What the Australian Open can teach Brisbane 2032

The precinct for Zoomers – people born between 1996 and 2010 – on the bank of the Yarra River adjacent to Melbourne Park was one of a number of targeted offerings, in addition to family areas and fancy restaurants tournament organisers set up, to bring people into the Open’s ambit.

“While we know that a lot of Gen Z love tennis and they’ll be out there watching that all day, some will also just want to hang out and be with their friends,” says Tennis Australia chief tennis officer Tom Larner. “So creating that space for them has been a really good focus this year.”

The Open has firmly established itself as a two-week party set around a tennis contest, and it needs good-quality space to do that. What Larner calls the “festivalisation” of a sports event offers a critical lesson for Brisbane as it gears up to host the Summer Olympic Games in just 7½ years.

Like the Australian Open, Brisbane 2032 will need spaces and precincts connecting the sporting venues – wherever they end up being located – that create the platforms for a wide range of formal and informal activities that will be part of the wider event.

But architects and planners in the Queensland capital are concerned that spending decisions in the highly politicised debate about venues such as the Olympic stadium will exclude long-term planning for the public spaces and precincts connecting them with the city both during and after the Games.

Public space budgets are often a minor part of a much bigger infrastructure spend, but the planning and clout needed to co-ordinate work between disparate – and often, competing – interests is crucial to create spaces that work over the event and long into the future afterwards, they say.

“How do we connect the venues to one another and make great precincts around them?” says Caroline Stalker, a Brisbane architect and urban planner.

“Pretty much all locations looked at have major urban blight issues around them – streets that have got huge runs of traffic and are terrible for pedestrians, transport corridors that need to be bridged, and clashes of infrastructure that make for inhuman spaces and under-developed land that’s not people-friendly.”

Earlier this month, the Australian Institute of Architects, Australian Institute of Landscape Architects, Planning Institute of Australia, and Design Institute of Australia asked the state’s independent review into Games infrastructure to ensure funding for masterplan funding.

The Games Independent Infrastructure and Co-ordination Authority, which will hand the recommendations of its 100-day review to the Queensland government on March 8, declined to comment.

Having flexible space in and around the venues is crucial, Larner says.

“The sport might be the core of what you’re actually looking to promote, but we’re building an environment where people can connect with each other and experience all the things that we love about Melbourne and Australia, around food, coffee and music, and for allowing families and with kids to come in,” he says.

“This is absolutely a really accessible space, both from an affordability perspective, but also in terms of the offering that’s on-site. It’s much more than just the sport.”

There’s another element, too. For all the investment in visitors and facilities on-site, 99 per cent of the Australian Open’s audience is the broadcast audience around the world.

The setting of the Open, and the activity the space around it permits, is crucial to reinforce the image of a grand slam event that – while locked in to Melbourne until 2046 – faces the existential threat of losing it to a location with a bigger home market, such as China.

“This is a global space,” says Adam Kiekebosch, a co-CEO of landscape architecture practice Aspect Studios, which in 2022 completed the stage three redevelopment of the Melbourne Park precinct with firms NH Architecture and Snøhetta for owner Melbourne and Olympic Parks Trust.

“This gets broadcast across the world; the elevated aerial shots of crowds of people. We want people to be able to occupy a space like this. It’s big, expansive, and that’s the challenge with a space like this – you need it open and clear. You need people to be able to walk.”

Record attendance numbers that pushed total visitation for the two-week main draw tournament to 1,102,303 – an 8 per cent increase on last year’s 1,020,763 – show the strategy is working, with the physical footprint of the event now stretching from the city-fringe Richmond train station to Federation Square in the CBD.

The Open needs more space to expand further and widen the range of peripheral events that draw in people who want to be part of it, even if they’re not watching tennis, said Tennis Australia boss Craig Tiley last week.

“Like everything, you’ve got to keep evolving,” he said. “We think we are at a point right now where having more space would be great. We’ll work closely with the Victorian government on what that looks like.”

More space creates more revenue for organisers of the event, which benefited from bailouts totalling $100 million from the Victorian government for debts racked up during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Open makes an assessment each year of how many of the square metres available to it are dedicated to players, broadcasters, food and beverage, merchandise and fan space. If the space available to them grows, they can increase revenue, Larner says.

“It is something you need to continue to invest in,” he says.

“The investment in permanent infrastructure over the period of the Melbourne Park redevelopment has had a major impact on the growth of the Australian Open because it’s allowed more capacity, it’s allowed a better experience, and it’s allowed us to activate better with our fans and playing group.”

And if the spaces around them are better, the venues will function better in the longer term – and more lucratively. Wherever the Queensland government decides to put venues for Brisbane 2032, the city should ensure the public spaces around them work as well, Stalker says.