After completing my Public Involvement and Community Development course at university, I was still unsatisfied with the notion that best practice public participation was considered by many - if not most - as too idealistic and impractical for planning in South East Queensland.

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It was around that time that I found the Right to the City Brisbane group. The "Right to the City" originated as a concept in 1968, in a book written by French Marxist philosopher and sociologist, Henri Lefebvre. In more recent years, urban geographer David Harvey has described it as:

“…far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanisation. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.” (Harvey, 2008, p.23).

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I wanted to get involved with the Right to the City Brisbane, and volunteered as an Event Facilitator at their Cracks in the Concrete Ideas Fiesta, which addressed issues such as housing affordability, environmentally sustainable architecture and urban design, and social inclusion in planning processes. This event was followed by a protest party which launched the group's "Break the Boundary" campaign. 

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This protest party demonstrated how citizens can peacefully occupy and playfully activate space, and how a community can create and gain control of their own public space. By closing down both lanes from the intersection at Boundary Street to 56 Russell Street to vehicular traffic, the road was transformed into a pop-up public square.

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My involvement with this group has shown me how communities can organise and mobilise to campaign for more sustainable, affordable and accessible development in their city.