“Power without love is reckless and abusive… Love without power is sentimental and anemic.” – Martin Luther King Jr.

I like former Councillor Martin. Every interaction I have had with him shows how much he loves this city, and how much he loves the CBD.

But this brings me to the quote I used to open. Love without power is sentimental and anemic. The CBD doesn’t need love, or rather not love alone. It needs love and power.

“Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, and economic change” – Martin Luther King Jr.

Both of these quotes are from Martin Luther King Jr’s Where do we go from here? speech. Aptly named, so I rebranded it — Where does Ipswich go from here?

I said in my last post — What has happened to Entrepreneurship? — that Councillor Martin doesn’t see the relationship between the growth of chain businesses and the decline of local businesses. That might not be entirely true, I’m sure he understands the very basics of economics, that money spent in one store can’t be spent in another.

But where I do believe his understanding breaks down is that he sees both the growth of national chains and the growth of local businesses in Ipswich as equally beneficial. He sees a local business like Memories of India opening and thinks “Yay, growth!”; but he also sees the developments along Brisbane Street in West Ipswich and thinks “Yay, growth!”. But they aren’t.

Changing the Outcomes

In organisational change there is a concept called the Iceberg Model to help you think about events, and why they happen.

At the top of the iceberg are the things we see, the event — in this case we’ll look at the development of the old eight mile hotel site into a chain store retail strip.

Just below the surface you have the pattern of events — the trend of this same event happening over and over. Along Brisbane Street in West Ipswich you have Bunnings, the Puma/Zarraffa’s/Hungry Jack’s site, the Forty Winks/IGA/TK Maxx site. It’s a pattern of development where national chains thrive and local business struggles, completely dominated by automobiles and parking.

Then there are the structures, the systems that are in place that virtually assure this is the growth we get. Things like zoning — the developments got the approval of the planning department. Things like financing — it’s really easy to get a loan from a national bank when you have 4 national retail tenants attached to the development. Things like transport — it’s important to build huge parking lots when the public works department makes it really easy for cars to move through the CBD.

Systemic Problems

But why not change the systems? If it is leading us to outcomes that are sub-optimal why do we continue in this manner?

The reason is because the system is a manifestation of our mental models. Our Council, and our citizens, all have this idea that growth is good, as if growth is the ends unto itself. I would say this isn’t the case, growth alone isn’t the ends — productive growth is what we want.

Not all growth is created equal. One type of growth, the type we are seeing in West Ipswich, is extractive. The other type of growth, the productive stuff, is what we are seeing in places like Circa 160.

One type of growth caters to formula businesses and the virtual exclusion of local independent business. The other promotes local business and community.

One type of growth is automobile dependent, the other walkable and safe.

Here’s to hoping for a little more of the latter and a little less of the former.