Danny Katz: What Melbourne can learn from a city like Havana, Cuba

Melbourne can be a bit of a brown town. It’s got brown buildings, brown streets, brown parks, brown malls, brown coffee, and a very brown river – the Yarra looks a lot like the chocolate river in Willy Wonka’s factory, but ours is flavoured with delicious stormwater pollutants and scrumptious submerged oBike contaminants.

And I don’t mind living in a brown town: it’s nice to wander around the CBD (Central Brown District) and enjoy all the various hues – dark-brown, light-brown, medium-darkish-light-brown.

If you’re very lucky, you might even spot a touch of beige-brown. People get very excited when they see this shade, it pulls in the big tourist crowds and everyone wants a photo.

But for all the joys of walking around browntown, this city just seems a tad drab after my recent holiday in the non-drabbest place on the planet: Havana, Cuba. I got to spend a whole week there, enjoying the April sun, oh oh oh.

Havana isn’t a city: it’s a massive art gallery where every building, every structure, every facade, is a magnificent canvas coated in dazzling colours and flaking textures and stunning communist-government urban neglect.

You see houses painted in Rothko reds and pinks, each one a masterpiece of modern abstract expressionism, but with a row of underwear drying on a clothesline across the balcony.

You see shopfronts layered with Jean-Michel Basquiat-ish graffiti-scrawls and revolutionary slogans, detailing decades of Cuba’s torrid political history – but inside, you can buy touristy Che Guevara souvenir ashtrays where you stub out your cigar on Che’s face.

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You see huge apartment blocks constructed like a Rosalie Gascoigne assemblage, all held together with rope and wire and broken bits of old wooden crates – and you stand there in awe, admiring it’s crumbling beauty, from two blocks away, where it’s safer.

Since I’ve been back, I’ve wondered why we haven’t got that kind of creative bravery here. Yes, I know Australia isn’t Cuba, and Melbourne isn’t Havana, and our city centre isn’t racked with natural decay after 50 years of economic hardship under US-enforced embargoes – but can’t we try?

Can’t we smother our skyscrapers in turquoise blues and garish greens? Can’t we distress our government buildings with tubs of crackle paint? Can’t every night be a White Night festival with digital images projected on to city structures? People love that; it’s the modern version of the traditional family slide show where dad couldn’t find enough flat wall space so half the picture got projected on to a shelving unit.

Not just buildings either: why can’t our cars be more pizzazy? Bring back those classic candy-coloured 1950s models with retro tones and sculptural elegance and old-world smartphone connectivity.

Why can’t our people dress less drably? Get everyone out of their basic blacks and into lime-green polyester flairs with pink thigh-high Go-Go boots. You can buy them at St Vinnies, I’ve seen plenty there, enough for everyone.

Melbourne should be glowing with colour and texture and passion, but at the moment the most colourful thing in this city are the bright, canary-yellow oBikes being fished out of the Yarra.

Sure they look nice in a great big pile, but I think we can do better.