Australian cities don’t have panoramic piazzas like in Italy, nor do their streets rival the grandeur of France’s finest boulevards. But the treatment of laneways here contains lessons that any municipality can learn from. For the better part of 30 years, players from both the private and public sector have been turning the country’s small-scale thoroughfares into vibrant urban places.

So what is the appeal of investing in such spaces? These alleys were typically built to service buildings and were frequented by delivery and waste-management vehicles. But when they are reoriented to serve pedestrians, they bring to a city a potent blend of lifestyle and economic benefits. As well as improving the permeability of city grids, the friendlier proportions of laneways (which feel more intimate than a city’s main arteries) making for comfortable and desirable spaces for walking, shopping and dining.

Take Fish Lane in Brisbane, for instance, which hosts several significant city-shaping projects that symbolise the Queensland capital’s recent ambitions to become a bigger player on the world stage. “Brisbane is changing quickly and is infinitely different now to what it was when we started revitalising Fish Lane more than a decade ago,” says Michael Zaicek, commercial manager for developer Aria Property Group, which acquired a building on Fish Lane in 2012 – an underused former service street in South Brisbane – and began redeveloping. “At the time, we saw such a strong appetite for a sophisticated placemaking project in the public realm.”

When it reopened in 2015, brandishing a new residential offering and three hospitality venues, it garnered instant acclaim – and foot traffic. Following this initial success Aria pressed on, bringing in public art, acquiring more buildings along the laneway for adaptive reuse, and installing street lighting throughout the area’s public spaces. It’s a combination that has proven so successful that Fish Lane now has a full-time precinct co-ordinator, who is responsible for organising public events, from markets to concerts. “There wasn’t a master plan, it’s just evolved organically into a positive feedback loop,” says Zaicek. “The more we invest in the laneway, the better the outcome for everyone.”

Today, South Brisbane is the city’s fastest-growing residential area and more than two million people pass through Fish Lane annually. Brisbane’s laneways were nearly extinguished in the 1980s; now they’re some of the most sought-after addresses in town. “Ten years ago Fish Lane was a very uninviting place,” says Zaicek. “We’ve reclaimed those nooks, crannies and otherwise unusable spaces and now I see opportunities everywhere.”

It’s a lesson that Melbourne is intimately familiar with. In the 1990s, confronting a precipitous decline in commerce and visitation, the city centre decided to rethink itself. “Growing up in Melbourne in the 1980s, you could literally see tumbleweed blowing down the streets of the city,” says Jocelyn Chiew, Melbourne’s director of city design. “So the City of Melbourne decided to use its laneways to attract a critical mass of visitors and residents.” In 1994 just 300 metres of the lanes within its urban grid were accessible. Now, following a decades-long effort to convert, reactivate and reinterpret its alleys, there’s more than 3km of traversable laneways.

The roots of this transformation in the Victorian capital can be traced to Postcode 3000, a programme that incentivised developers to build in the city, beautified and greened up streetscapes and boosted the city centre’s residential population. Once the laneways had been cleaned up and repopulated, a host of red-tape-cutting changes, such as small-bar licences, lower rents, active street frontage requirements and retail footprint limits, encouraged fledgling bar owners, retailers and creative entrepreneurs to move in, injecting round-the-clock vibrancy into the network. And the work hasn’t stopped: Chiew and her 50-strong multidisciplinary design team are constantly tinkering with the laneways, from increasing safety through better lighting to ensuring that each one feels distinct and different. Documents, such as the Central Melbourne Design Guide, inform designers, architects and developers working on the city’s built form. “But you also want to maintain consistency and curation across the whole network. It’s an ongoing investment,” says Chiew.

Meanwhile, Sydney, which has always had a complicated relationship with its heritage spaces, is still recuperating from the state’s controversial, now abolished, lockout laws, which saw entry to bars (and the potential for nightlife) stop at 01.30 in the city centre. Despite those challenges, several long-term infrastructural bets, from the new metro line to the pedestrianisation of George Street, one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares, have recently been delivered to instantaneous success.

These landmark city-making projects, and the dynamism that they’ve returned to the city, have assisted with another of Sydney’s key goals: reviving and rediscovering its historic laneways. Since 2008 the City of Sydney-backed Live Laneways revitalisation strategy has brought dozens of alleys – including Ash Street, Angel Place, Tank Stream Way and Bulletin Place – back to their best. Throughout town, with funding through Live Laneways, sculptures, projections and even native micro-forests have been installed on laneways to transform them into pleasant refuges between Sydney’s busier, broader streets. With government-supported business alliances, such as YCK Laneways (a consortium of small bars in Sydney), and a new plan to spruce up Chinatown and its warren of lanes, these small streets are becoming a big part of the agenda.

Sydney’s private sector is pitching in too. By the harbour, mixed-use precinct Quay Quarter Lanes, completed in 2021, is a seamless blend of new and heritage buildings across an entire city block, all interwoven with a cross stitch of laneways. Previously dead-end lanes have been unblocked; apartments on the upper floors ensure a residential character and a mix of street-level businesses, from a handmade-pasta shop to a beloved banh mi spot, cater to hungry office workers. Miniature plazas and recesses encourage anyone who stumbles upon these laneways to sit down and take a beat.

“Australians like to abbreviate things so no wonder that we like laneways,” says Adam Haddow, director of Sydney architecture studio SJB, one of the firms that worked on Quay Quarter. “As shortcuts through our cities, they’re like a physical abbreviation but we want to make sure that they’re also places where you can linger.”

While projects like Quay Quarter Lanes relied on existing laneways, its success in Sydney is inspiring a new approach: making new laneways the focal point of new developments. That’s the brief for SJB’s latest project, Wunderlich Lane, in the inner-city neighbourhood of Redfern. The precinct’s centrepiece is a long laneway thronged by high-end restaurants and shops. But just like the historic laneways that it is based on, Wunderlich Lane improves liveability and vibrancy for everyone in the area. “When we do a private project, we always think about how we can generate public good,” says Haddow. “So we built the lane around the existing supermarket and kept that key community infrastructure.” Wunderlich now draws crowds from around Sydney without displacing long-time locals.

Australia’s successful laneway love affair isn’t slowing down. It’s a sign that sometimes focusing on our most forgettable streets can have the most memorable impact. Perhaps, if we want to get a real sense of a city’s trajectory, we should examine how it treats its least glamorous and lowest-visibility spaces, as opposed to its most conspicuous ones. And laneways are a great place to start – if you can find them. — L