The 49 coolest neighbourhoods in the world
- By Peter Gordon
- •
- 18 Aug, 2022
New normal. You’ve probably heard that phrase a lot over the past 18 months. When the pandemic hit last year, humankind entered a new era. And the day-to-day lives of city-dwellers – so used to the social aspect of urban living – changed with it.
But now, many of us have gone some way to throwing off those shackles. Border restrictions are loosening. Bars, restaurants, even clubs are reopening. And while the pandemic still rages on, we’re all tentatively reaching out to something that kind of resembles a better normal.
So, what’s that, exactly? To find out, you’ve got to look at what’s going on around you, out on the street, down the park, in your backyard. Throughout 2020 and 2021, our cities have thrived. Against impossible odds, communities banded together, hung out, made stuff. They displayed all the same energy and resilience and grassroots ingenuity that allowed them to spring up in the first place. They survived.
And now we come to our annual ranking of the world’s coolest neighbourhoods. This year, we couldn’t help but switch up our priorities. Food, drink, nightlife, culture – important. Community spirit, resilience, sustainability – just as important, especially if we are to come out of this pandemic with things we can be proud of and tell the rest of the world about.
Just like we’ve done for the past three years, we took the results of our annual Time Out Index survey (which this year polled 27,000 city-dwellers) to our local editors and contributors. They then vetted the public vote against those all-important criteria – cool stuff, but also kind stuff, forward-looking stuff – and made their final picks. Our panel of experts then ranked the lot.
The result is a love letter to the city at its most joyful and surprising. Read on to see whether your neighbourhood made the cut https://bit.ly/3AylDg6
Article courtesy Time Out 6/10/21
| Quiet simply, the Palms is the place to buy! |
Sydneysiders and Melburnians, put aside your equally outstanding flat whites for a moment. Stop bickering about whether great beaches beat cool laneways (they do) and desist from debating whether all baristas require waxed moustaches (ideally).
Because Brisbane is closing in on the title of Australia’s best city, and we must join forces to keep this subtropical upstart in its place.
Time magazine recently named Brisvegas on its “World’s Greatest Places” list, and omitted our cities. It’s a huge shock (and who knew they still published Time magazine?). But they might be onto something.
Time points to the 2032 Olympic and Paralympic Games, which will be hosted in the maroon metropolis. Brisbane will do a fine job, even though it’ll baffle the world when rugby league is added to the schedule and Queensland is allowed to field its own team.
Time’s most radical claim is that Brisbane is worth visiting now, but tourism is surging. Not only did Lin-Manuel Miranda recently drop in to catch Hamilton , but hundreds of Hamilfans flew up to watch his interview with Leigh Sales (presumably unaware that it would subsequently arrive on iView for free).
A leading local agent has appraised each side of these duplex's to be worth $665k on completion and rent for $495 per week. So that is massive potentail instant equity of up to $390K on completion, which is incredibly hard to find.