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Welcome to CityChats<\/a>, where Brisbane Times meets our city\u2019s most interesting characters on our most iconic form of transport. This week, architecture influencer Izzie White tells us why she\u2019s passionate about Brisbane being pink, and how we should rethink our relationship with public space.<\/p>\n We meet White at Riverside ferry terminal near Eagle Street on a drizzly overcast day after she ducked out of work to chat with us.<\/p>\n How did you get into making social media content?<\/p>\n I make short-form videos explaining how to understand modern architecture and modern city making. I studied my bachelor and masters of architecture in Brisbane. I\u2019ve been between Melbourne and Brisbane over the last couple of years, when I\u2019ve really got to see the difference in city making.<\/p>\n About a year ago, I decided the public should really know about this too, and I started making videos. I\u2019ve had the most amazing journey being able to talk to the public online about how to understand the city going up around them.<\/p>\n Architecture feels like something that we all love and are exposed to, and it\u2019s around us, but it feels a little bit unattainable. Has that been your experience?<\/p>\n Architecture has a very tough relationship with the media. A lot of what makes it into mainstream media is very expensive houses that not a lot of us are ever going to live in. If you\u2019ve ever seen the stats, about 97 per cent of homes in Australia are done without architects, so the portion of architecture that gets covered by mainstream media is incredibly narrow.<\/p>\n Big commercial work is very hard to talk to the media about when you\u2019re an architect because you really have to protect your client relationships, so when you\u2019re working for an architecture firm and you do want to put out media, you are held really tightly with what you can say.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not unusual, it\u2019s just the way of the world, but that is why we have this incredible comms bubble between what architects know and what they\u2019re working on, and what the general public get to see and understand about their city.<\/p>\n Related Article You\u2019ve lived between Brisbane and Melbourne in the past few years. What is your experience watching a city like Melbourne grow compared to Brisbane?<\/p>\n Almost every city in Australia right now is facing a similar housing conversation, and almost every city is approaching the solution in a similar way. We are increasing density to allow for more supply in our inner-city areas, and that makes a lot of sense.<\/p>\n I think Melbourne has more pressure, with more people. It\u2019s also a much less forgiving climate. And so they\u2019ve had a lot of tension in where they put this new housing.<\/p>\n The lesson out of that, which I hope Brisbane can avoid, is that long-term planning with communities and being able to bring them on board with where more housing is going to go is a much better solution than rapid rezoning and sending out panic alarms. It can absolutely be done, it takes longer, and in a public conversation that focuses mainly on housing supply, there\u2019s much less focus on master-planning for livable communities.<\/p>\n Do you think we need to be cautious of sprawl, and is it being addressed?<\/p>\n What we have to be cautious of is relying on houses and apartments to do everything. Australia has the lowest-density cities in the world.<\/p>\n There is a direct relationship between how much time you spend in the private home and how much time you spend in the public realm. If you don\u2019t have that third bedroom, chances are you\u2019re going to the park, or you\u2019re looking for a studio that you can rent in the civic realm, and that\u2019s what\u2019s so cool about big cities.<\/p>\n When you do travel to the Tokyos, Londons, New Yorks, they have this jam-packed street life. That is what density supports and facilitates, but it also needs that public realm built in.<\/p>\n Related Article So I think the lesson is that the infrastructure has to come with the housing to support that, because otherwise, where does everyone go if they don\u2019t have the backyard and there\u2019s no park being built?<\/p>\n Do you think we\u2019re doing that well enough? Are we building the parks and the extra elements around supporting that density?<\/p>\n Everyone could do it better. Brisbane is lucky in the sense that it has this built-in public space \u2013 being the river \u2013 along almost the whole length of it.<\/p>\n Our weather also facilitates being able to pop down for free, go for a bike ride in a big outdoor public open space, so we\u2019re very lucky that we have that. Once we get away from those inner-city areas with that already good and built-up amenity, we do need to be really mindful that we\u2019re building in civic and community facilities to facilitate that public life. Without it, you risk exacerbating urban challenges that are already felt, like traffic, isolation, things like that.<\/p>\n We\u2019re about to go through, I guess, a bit of an identity change, to reshape our identity somewhat, with starting the Olympics build. There\u2019s going to be quite a lot of transformation of the river itself. It just feels like we\u2019re about to embark on something that\u2019s going to change it quite dramatically.<\/p>\n Are you worried about that?<\/p>\n I\u2019m not worried about the Olympics speeding up development. I think the Olympics have been going around for a long time now for a lot of major cities, and there are a lot of amazing lessons to be learnt from all of those.<\/p>\n I have full faith that the architects that are being selected are going to take on board everything that has been documented and already tried before.<\/p>\n I do hope that we get good public amenity out of it and not just new private spaces.<\/p>\n South Bank is a great example of doing a massive piece of urban renewal. Some people might call it gentrification but 30 years on, everyone seems to think it\u2019s a great thing. It\u2019s a very tough line to walk.<\/p>\n As we\u2019re returning to the Riverside ferry terminal, White points out one of her favourite apartment buildings in Brisbane<\/a> \u2013 443 Queen Street \u2013 a collaboration between WOHA Architects, Architectus, TCL, and RPS Landscape Architecture.<\/p>\n Do you think we\u2019re skipping over generations of design because of our love of the Queenslander?<\/p>\n Totally. It\u2019s an amazing thing to sort of not learn from past mistakes. Everyone seems to look back on old projects, saying, \u201cI wish we kept that\u201d, without realising that we\u2019re doing the same thing now.<\/p>\n I would say there\u2019s very little incentive for developers to be able to keep those buildings. A lot of extra work has to go into peeling apart a building and seeing what\u2019s usable.<\/p>\n Without the policy to incentivise that shift in thinking to building sustainably, thinking about material and energy of life, we\u2019re probably not going to see it if we just rely on the market. It does come back to better policy and people putting the pressure on what they want to see in their city.<\/p>\n White and her mother are behind the renovation of Miss Midgley\u2019s<\/a>, a pink heritage-listed boutique hotel on James Street in New Farm \u2013 and she has strong opinions about colour on Brisbane streets.<\/p>\n You\u2019ve spoken online about the colour of Queenslanders and the heritage aspect of them. Why are you so passionate about this?<\/p>\n I\u2019m incredibly passionate about keeping Brisbane\u2019s identity. Of course, housing is going to change and we\u2019re going to have a big city, of course we are, but there are lessons in our architecture that we shouldn\u2019t lose, colour being one of them.<\/p>\n I\u2019m a big believer that Brisbane should be pink \u2013 the whole city. Because when we come in and we paint everything white, it\u2019s an incredibly anonymous colour. It doesn\u2019t say anything about our landscapes, our flora or our fauna.<\/p>\n Related Article Queenslanders were always colourful, and it\u2019s to do with shifting glare in our hot, hot Brisbane sun. You can keep all of our colours light and bright, you can do sage greens and pastel blues and beautiful buttercup yellows, you\u2019re still going to reflect a lot of heat, but we\u2019re keeping that core Brisbane identity.<\/p>\n The reason I\u2019m so passionate about that, aside from the fact that I think it\u2019s beautiful, is that if we really want to be a global city, we need an identity that is ours. And when we import things that didn\u2019t come from this place, we risk looking like, and feeling like, everything else.<\/p>\n Brisbane was built on this incredible stone bed called the Brisbane tuff. It\u2019s this beautiful pink sandstone that was used to build all of our heritage buildings. It was cut by convicts. It\u2019s also a beautiful relationship with a landscape that we built over the top of, and there\u2019s this idea in design called a sense of place, making sure that what you\u2019re developing responds to the very specific location it\u2019s being built in.<\/p>\n Should the Olympic stadium be pink?<\/p>\n I think the Olympic stadium should be pink, and not just with lighting, do it permanent.<\/p>\n Start the day with a summary of the day\u2019s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. 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James Hall<\/a> is the News Director at the Brisbane Times. He is the former Queensland correspondent at The Australian Financial Review and has reported for a range of mastheads across the country, specialising on political and finance reporting.Connect via X<\/a> or email<\/a>.From our partners