Brisbane has no shortage of Olympic ambition. But a proposal unveiled this week by two local design firms may represent the most audacious reimagining of the city's inner south yet: bury Stanley Street, one of Woolloongabba's busiest roads, in a tunnel, and build an entirely new urban village on top of it.
As reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, the scheme would deliver 2,500 new homes and eight hectares of green space in Woolloongabba, transforming a suburb long defined by traffic noise and patchy streetscapes into something closer to a liveable, human-scale precinct. The timing is deliberate. With Brisbane set to host the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games, the pressure to produce genuine urban legacy, not just shiny new stadiums, has never been greater.
The proposal does not exist in a vacuum. Woolloongabba already sits at the centre of the most significant concentration of public investment Brisbane has seen in decades. Cross River Rail's new underground Woolloongabba station, buried 27 metres below street level with 220-metre platforms, is nearing completion. A Brisbane Metro stop is planned for the same precinct. The suburb is also governed by the Woolloongabba Priority Development Area, a state-managed planning framework designed to deliver coordinated, high-density development around those transport links.
Context matters here: the original plan to rebuild the Gabba Stadium as the centrepiece of the Games was abandoned in early 2025. The revised Queensland government plan instead places a new 63,000-seat stadium at Victoria Park, with the existing Gabba site earmarked for redevelopment into a mixed-use entertainment and residential precinct. That decision fundamentally changed Woolloongabba's trajectory, opening a large parcel of government-owned land to the very kind of urban renewal the new design proposal is championing.
From a fiscal responsibility standpoint, the idea of burying a major road to create development potential deserves careful scrutiny before anyone gets carried away with the renderings. Tunnelling is expensive. International precedent, from Boston's Big Dig to various European motorway underpasses, shows that cost blowouts on underground road projects can be spectacular and politically damaging. The proponents will need to demonstrate a credible funding model, whether that involves value capture from land sales, private investment, or public subsidy, before any serious government consideration is warranted.
There is also the broader question of who benefits. Brisbane's housing crisis is acute. Australian Bureau of Statistics data consistently shows rental vacancy rates in inner Brisbane near historic lows, while affordability pressures push lower-income residents further from employment centres. A scheme delivering 2,500 homes close to a major public transport hub, two kilometres from the CBD, is precisely the kind of supply-side intervention economists argue the market needs. The question is what proportion of those dwellings will be genuinely affordable, rather than high-end product pitched at investors and downsizers.
Those on the progressive end of the political spectrum would push that question hard. Greens councillors and housing advocates have consistently argued that prime publicly owned land near transit infrastructure should prioritise affordable and social housing, community facilities, and green space, rather than yielding to private developers seeking the highest return. That argument has genuine force. The precedent set by other Olympic host cities is not always encouraging: cities like Montreal have remained indebted for generations, while Athens was left with unusable facilities, as architect Richard Kirk noted in a recent essay for Architecture AU. Brisbane has a real opportunity to avoid those outcomes, but seizing it requires deliberate policy choices, not just ambitious planning diagrams.
The Woolloongabba Priority Development Area framework, managed by Economic Development Queensland, does at least provide a planning structure capable of mandating affordable housing components and public space requirements alongside private development. How aggressively the Crisafulli government chooses to use those levers will determine whether the suburb's transformation serves the broader public interest or primarily enriches landholders lucky enough to sit in the right postcode.
Private developers are already moving. Multiple development applications have been lodged along the Stanley Street corridor in recent months, including a two-tower proposal by Sarazin that would put a 53-storey building among Brisbane's tallest outside the CBD. The design firms behind the underground road concept are, in effect, trying to get ahead of that piecemeal development impulse by proposing a coherent, large-scale masterplan that could stitch those individual projects into something greater than the sum of their parts.
That instinct is sound. Woolloongabba has long been a suburb of unrealised promise, its character undermined by traffic dominance and disconnected blocks. As architecture commentators have observed, the suburb has the potential to become a new inner-city village comparable to New Farm or West End, but better located, sitting directly above a major rail interchange with easy walking access to the CBD and South Bank. The Cross River Rail station alone puts Woolloongabba just three minutes from Albert Street by rail once the line becomes operational.
What the suburb does not yet have is a coherent public commitment to deliver on that potential. The underground Stanley Street proposal, whatever its ultimate fate, serves a useful purpose: it forces a genuine conversation about whether Brisbane's Olympic legacy will be measured in concrete poured before the opening ceremony, or in the quality of urban life left behind long after the Games are forgotten. Both sides of that debate have legitimate arguments to make, and neither should be dismissed before the hard numbers are properly worked through.