The Gabba Cross River Rail site is not only the largest infrastructure project in Queensland’s history but is a massive piece of public land in the heart of Woolloongabba. This is a 5+ hectare site with huge potential to meet a range of community needs.
Imagine a large beautiful new public park with shade, seating and a playground. A place for the community to meet, connect and enjoy. A park surrounded by affordable medium-density homes for local people and families, rather than high-density apartments towering above.
Alongside Max Chandler-Mather and Amy MacMahon, I’ll fight to keep this site to remain in public hands and implement a vision alongside the community.
Below, you can find info about the alternative visions we’ve produced for the Gabba Station, what we think the government is currently planning for both stations, and how you can make your voice heard most effectively. Please enter your contact details at the bottom of the page to sign up for updates about the growing campaign for a better future for this site.
The Gabba office has released two alternative visions for redeveloping the Cross River Rail Gabba site. These images are not detailed proposals. Rather than being finalised concept designs, they simply aim to show what’s possible. Some elements may not be feasible in the proposed context or not quite what the community really needs. But we’ve produced these drawings to share a broader range of ideas and prompt deeper discussions.
So far, images and videos released by the State Government have shown very little detail about the future of the Gabba site. The hope is these visions will inspire residents to produce their own ideas for how this massive 5-hectare publicly owned site can best meet the community’s needs.
Both visions include space for an Aboriginal cultural centre, a 50-metre public swimming pool, a large skate park, playgrounds, sports courts, dog off-leash areas and a wide range of community facilities.
Naturally, we envisage that all buildings would be designed to be as sustainable as possible, emphasising sourcing construction materials locally and using materials like cross-laminated timber to reduce reliance on concrete and steel. In addition, all buildings would incorporate stormwater collection, greywater recycling, on-site organic waste composting, water-smart and energy-smart fixtures and appliances, and solar panels on the underutilised roof and awning.
The Mixed-Use Vision features a couple of office blocks and medium-density and higher-density apartment blocks containing several hundred dwellings. These apartments could be rented to high-needs, low-income residents and middle-income and higher-income households, creating a diverse community of residents of different backgrounds and financial positions who all live in similar-style housing and have access to the same public facilities. In addition, office space could be made freely available to government departments and non-profit organisations like Murri Watch or rented out to the private sector as a source of revenue.
The Mixed-Use Vision shows a pedestrian overpass to the Gabba Stadium, which has also been proposed by the State Government. However, unlike State Government concept designs, we envisage that such an overpass could also span Stanley Street, connecting cyclists and pedestrians to and from the Logan Road precinct and southeast active transport corridors. This serves a broader range of uses, whereas an overpass to the Gabba Stadium would be of comparatively little value on the many days of the year when significant events aren’t hosted at the stadium.
The Blue-Green Vision does not include any residential apartments. Still, it offers more space for sport and recreation, with a full-sized athletics track, larger parks, community gardens and market stall spaces for artisans and farmers markets. The Blue-Green Vision also includes an area for natural lagoons and densely vegetated bushland reserves, cooling the city, reducing stormwater flooding, and providing more habitat for native wildlife.
The Blue-Green Vision proposes to work with the sloping nature of the site, nestling a sizeable underground music venue into the corner of Leopard St and the Vulture St motorway slip lane, with parkland over the music venue roof that connects to the existing corridor of native trees around the motorway. This would dramatically improve connectivity for native wildlife moving between central Woolloongabba and Maiwar (the Brisbane River).
If you have further questions about some of the other ideas and elements depicted in these alternative visions, email us at [email protected], and we can add more detail to this explanation. -