PERSPECTIVE: Closing the loop on Brisbane River with River City Circuit
Richard Coulson, COX Chair and Partner, on COX’s proposal for The Courier-Mail’s Future Brisbane series, which advocates for the big ideas that could supercharge Brisbane 2032.
I moved to Brisbane in 1979, when I was nine, and it was quite a different city then. Brisbane tends to change incrementally, with the occasional leap when a major event gives it a push, as Expo ’88 did for South Bank. Plenty of those moments have happened along the river, our cultural heartbeat, which sees everything from the annual Riverfire to a morning ride on the CityCat.
So when Rachel Riley, editor of The Courier-Mail’s Future Brisbane series, challenged architects to pitch their ideas for the city, the river was the natural place to start. Our proposal, River City Circuit, is a 5-kilometre loop that joins South Bank, the Kangaroo Point Cliffs and the City Botanic Gardens, with the Goodwill and Kangaroo Point bridges as its two river crossings.
In our experience, the links between a city’s best places can matter as much as the places themselves, yet many of Brisbane’s riverside destinations still feel disconnected from one another. The Kangaroo Point Cliffs rank among the city’s highest-rated attractions, but few people pair them with South Bank and the Gardens on the same outing. The dry dock and the cliffs are two of the most dramatic places on the river, but at the moment they’re two separate journeys.
Bringing those journeys together is an idea that goes back 25 years for us, to when we designed the Goodwill Bridge to close a loop around South Bank. Our work on the Kangaroo Point Bridge, more than 100 years in the making, took it across the river to the cliffs, and now the proposed River City Circuit would bring both sides of the river into one walk.
Much of the circuit already exists, so the work is in connecting it rather than starting from scratch. Queensland architects are known for doing more with less, and this idea is very much in that spirit: the new pieces come in where they add something the city doesn’t yet have.
The circuit begins at South Bank, where the first of those new pieces could be a museum beside the historic dry dock, addressing a gap our earlier work with Queensland Museum identified. Brisbane has around half the space it needs to properly display the state’s natural and cultural history, compared with other Australian cities. We’d love to see one on the river that does justice to its history.
From there, the route crosses to the cliffs, where a new walk follows the clifftop and a lower path steps out over the water at a string of lookouts, so walkers can climb from the river’s edge to the top and watch the skyline extend around the bend.
Lighting investment from the bridges and through the Gardens and Cliffs would illuminate the loop after dark and improve safety, wayfinding and identity. The daytime connectivity is also important. Brisbane is a breakfast city, with a relaxed, outdoor culture that doesn’t have to try very hard, and it is easy to see locals and visitors alike starting this walk at sunrise and enjoying breakfast before embracing the day.
*[Above and below renders are for illustrative purposes only]
