I was privileged to meet with Jim McKee, City Council candidate for Division 7 in the last civic election and partner at Gemutlich at the Top of Town, this past weekend. We discussed Division 7, what is happening around the Ipswich CBD, and the recent concept plan for its redevelopment. All very exciting news if you are a resident of Ipswich!

The redevelopment plan calls for 4 distinct areas within the CBD, the Bell Street Mall, the Civic Centre, the Library, and the Laneway Precinct. Phase 1 of the project includes the Bell Street Mall and Food Experience and is scheduled to start construction in the middle of this year.

While I am excited to see how this turns out, and would love to see it succeed, the plan itself concerns me. I dislike these sort of rejuvenation projects that have no granularity — master planned from the beginning at a large scale.

When we master plan large swaths of our CBD, we get to the point where the project is just too big to fail; and to some extent we are there already. This redevelopment is itself a second iteration of the original Mall and City Square redevelopment of 1987, a project that was also praised as the rebirth and renewal of the CBD, but after 30 years the project has not spurred the private development originally anticipated and the mall in now floundering.

But the civic government won’t let it fail — it can’t let it fail — because failure of this magnitude would be catastrophic for the City. So the “only” answer is to double down and make even more investment.

These stereotypical master planned rejuvenation project all have the same problems. Typically the development involves major land assembly and high upfront costs, which leads to high risk. The financing for these projects come in by the truckload, when it finally does come, but the Federal and/or the State government have already earmarked it for something big that requires a ribbon-cutting. We all know the Federal and State members would never miss a photo-op while spending our money.

But what if there was a different tactic? Has council even asked the question?

The idea of incremental Urbanism is to make the smallest positive change possible, and as you make more and more small changes the benefits snowball. The added benefit of this style of urban revitalisation is that if any one project fails, we learn from the mistake and move on without major incident. While there is risks in each individual project, the overall risk is reduced because of the volume.

Can you think of a small project that City Council could do to improve the state of the CBD? Let me know in the comments.