QUEANBEYAN is basking in big ideas as the winners of its Business Chamber’s Downtown Q 2025 International design ideas competition are announced.

A joint collaboration between Stewart Architecture, Stewart Hollenstein, and ASPECT Studios was the overall winner of $30,000 and the winner of the $10,000 “civic precinct” category.

Jury chairman and leading Australian architect John Wardle said of the winning entry: “This design presented a ‘big idea’ with the strategic potential to retain and enhance the best of Queanbeyan. This is a transformative urban framework idea that deserves to be implemented.”

Their concept was “Rivertown: Queanbeyan 2025” and it proposes a more walkable and connected city and sees the re-positioning of the Queanbeyan River as the heart of an expanded town centre.

The collaborators say: “Riverfront Park Precinct occupies the centre of town and will become a focal point for the recreation, cultural and social activities of the community. Expanded park facilities on the river banks will offer places for events, leisure, play and respite with in an improved River ecology.

“New city spaces throughout redefined urban core provide a range of opportunities for the growing community. These public spaces include a significant Civic Square, a local village square, a revitalised river parkland and a vibrant Heritage Square all connected by network of new pedestrian ways.

“The Civic Square will be the new cultural hub for Queanbeyan focusing as a forecourt for the Q Theatre as the public centrepiece for new civic and mixed-development uses.”

The plan sees a re-energised Monaro Street transformed by greenery and increased places for people to conduct life in the street. New pedestrian and cycle connections provide a city loop as well as connections to surrounding neighbourhoods. Queens Bridge will be “reinvented as a generous pedestrian and event place that will again reconnect the city with the river while creating a major new symbol for the city and a new destination for visitors to Queanbeyan”.