Creating legacies with boldness and courage, with Kate Meyrick
Kate is a Director at Urbis and the former CEO of The Hornery Institute (or as we now know it, Studio THI). She is a passionate urbanist and place maker with more than 25 years of experience working throughout Australia, Asia, Europe and the United States. Kate is regarded for her expertise in visioning and positioning city-scale precincts, working sensitively with stakeholders and the community to co-create powerful new futures for well-loved places. She is a thought leader in city-shaping, knowledge and innovation precincts and has been influential in shaping thinking about the global competitiveness of Australian cities.
What do you love about cities?
I love everything about cities. Like people, cities are all different. Each one has its own unique identity and personality and they’re very complex. They have a very distinctive personality and over your lifetime, you get to know the lifetime of a city and you get to know it deeper with every day. You see every facet of that city in a different way.
What changes have you seen in cities over the past 20 years that matter the most to you?
I’ve seen a lot of changes in cities over half a century. The thing that I'm finding most encouraging is our return to human centricity. The sense that localisation is important, that the sense of belonging is important, that neighbourhood scale is important, and that connectedness is important. Ultimately, the reason why cities matter so much is because they're the place that people and ideas can come the closest together.
Tell us about a project you’ve worked on that has been most important to you?
There's something important in every project that you undertake, but I can't go past the Bluewater retail precinct in the United Kingdom because it happened at such a profoundly important and significant time in my career, when everything that I understood as a practitioner was very formative.
“The thing that I’m finding most encouraging is our return to human centricity.”
To be a great ancestor for future generations, what does our sector need to focus on today?
I think to be a great ancestor, you've got to really care. You've got to understand that you have stewardship of a city or a part of a city for a point in time. We’ve got to have empathy – empathy for the city and the people who live in it. And we've got to use our imagination because we've got to understand how the paradigm will change. We also have to think about how we create places that are really distinctive and give people a sense of identity and help them to care. If we don't care and we don't use our imagination, they won't care and they won't feel inspired. And I think the last thing is about boldness and courage; ultimately, we don't remember the people who did mediocre things. We actually remember and we look back on the people who made really bold decisions. So I think that, to be an ancestor, the other quality that we need to have is the ability to be courageous and perhaps be ahead of our time.
What has to change or be amplified in our system to make these things a priority?
We need to understand that everything is not about a short-term capital cycle or a short-term political cycle, that cities are forever. We create cities for people whose needs will change and evolve and need to create systems that provide certainty, but at the same time flexibility. That's a very sophisticated framework to put in place. Somehow we need to fuse the present, with an appreciation for what the future might bring and what the past has shown us. And think deeply about the local context while also learning lessons from other places about what has worked and not worked. Then I guess the final thing comes back to the first thing: cities are for people, places are for people. If we don't have systems, whether they are industry systems, government systems, community systems, financial systems that place people at the heart of every decision we make, we're never going to create places that people value or feel valued by.
What advice would you give to emerging urban leaders?
What I think is extraordinary about a really visionary city leader, one who has this concept of ancestry, is that they are making a bold decision at a time when they're not going to feel the maximum benefit. I think really great city leaders are also great storytellers. They're able to build the story of what success will look like and they're able to help their constituents position themselves in that future state. If you don't get people to be part of the story making and telling, it doesn't attach to them. But as soon as they become part of the story, the story gets another life and builds another layer. Maybe that comes back to why I love cities so much, because cities are the sum of millions and millions of people's stories, ancestral stories, future people. They're all captured in this one massive melting pot and that's what makes them brilliant.
