The past, famously, is a foreign country. Almost daily, at Surfers Paradise, I walk past a 1918 image of people on a track to the beach. They are dwarfed by the tall trees and ferny canopies of the once extensive littoral rainforest. That track is now called Cavill Avenue. That rainforest is still here in the form of some regrowth trees standing as solitary species surrounded by the tarmac of a car park, or in copses behind wire fences enclosing infrastructure or lingering on private property. There is the valiant forest remnant in its steel enclosure at Narrowneck with the hopeful declaration, “This forest has a future”.

Can it have a future in Surfers Paradise itself? Can we have tall buildings and tall trees? I want to find out more about this extraordinary history and how to build on it for a more authentic and humane city now and in the future. The Room to Grow Project brings together articles, essays, interviews, panel talks and design speculations that aim at showing why seeing the forest for the towers is important in the high-rise city and how we can envisage and implement the green city.