Industry Leaders EP13 with Kate Meyrick

Seton Walsh-Rose sits down with Dr Kate Meyrick — Director at Urbis, former CEO of THI, and one of Australia’s most respected urbanists and placemakers. With more than three decades of international experience across Australia, Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the USA, Kate has spent her career on a single throughline: the process of change — how you imagine a better future and work out how to get there.

It’s a big-picture, generous conversation about city-making and leadership. Kate unpacks why a real strategy is something half of people should disagree with, what world cities like Singapore and London reveal about the courage to change, how South-East Queensland can stop its cities cannibalising each other, why the ‘new Australian dream’ has to evolve, and why AI — used well — is liberating rather than frightening. She closes with the advice she’d give her younger self after 35 years: you don’t have to be right all the time.

Episode Chapters

• 00:10 Welcome & Introduction
• 02:15 Change as a Career Throughline
• 04:03 Lucky to Have Lived Through Transformation
• 06:23 Paralysed by Uncertainty
• 08:01 Strategy vs Strategic Planning
• 09:10 Democracy’s Short Horizon
• 10:16 City Posters on the Wall
• 12:44 Brisbane vs Melbourne
• 15:00 Fares, Bikes & Habits
• 20:22 South-East Queensland’s Assets
• 22:09 Levels of Government
• 26:06 Cooperate, Don’t Cannibalise
• 27:57 The New Australian Dream
• 29:30 Smart People, Smart AI
• 30:13 AI as Liberation
• 32:13 Constraining the Parameters
• 34:23 “Be Everything You’re Not”
• 36:10 Jobs Change, They Don’t End
• 38:10 Who Thrives
• 40:14 Ask the Question Ten Ways
• 42:01 Advice to a Younger Self
• 44:23 The Privilege of the Work
• 46:11 Reflections & Close

Key Takeaways

• A strategy isn’t a plan everyone agrees with
• You can drive change — if you know what change you want
• Democracy gives us a shorter horizon — plan for it
• Stop cannibalising, start cooperating
• The quarter-acre dream has to evolve
• You need smart people to use AI smartly
• AI’s superpower: it can be everything you’re not
• AI changes jobs, it doesn’t end them
• Curiosity is the meta-skill
• You don’t have to be right all the time

Sound Bites / Quotes:
“Strategic planning should be something we all agree to. But setting a strategy should be something around 50% of people disagree with — because it’s a decision about our future identity that everybody won’t necessarily agree with.”
— Dr Kate Meyrick, ~08:01

“The older I’ve got, the luckier I’ve felt — because I’ve lived through a period of incredible transformation, and I know it’s possible to drive change if you know what kind of change you want to drive.”
— Dr Kate Meyrick, ~04:03

References & Resources

• Matthew Charles — Hamish’s business partner; leads the Plus Studio Christchurch office.
• Creative Spaces — Auckland practice Hamish directed, later acquired by GHD.
• GHD — global multidisciplinary firm: ⁠https://www.ghd.com ⁠
• New Zealand Registered Architects Board (NZRAB): ⁠https://www.nzrab.nz ⁠
• Dr Paul Walker — architecture theory lecturer (Victoria University of Wellington), quoted: “there’s nothing new in architecture.”
• The Pacifica, Auckland — New Zealand’s tallest residential tower, by Plus Studio: ⁠https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pacifica_(Auckland) ⁠
• Closer Economic Relations (CER) — the Australia–New Zealand agreement behind trans-Tasman work rights: ⁠https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia%E2%80%93New_Zealand_Closer_Economic_Relations_Trade_Agreement ⁠
• Vitruvius / ‘firmness, commodity and delight’ (De architectura):⁠ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_architectura⁠
• Frank Lloyd Wright & Fallingwater / Johnson Wax — referenced on engineering and cantilevers: ⁠https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallingwater ⁠
• Revit, AutoCAD, ArchiCAD, SketchUp, Microstation — the design-software timeline discussed.
• One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel García Márquez: ⁠https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Hundred_Years_of_Solitude