in the future. -Amy
I am so amazed at the incredible work of Kelly Meyer, Graphic Designer, as she paints the Giant Mahjong! To my knowledge this is the largest Mahjong set in the world (but if you know of a larger one, let me know). The Giant Mahjong will activate King George Square for free, on 21 February 2013 (1 weeks time) from 5-9pm, as part of the Brisbane City Council's BrisAsia Festival - it will be well worth coming to check out this incredible work by Kelly!
Kelly Meyer paints a Giant Mahjong tile
A flurry of colourful parasols greet you on your way home. Everyone around you fans themselves on the warm summer night standing under glowing, floating lanterns. You hear loud, rhythmic drums and are enticed to join the growing crowd. They stop. The crowd parts, and a Giant Mahjong set is revealed. People call out they are looking for players for the normal sized Mahjong games, and you decide to join them later. You smell delicious food sizzling on a hotplate, incredibly installed on a bike. You’re intrigued and can’t help but go and grab some gyoza. Boiling hot tea is being poured ceremoniously into china, and you watch and learn, so you can try it later at home. Around you are more Giant Games – Giant Chinese Checkers, Giant Scrabble, Giant Jenga, Giant Connect Four. People of all ages, cultures and background are playing the games and enjoying themselves. Where are you? You’re in Brisbane’s King George Square on 21 February 2013 at 5pm for BrisAsia Games! If you want this experience come along to the BrisAsia Games Night for: EDIT: Date corrected to Thursday night 21 February 2013
A city is not buildings, bitumen, parks. A city is people, on mass living together.
The buildings, bitumen and parks are how we live together. YOU are your city U R BNE UR{BNE} is a collective in Brisbane who run a yearly festival - the UR{BNE} Festival and Amy Saunders from Vibrant Places is on the committee. On 23 January we will be running an Idea's Cafe where we invite everyone to come and bring their ideas for the urban spaces of Brisbane. These ideas can be become projects for the UR{BNE} Festival in April/May 2013. If you have an idea you want to develop or want to help someone develop their idea, come along! The details:Wednesday, 23 January 2013 Sparrow & Finch Café (Adelaide St at Creek St) 5:30pm for 6pm start $10 tickets on eventbrite (nibbles provided + cash bar) Buy tickets via Eventbrite + read more about the Ideas Cafe Why:... because you are your city - so you should contribute to it Below is the official invite (download it as PDF or view as a .jpg), please spread it around!  | Ideas Cafe Invite Jan 2013 | | File Size: | 230 kb | | File Type: | pdf |
Download File
Our last Idea's Cafe in 2012 was very successful in developing some great ideas for the UR{BNE} Festival 2012. Brooke Murphy put together a fantastic "Prezi" Presentation about the Festival which I highly recommend you check out!  One group discussing the Style over Speed ride at last year's Ideas Cafe
What to look forward to in early 2013 ... Most of these dates still need to be locked in, so please just use this as a guide. My News Years resolution is to provide a “What’s On” month to month on this blog. December 201320 | 5-9pm – Games Night Human Chess @ King George Square (see Facebook event) January 201313 | Lazy Sunday Cycle (meet at Lota Train Station) (see Facebook event) 23 | UR{BNE} Ideas Café (TBC) 31 | Games Night February 20133 | Lazy Sunday Cycle TBC | Special Games Night event … more information to come soon March 20133 | Lazy Sunday Cycle 20 | UR{BNE} Ideas Café (TBC) 28 | Games Night April 20137 | Lazy Sunday Cycle 25 | Games Night TBC | UR{BNE} Festival 2013 May 2013TBC | UR{BNE} Festival 2013 5 | Lazy Sunday Cycle 30 | Games Night
This has been the biggest year of my life, professionally and personally and I’m so grateful that you were all there on the journey with me. My year started with buying our first house, an engagement, creating the first Human Chess as part of Games Night (which I must promote that we are doing again tomorrow night - check out the FB event) and being awarded a Lord Mayor Australia Day’s Award for Games Night … … towards the middle of the year I was part of the team leading the UR{BNE} Festival and started the Ideas Café; an idea I came up with as part of the Queensland Youth Forum was developed by a fantastic team and I joined them for Walk in Our Shoes; I was awarded a Queensland Emerging Designer Award; published a book about the five years of Brisbane PARK(ing) Day; co-founded Giant Games as a business with my father; I was given the amazing opportunity to promote Brisbane and the activation of public space work that I do at the BMW Guggenheim Lab in Berlin; Lazy Sunday Cycle just kept getting bigger and better each month; and I co-founded and co-directed the first ever Diner en Blanc in Australia … … and just recently I married a lovely man and we shared a fantastic honeymoon trip to northern Vietnam and northern Thailand, where I was thoroughly inspired by the people and the landscapes (… so watch this space)! I’m really looking forward to 2013 and I hope we can continue to fulfill our aims of making Brisbane a more vibrant city.
My husband and I training elephants in Thailand at the Elephant Conservation Centre, Chiang Mai
I found this synopsis on EDRA, about Activating Public Space, and think it's a great summary: Public space can support shifting, flexible activity
that allows multiple, overlapping, personal and collective use and the accompanying imbuement of meaning and attachment. Reciprocally, design interventions can “activate” space so that it becomes inviting, vibrant, exciting, and useful.
In post-industrial remnants, forgotten and redundant infrastructure, empty modernist spaces, underused parks and waning business districts, design insertions may serve to revive urban spaces, making
them safe and enjoyable and cultivating a culture of
“city life,” as advocated by Jan Gehl and exemplified
by Copenhagen’s successful urban open space network.
Transitory events and spatial occupation may establish and embed new use patterns, staking community claims to public space, such as New York City’s painted plazas on a temporarily—and now permanently—pedestrianized Broadway.
Temporary installations can also serve as instruments of site analyses, testing how a public
reacts or how a place or idea interacts with water and
weather. And in a stalled economy, temporary installations are viable strategies to fill voids that are deadening holes in the urban fabric.
I find myself infuriated by what I will refer to as “Display Home” Public Spaces. These are new public spaces developed in new planned areas, which are uninviting, unusable and lacking soul; they do however look gorgeous in photographs, they sell, sell, sell and they win awards.
For some time now I have been toying with the idea of starting an award in Australia - a retrospective award where we look at Australian Landscapes/Urban Design and Public Spaces that were nominated or won awards 5 or 10 years ago and see what they are like now – review them based on whether they succeeded in their aims, ask people whether they enjoy using the space, observe people’s interactions in the space and in some cases see if they are even still there.
I was influenced by my experience at the 72Hr Design Challenge by OUTR at the Melbourne Docklands. I was looking forward to visiting this area because it had won awards and had looked slick on the cover of magazines, however when I visited areas were being removed or restructured because they weren't working and no one was there; it was a desert; a beautiful, designed, soul-less desert. They were working on adding ‘life’ to the area with temporary interventions, which I commended them for at the time, but I can’t really understand, if the area needs more work, why it won awards.
As an emerging Landscape Architect I was highly influenced by the Australian public spaces winning awards, and aspired to create work just like them. I'm glad I was able to experience some of these spaces first-hand and realise some aren't all that they boast to be, before embarking on a career of copying their "look".Designers are influenced by other designers, and so if even one of these award winning spaces is not exemplary then it starts a cycle we can’t break.I've been thinking about this for a while, but a recent article, Whom Does Design Really Serve? by Fred Kent (2012) on the Project for Public Spaces website, has reinvigorated my thinking. In the article Kent reviews and reflects upon one of these “Display Home” Public Spaces, Sherbourne Common in Toronto, which recently won an award from the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects. Kent concludes that jury members of these awards are “tastemakers” not “placemakers” and too caught up in style. He too agrees that determining factor of the success of public space is “whether people are using it”, “Are they happy, and smiling?” and “Do they brag about how much they love it (not how many awards it’s won) to their friends in other cities?”Some of the comments on the article are interesting and I think actually further encourage me to pursue my Australian retrospective award idea. The commenter Roward Caister (3 October 2012) states that the, “planners made a concerted effort here to build the public realm before, rather than after, the new city precinct is built. There's no one there because.. there's no one living nearby at the moment. But, as a way to enhance the value of the neighbourhood for early residents and ensure that developers are given the best environment to market their units, the park was built first.” Caister may be correct; the space may be improved and more people may use it when people move there, but from Kent’s review it does sound like it will need some major improvements to humanize the space, and if it needs improvements why did it win awards, why is it considered exemplary? It sounds like it was created to be photographed, to sell people to move to the area. It may have a good “first impression”, but it isn't actually usable and in that way it is just like a “Display Home”.
I sometimes become quite disillusioned as a Landscape Architect when I see these “Display Home” public spaces and that’s generally why I pursue my interest in Placemaking and activating public spaces outside regular hours. I am still working on making this a feasible pursuit, but in the meantime, it is a passion that I will keep exploring. I know that PPS do some great reviews of Public Spaces (I urge you to check them out), but for my idea, I want to focus on those that won or were nominated for awards in Australia, so we review, as an industry, what we are doing. I don’t want these awards to be malicious or blame people. I just want them to be a catalyst for change and analysis in our industry.
My Australian retrospective award/review needs a name … any ideas? Please add ideas in the comments section! And if anyone wants to help, please contact me.
Some reflections on study:
I find it interesting that 6 months after graduating high-school my OP score became irrelevant, my university GPA never mattered to employers and that my Bachelor degree and post-graduate diploma are featuring less and less when I talk to people - what seems to matter most is my passion and my ability to come up with an idea and make it happen.
I don’t remember most of what I was taught in high school and most of my university studies were theoretical and are now either outdated, or were never relevant, but what they did teach me was to work damn hard, how to learn, to keep learning as things evolve and ignited the passion I have today.
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