Off the Shelf or Tailor-made? Sources of Ideas for the Creation of Greater Brisbane in 1924

Abstract The literature on city planning and city administration is replete with examples of the international and inter-urban transfer of ideas. The transfer can result from qualitative emulation of one city by another or from the more generalized international circulation of expertise. But insufficient attention is paid to both the possibility of indigenous creation of local solutions to what are seen as local problems, even if triggered by international examples, and to the question of why the same circulating ideas take root in one place but not in another. This paper uses the “greaterization” of the City of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia in 1924 by a reformist Labor Party government as a case study to explore the sources of the ideas. The paper also compares the successful “greaterization” in Brisbane with the unsuccessful efforts in other Australian capital cities.