Its the Vibe

If you’ve seen The Castle, you’ll remember Dennis Denuto standing in court explaining property law with the immortal phrase: “It’s the vibe of the thing, your Honour.” It’s funny because it’s true.

Cities have a vibe. And once you’ve felt it, you know exactly what it is even if you can’t quite explain it. That thought was sitting quietly in the background when David Engwicht came to Townsville for a series of workshops hosted by the Townsville Chamber of Commerce.

But before getting to the workshops, it’s worth stepping back for a moment. Because the way we experience a place is rarely just about buildings or infrastructure. it’s about moments and memories.

The Townsville I Remember

When I was a teenager, the CBD on a Friday night was where you went. You met your friends at the fountain, because that’s where everyone met. Not because it was particularly convenient. Because it was the spot. And of course this was before mobile phones, so if you said you’d meet someone there at seven, you actually had to turn up.

We’d wander the streets for a bit, grab a potato with crispy onions from the potato man or sometimes just a hotdog or if feeling flash head to the International Foodcourt , then head to the movies. Afterwards you didn’t rush home. You hung around. Walked the streets. Saw who else was out that night. I am sure everyone has their own memories depending on their generation and experiences but looking back now, what I remember most isn’t the shops or even the cinema.

It’s the feeling of the place. The sense that the city centre was where things happened.

When That Feeling Fades

Cities rarely lose that feeling all at once.It happens gradually.

Retail moves elsewhere. Offices still operate but people come in, do what they need to do and leave  again. Streets that once felt busy start to feel quieter than they used to.

The interesting thing is that the physical city usually doesn’t change that much. The buildings are still there. The laneways are still there. The streets are still there. What changes is behaviour. When people stop lingering and once people stop building memories in a place, the connection to that place fades surprisingly quickly.

There was a time when the Townsville CBD didn’t need to persuade people to come in.
You just went. But you can't look back and go why isn't doing what we did before working. Times change, people change and behaviour change. City Centres across the globe have shifted and therefore you need to reimagine how to make a heart and a home again and bring back the feeling that the the historical heart and centre of the city belonged to you.

The kind of thing Dennis Denuto tried to explain in The Castle when he said, “It’s the vibe of the thing, your Honour.”

The Question Behind the Workshops

When the Townsville Chamber of Commerce invited David Engwicht to run a series of Uptown workshops earlier this year, the conversation wasn’t really about urban design or planning frameworks. It was about something much simpler.

Why do some places feel like home, while others feel like somewhere you just pass through?

Engwicht has spent decades exploring that question with cities around the world. One of the ideas he often returns to is that placemaking is really just another form of homemaking. Homemaking turns a house into a home. Placemaking turns a space into somewhere people feel they belong.

Across two half-day workshops in Townsville, business owners, property owners, council staff and people who care about the future of the CBD spent time talking about what that actually means in practice. Not theory. Behaviour.

The Laneway Moment

The most interesting part of David’s visit didn’t happen inside the workshop room. It happened in the Flinders Lane, One the sidewalk and in the streets.

The idea was simple. Bring your lunch into the laneway. Sit down for a while. Listen to some music. Hear a short talk. People grabbed food from nearby cafés. Some brought their own lunch. A few people arrived first, then a few more. Gradually the lane began to fill.

Earlier in the day we had been doing a walk-through of the city with David, looking at spaces and talking about how people move through them showing while our city centre had good bones it didn't have a lot of character. However he used Gecko Interior as a exemplar in what an experienced focus business can do to a streets mood.

People who weren’t part of the group would stop, listen for a moment and then quietly fall in behind us, following along to hear what was being said.

During the packed lunch talk, a couple walked through the laneway yelling and carrying on with the kind of behaviour that has become a familiar frustration in the CBD. David paused the talk and simply invited them to stay and join in if they wanted to. One of them did. He stopped. Listened for a while. And the behaviour stopped.

At the Lunch where a musician was playing to the controlled "approved" participants, David suggested moving the musician who had been playing inside the laneway out to the street. As soon as the music moved closer to the footpath, people began to gather. Some stopped for a moment. Others drifted down the lane to see what was happening. The energy shifted almost immediately.

Around us people sat along the edges of the laneway talking to people they hadn’t planned to talk to. A few office workers wandered down just to see what was going on. For a little while the lane stopped behaving like a shortcut between buildings and started behaving like a place. Nothing about the physical environment had changed. But the experience of the space had

When cities start talking about revitalisation, the conversation usually turns quickly to large projects. Infrastructure. Investment. Big plans. Those things matter. But the workshops kept circling a quieter idea. Cities come alive when people want to spend time in them. Not because they have to. Because they want to. Our job was to come up with some ideas , projects that were doable, uncomplicated and could have impact. Those initial four projects centering on lingering, home making and giving our CBD a fresh identity are now the compass for Uptown Initiatives but we also have the ability of being agile and finding opportunities when they come.  


Standing in Flinders Lane during that packed lunch, it was hard not to think back to those Friday nights as a teenager. The fountain. The movies. The potato man. Different time. Different city. But the same underlying idea.

When a place starts to hold memories again, something else begins to return with it.

The vibe.

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