A CITY THAT KNOWS HOW TO USE A MOMENT.

There is a particular quality to cities that have hosted major global events and emerged from them carrying something permanent — a precinct, a habit of public life, a revised understanding of what the city might become. Barcelona after 1992. Sydney after 2000. Brisbane, in 1988, discovered this for itself, and what it discovered was South Bank.

Expo 88 was a temporary event but it changed Brisbane culturally and physically. It redefined the city as one oriented towards culture and leisure, turning citizens into cosmopolitan consumers. The six months of the World Exposition did not simply entertain a city; they reset its expectations of itself. And when the tents came down and the pavilions were cleared, those expectations proved too high to abandon. While the Queensland Government had intended to sell South Bank for commercial development after Expo 88, locals had realised its potential as a public space. Community lobbying saw the 17-hectare parklands precinct of South Bank remain public.

Four years after the closure of World Expo 88, the site was reopened as South Bank Parklands. In the decades since, it has accumulated the kind of civic gravity that cannot be manufactured. South Bank and its parklands are one of Brisbane’s most important cultural precincts and they regularly host large-scale festivals and events. An estimated 16 million people visit the parklands each year, making it Australia’s most visited landmark. Now, with the Games of the XXXV Olympiad approaching, Brisbane finds itself in possession of a proven instrument for the transformation of public life — and the question before the city is whether it has the patience and imagination to use it wisely again.

THE PATTERN OF MAJOR EVENTS.

Understanding South Bank’s role in Brisbane 2032 requires understanding the pattern that major events have cut through this city’s geography and civic culture over more than four decades. Similar transformations resulted, on a smaller scale, when Brisbane hosted the Commonwealth Games in 1982 and World Expo 88 in 1988. These events are credited with elevating the city’s image from country town to internationally connected, urbane and energetic city of unique subtropical character.

Expo 88 yielded South Bank, a 42-hectare subtropical haven created from post-industrial land that took the central business district across the river. The region’s first contemporary mixed-use urban precinct, South Bank became the model for multiple urban transformations across the state. Each iteration built on the last. Each event asked the city to imagine something it had not previously been capable of imagining about itself.

The 2032 Summer Olympics, officially the Games of the XXXV Olympiad and also known as Brisbane 2032, is a planned international multi-sport event scheduled to take place from 23 July to 8 August 2032 in Brisbane, Australia, with venues across the various regions of Queensland. It will be the third Olympic Games held in Australia, following the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Victoria, and the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, New South Wales. But where Melbourne’s Games shaped a generation of sporting infrastructure and Sydney’s secured its harbour foreshore as a public legacy, Brisbane 2032 has arrived in a city already marked by one extraordinary act of public-space creation. The challenge is therefore different: not to build from scratch, but to deepen and extend what already exists.

With sustainability and economic responsibility at the core of how the Games will be delivered, the Brisbane 2032 Games will respond to today’s challenges. The goal is to primarily use existing sporting infrastructure with necessary upgrades to deliver a successful, exciting Olympic and Paralympic Games — and lasting improvements that will benefit the communities in which they stand for decades to come. South Bank, in this framing, is not merely a backdrop for the Games. It is the civic ground against which the entire endeavour must be measured.

SOUTH BANK AS OLYMPIC GROUND.

The precinct’s role in Brisbane 2032 is layered in ways that resist simple categorisation. South Bank will be a key hub for public gatherings and events during the Olympics and beyond. The precinct has been earmarked as a potential gaming site for sports such as archery, badminton, basketball, fencing or taekwondo at the 2032 Games. Three existing South Bank sports and events sites — the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre, South Bank Cultural Forecourt and the South Bank Piazza — will be retained and upgraded.

The Convention and Exhibition Centre’s existing halls can host up to 18,000 spectators; at least 4,000 spectators are expected to watch events from the forecourt on Melbourne Street, while the South Bank Piazza could host 4,500 spectators. These are not peripheral venues. They sit within one of the most densely layered cultural and civic precincts in Australia, immediately beside the Queensland Cultural Centre — home to the Queensland Art Gallery, the Gallery of Modern Art, the Queensland Museum, the Queensland Performing Arts Centre, and the State Library of Queensland. The Games, in that sense, will not be held at a blank facility but within a working institution of public life.

Beyond competition, South Bank has already demonstrated its capacity as a live-broadcast gathering point. During the Paris 2024 Games, Queensland established a network of LIVE sites across the state. The South Bank LIVE site, overlooking the Brisbane River and featuring a four-storey tribute to the Eiffel Tower, brought Paris to Brisbane from the opening weekend. The Olympics LIVE site at South Bank ran from Friday 26 July to Sunday 11 August, starting at 6pm on 26 July and continuing daily from 6.30am to midnight. This precedent — South Bank as the civic hearth around which the city gathers to watch the world — will find its fullest expression when the city is itself the host.

There is also the matter of the International Broadcast Centre. Under plans announced in the immediate aftermath of the Games award, a seven-hectare site on Montague Road in South Brisbane would be purchased as part of the Games to house the International Broadcast Centre for the event. As one local political leader observed at the time, “World Expo 88 was the catalyst for the creation of South Bank and now Brisbane 2032 will facilitate the next phase of this evolution.” The temporary broadcast facility would be constructed on the land for the duration of the Games. The medium-term disposition of that site — and its potential conversion into additional riverside public space — remains one of the more consequential decisions Brisbane will make in the years before 2032.

THE FUTURE SOUTH BANK MASTER PLAN.

It is one thing to host an Olympic Games. It is another to ensure that the decade of preparation leading to it becomes generative in its own right — that the planning, the consultation, and the civic ambition produce something durable rather than merely logistical. In this respect, the Future South Bank Master Plan, developed through extensive community engagement and finalised by the Queensland Government, represents the most substantial planning exercise the precinct has undertaken since its original conception in the early 1990s.

The Future South Bank Draft Master Plan includes proposals such as making Grey Street more pedestrian-friendly, improving the Promenade path along the Brisbane River, increasing green space, upgrading the Cultural Forecourt, and creating a world-class maritime precinct. The scale of community engagement was notable: more than 25,000 pieces of public feedback shaped the Master Plan.

The plan proposes a ten per cent increase in green space and a twenty per cent increase in footpaths, while reducing roads and carriageways by forty per cent. The remixing of existing spaces would provide South Bank with an additional 4,600 square metres of parkland. These are not abstract numbers. In a precinct of 42 hectares that already carries the weight of 16 million annual visits, the reclamation of road space for pedestrian life represents a meaningful shift in the calculus of public space.

The Master Plan provides a vision to further enhance the heart of Brisbane as a connected and liveable space. As the Queensland Government articulated in finalising the plan, “South Bank is a lasting legacy of Expo ‘88 and its Master Plan envisions how South Bank can help create our next big legacy, including from the Brisbane 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games.”

The Connected Precincts Program, launched in concert with the Master Plan, carries equal significance for understanding what the precinct will become. The Connected Precincts Program includes a green active travel corridor and a Walkable Spine, through the Woolloongabba Priority Development Area and South Bank, linking with the Brisbane Arena at Roma Street and Suncorp Stadium. Come the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the South Bank Master Plan and the Connected Precincts Program will help enable easy, walkable access between the city’s proposed Olympic venues. The ambition here is not merely to connect buildings but to connect precincts — to build the kind of legible, pedestrian city that Olympic cities consistently struggle to produce but that South Bank, by its nature, makes imaginable.

THE LESSON OF LEGACY.

The discourse around Olympic legacy has, over the past three decades, grown considerably more honest about its failures. Cities that built for spectacle and inherited debt. Stadia that became monuments to a fortnight’s competition and then fell silent. The 2004 Athens venues. The elaborate precincts of certain host cities whose names need not be rehearsed here. Against this record, Brisbane has something unusual: a proof of concept already embedded in its riverbank.

South Bank proves that success isn’t measured by grand gestures, but everyday usability. The parklands’ authority as civic space derives not from any single architectural gesture but from the accumulation of ordinary acts — families arriving on weekend mornings, the city’s schools making their way to the cultural institutions on the western edge, the rhythms of evening use along the promenade. As a former Queensland Premier noted in considering the 2032 legacy framework, “just as South Bank has been the lasting legacy of Expo ‘88, this report details what the community wants the 2032 Games to achieve.”

While the Olympic and Paralympic Games will take over venues for two weeks each, a community-first mindset will ensure all get the opportunity to enjoy world-class facilities before — and long after — the Games, helping to foster a love and participation in sport for future generations of Queenslanders. This principle, expressed by the Brisbane 2032 Organising Committee, maps directly onto the way South Bank already functions. The parklands were never built for spectacle alone. They were built for the day after.

Expo 88 demonstrated that temporary events change public expectations of urban space, which can drive permanent changes to the cityscape. The case highlights an important urban design principle: successful tourism spaces can be created by focusing first on attracting locals. If Brisbane takes only one lesson from its own history into 2032, that is the lesson most worth carrying.

FIRST NATIONS COUNTRY AND THE CIVIC OBLIGATION.

Any account of South Bank and Brisbane 2032 that does not acknowledge the land on which all of this takes place is incomplete. South Bank was originally a meeting place for the traditional landowners, the Turrbal and Yuggera people, and in the early 1840s it became the central focus point of early European settlement. The displacement, the industrialisation, the clearance, the reclamation — these are all layers of the same geography.

For 65,000 years, Brisbane on Yuggera and Turrbal Country has been at the heart of an enduring cultural universe. The Brisbane 2032 festival of arts, culture, and heritage that will take place in conjunction with the Olympic Games is not about imitating others — it is about defining a uniquely Brisbane approach to cultural transformation.

Australia is home to rich Indigenous cultures dating back over 65,000 years, and the Brisbane 2032 Organising Committee is committed to providing a platform for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples to share their story, history and traditions with the world. The Olympic and Paralympic Games Brisbane 2032 is positioned as a time to celebrate First Nations culture, foster participation, and create meaningful opportunities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander athletes, young people and their communities.

South Bank, as a precinct, carries this obligation in a particularly direct way. It is the civic space of a city on Country — a space where the question of who the city belongs to, and who it is made for, plays out in the most literal terms. The Master Plan’s emphasis on access, connectivity, and green space is, among other things, an attempt to make a public answer to that question.

WHAT THE GAMES WILL ASK OF THE PARKLANDS.

The Brisbane bid was approved on 21 July 2021 during the 138th IOC Session in Tokyo. In the years since, the planning questions around South Bank specifically have matured from conceptual to concrete. The precinct is no longer merely adjacent to the Olympic conversation; it is embedded within it, at multiple scales simultaneously.

Venues will be located in three main zones: Brisbane, Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast. Within Brisbane, South Bank sits at the cultural hinge between the CBD and the southern arc of the city — a position it has occupied since the Expo redevelopment placed the Cultural Centre and the parklands in deliberate adjacency. For Games visitors navigating between the new Brisbane Olympic Stadium at Victoria Park, the Athlete Village at the Brisbane Showgrounds in Bowen Hills, and the river venues in the city’s south, South Bank will function as the natural gathering point — not by administrative designation but by the logic of the city’s geography.

The cultural festival accompanying the Games must leave an intergenerational impact, embedding culture into Brisbane’s fabric for decades to come. With events planned across Queensland, including regional centres throughout the state, there is an unparalleled opportunity to foster a state-wide cultural renaissance. South Bank, as the city’s principal public cultural precinct, will carry a significant portion of that cultural programming load — not as a secondary offering to the sport, but as the civic counterweight that gives the Games their depth.

The question of what the Games will ask of the parklands is also a question of proportion. Urban designers and commentators have observed, through Landscape Australia and other professional forums, that the challenge for Brisbane 2032 is to go beyond the “city of bits” — a collection of individual facilities and precincts that function well in isolation but do not constitute a legible, walkable urban whole. Implicit in this is the recognition that while Queensland can provide individual facilities and locales of value, it struggles to create well-connected, accessible precincts that successfully combine multiple activities and multiple mobilities. South Bank is the closest thing the city has to a proof that this integration is possible. The challenge for 2032 is to extend that proof across a much larger territory.

PERMANENCE, IDENTITY, AND THE ONCHAIN CITY.

Cities accumulate identity through their institutions, their streets, their named places, and the civic infrastructure that makes those places legible to the world. South Bank Parklands is, by any measure, one of the most recognisable and substantive public spaces in Australia — a place that has demonstrated, over more than three decades, the capacity to anchor a city’s sense of itself.

As Brisbane moves into its most globally observed decade, the question of how civic places are identified, recorded, and made permanent takes on new dimensions. The Queensland Foundation project — a permanent onchain identity layer anchoring Queensland through a set of top-level domains — designates southbank.queensland as the namespace address for this precinct. The concept is straightforward: just as South Bank has a physical address and an institutional governance structure, it can carry a permanent digital address that reflects its civic significance rather than its commercial transactions. A namespace for a public place, in a ledger that does not expire.

This is not a trivial consideration for a city preparing to host billions of digital interactions around the Olympic Games. The infrastructure of civic identity — the names, the records, the addresses that persist across political terms and planning cycles — matters. The Future South Bank Master Plan sets the stage for the long-term evolution of the South Bank precinct, ensuring it continues to meet the expectations of international and interstate visitors, residents and businesses. A permanent onchain address is one expression of that same long-term orientation — an assertion that this place matters enough to be identified durably, not merely indexed temporarily.

The Games will come and go in a fortnight. The promenade will still be there on the morning of 9 August 2032. The bougainvillea on the Arbour will still be flowering. The lagoon at Streets Beach will still be drawing the city’s families on a Tuesday afternoon in September. The impact of Brisbane 2032 will be felt long after the closing ceremony. It is an opportunity to create lasting benefits for communities, environment, and economy — not just in Queensland, but communities throughout Australia and beyond.

As the Lord Mayor of Brisbane observed in the immediate aftermath of the Games being awarded to the city, “World Expo 88 was the catalyst for the creation of South Bank and now Brisbane 2032 will facilitate the next phase of this evolution.” If that evolution is well managed — if the Master Plan’s ambitions for more green space, better pedestrian connections, and deeper cultural programming are realised — then 2032 will do for the South Bank precinct what 1988 did for the riverbank: open a next chapter that outlasts the event that prompted it by generations.

The permanence that matters most is not the permanence of stadia. It is the permanence of public places that a city returns to, day after day, long after the cameras have gone. southbank.queensland marks this precinct in the ledger of civic identity for precisely that reason — because South Bank is not an event, and never has been. It is Brisbane’s most durable act of public imagination, now preparing, for the second time in its short life, to show the world what that imagination is capable of.