The City Mouse

Nicole Dennis, urban planner from the Academy of Emergency Art disagreed.

“It may be affordable to be an artist, but what type of artist and is that the kind of artist our society needs, of course there is a market for a range of things, but are we pricing out those artists that challenge us conceptually and produce the kind of art which doesn’t have a market.”

Ms Dennis criticised the government and the private sector for neglecting creativity in their planning.
“This is really a planning issue, planners have not planned for creativity in Sydney really at all, the new Sydney metropolitan plan 2036 doesn’t map or analyse cultural or creative capital.”

I just got sent this article, it is from a few months ago - but this debate is still relevant. I spent the October long weekend at Sound Summit debating this issue again. People are moving, if you are an artist that is unsatisfied with the way art is valued in Sydney (and Australia) please send me an email contact@thecitymouse.org

If you want to protect wilderness, live in a dense urban centre. Same if you want to avert climate change. Same if you want cheaper housing, better transport, decent coffee or a choice of walk-to tapas.

As Richard Rogers told the House of Lords last week, Britain’s urban renaissance over the past decade has been driven by tight controls on out-of-town development. Put more simply, opposing high-density development on inner-city sites such as Barangaroo or Broadway (as ”greens” and NIMBYs still archaically do) drives sprawl.

Australia needs four more Sydneys (or 16 more Adelaides) within four decades. If it doesn’t go here, it goes somewhere else.

Work it out. Grow it up.

In booming cities, old industrial sites, railyards, shipyards and decommissioned military bases are frequently among the last large empty spaces ripe for infill. The communities near these sites are often low-income. Like Bayview, many have weathered the economic and environmental blows of declining industries and their toxic legacies. Now, they find themselves caught between hope for much-needed investment and fear of the change it might bring. “One of the complaints about the (smart growth) movement has been, ‘It’s always upscale, it’s expensive, it drives people out,’ ” says John Frece, the director of the EPA’s Office of Sustainable Communities. To prevent displacement, federal funding for smart-growth projects through the Partnership includes requirements for affordable housing, job-training programs and community engagement in the planning process. The administration’s goal, Frece says, is to make sure communities aren’t “penalized just because their environmental problems get cleaned up.” Accomplishing that, though, isn’t easy. Says Malo Hutson, assistant professor of city and regional planning at UC Berkeley: “You would get the Nobel Prize in Economics — or Peace — if you could figure out a way to keep the community that existed before the redevelopment project came along.

The former Labor government approved the light rail extension and GreenWay plan in February but the new Transport Minister, Gladys Berejiklian, is refusing to quash rumours she will scrap the GreenWay part to save money and to speed construction.

Gilbert Grace, the president of ARTcycle, the group that organised the rally, said the GreenWay would take only a fraction of the cost of the light rail but would bring vast benefits, including improving people’s health and decreasing road budgets.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/cyclists-ride-to-support-proposed-greenway-20110828-1jgn9.html#ixzz1WNhCVSIt

“If job creation can be spurred by municipal government, that phenomenon will be driven by the ability of the city to build public spaces where people want to live, work, shop and invest. This exercise is called “placemaking.”

Previous generations created public spaces with parks, buildings, schools and streets that made for a high quality of life and incented economic development. The city should continue this practice and reinvent our public spaces with the principles of placemaking in mind.”

Modelling suggests that Australia’s predominantly supply-side cultural policies will have done little to alleviate, and may have even accentuated, the decline in artists’ relative incomes. It also suggests that demand-side policies could alleviate some of the downward pressure on artists’ incomes by expanding arts sector revenue.