It was a morning in January when I pulled off Coronation Drive, parked the car and my fiancée and I walked down to the riverbank to watch the scene unfold. The water barely rippled in the half light, a ferry sliced silently across the stillness while behind it the city's skyline stood silhouetted as the sun's incandescence blazed through the gap in the upper levels of the Riparian Plaza tower. The moment captured an essence of Brisbane, an element of its soul, for it embraced both its physical charm and its cosmopolitan appeal.

Where lies its heart? Is it in its people? Is it in the face of the woman I watch waiting patiently in a bank queue, her hair blue-rinsed, skin mottled with age, diamonds on her rings glinting under the fluorescent lights? She had the look of contentment some older people wear. She felt at home in her city, had seen it grow and would sometimes recall images of those days when the Town Hall clock towered above the cityscape, its streets teemed with American soldiers and sailors, and huge, grey warships lined its wharves.

Maybe its heart lies in a coffee shop in Paddington on a Thursday morning where, as I sip my flat white, I watch a group of young mothers seated inside a corral of prams eating cake and exchanging compliments, gossip and babies as only women can. An infant screams, its face beet-red, and its mother coos and soothes. My own mother walked these same streets with my sister and I in tow and I wonder if our own screams once shattered the suburban calm.

Saturday afternoon in the Regatta Hotel and images of racehorses flicker across the screens, hopeful faces upturned to watch their progress, tables littered with torn tickets and misplaced hope. In the main bar, the low hum of conversation rises and falls like a gentle swell. A week's work is done and Monday far away, and the faces around me wear the colours of youth, exuberance and indestructibility. The pubs of a city can offer a glimpse of its heart to anyone who cares to look, and the view from where I stand, reflected in the faces of the next generation of parents and homemakers, is one of brightly shining confidence.

Saturday morning on the northside, and mowers and whipper-snippers buzz like distant squadrons in cul-de-sacs flanked by double-storied brick and plaster homes. Four-wheel-drive wagons ferry children to sports and mothers to shopping centres. Middle-class affluence pervades. The city has been good to these people.

Friday night in Teneriffe, where the canyons between the old woolstores were once the preserve of the desperate and the dispossessed. A flood light fills the front of a building where a hundred people sit and drink, the night air warm and full of promise of the day to come.

In Holland Park, a man, easily 80, gazes down the street. He moved here with his family in the '50s when the roads were unsealed and the houses unsewered. He watched the suburb fill with children and then empty as the years passed. He went to the funerals of his friends and now watches from his front gate as new families fill their houses, the hammers and power saws of renovators proof of life after death. His eyes, dulled a little by the years, reflect the heart of the city and it is one of rebirth. It has its poor and its homeless, its lonely and those for whom sadness is their only cloak. All cities do.

But there is brightness and hope at the start of a new day in the faces of its people, and it is this that is a city's heart. It is the belief that life is good and that in Brisbane, it can be lived well.