Cultural Development

Last week I attended the Right to the City symposium at the Sydney University Faculty of Architecture. The symposium sought to make connections between artists, activists, planners and architects in seeking ways to "remake" the city “in more socially connected and sustainable ways”, responding to the increasingly fragmented and complex nature of urban life by “developing critical spatial practices that engage in micro-political actions”.

The presentations were interesting if a little uneven in quality, not surprising given the symposium’s diverse range of perspectives and participants. It was more disappointing that there seemed to be (at least in the sessions I attended) relatively little emphasis on outer suburbs or the urban fringe. Most of the “micro-political actions” were targeted towards inner-city areas and predicated on a relatively dense population; for example, interventions that depended on high levels of pedestrian traffic.

An exception to this inner-city focus was Linda Carroli’s participation in a forum on place blogs. Carroli is a writer, researcher and consultant who works in the cultural/arts sector. She is particularly interested in the critical and cultural exploration of place, looking at the role of artists, designers, planners, architects and other urbanists in the process of change. An integral part of this project is her blog, Placeblog. While this is not itself strictly speaking a place-based blog, Carroli’s location in the Brisbane suburb of Aspley informs her wider work. 

The other panellists and presenters in this forum were involved with more “traditional” place blogs focussed on specific locations, all located in inner and middle-ring suburbs such as Kings Cross/Darlinghurst, Ultimo and Marrickville. The discussion was interesting, particularly when it touched on issues of class and gentrification.

As Jesse Adams Stein, who chaired the session states on her Penultimo blog, “Place blogs enact a very specific act of watching, witnessing, monitoring, recording, sometimes celebrating, sometimes protesting – on a very local level” (click here for her summary of the forum outcomes). In this context I raised the question, “why are hardly any place blogs written about specific outer suburban locations such as places in Western Sydney?” which produced a wide range of responses.

Some thought this was due to the lack of access to computers and/or a lack of familiarity with blogging software in these areas. However the consensus (and my view) was that while this may be applicable in some places, it was hardly a universal explanation. The same applies to assumptions about class differences, given the range of income groups represented in areas like Western Sydney.

It was also pointed out that many residents in these communities run and participate in blogs – it’s just that they are mainly about things other than place. Those that have a spatial focus tend to look at wider regions and to deal either with broader cultural, social and spatial issues or specific problems such as the lack of transport infrastructure.

Leaving aside my half-joking response that place blogs are the harbingers of gentrification, there may be other reasons for this discrepancy. First, the nature of suburban life means that the nature of place is different.

In the inner city, people can live, shop, relax and go to school all in the same location and often their workplace is nearby as well. In the suburbs, however, they may live in one suburb, work in another, shop in a third and send their children to school in a fourth.  

This means that outer urban areas are often less “fine-grained” than inner urban ones – I don’t mean this pejoratively, but in the sense that social activity takes place over a much larger geographic range in car-based low-density suburbs.

This makes it difficult to write about place without writing about a wider region (thus ending up with the sorts of “issues” blogs I mentioned earlier) – or conversely, writing about stuff that may be way too local, like what your neighbours are up to. Indeed, the “communities” that many suburban dwellers belong to are not spatially based at all – an outcome that ironically is now being facilitated by the same sort of technology that makes place blogging possible.

This should not discourage blogs about places in outer urban areas, but I suspect that they will always have a different “feel” to their inner-city counterparts. The exception may be place blogs centred on the old centres around Western Sydney (such as those located on the rail lines) or the new ones that are starting to appear in places such as Rouse Hill, documenting the rate of change occurring in many of these places.

A blog about one of the latter would be particularly interesting. Anyone want to take up the challenge?

The NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell today announced his new ministry, with a few surprises.

Much has been made in the media about the two new MPs, Robyn Parker (Maitland) who is Environment and Heritage Minister and Graham Annesley (Miranda), who takes over Sport and Recreation. Victor Dominello (Ryde) who was in the previous parliament but not the shadow Cabinet has been appointed Minister for Citizenship, Communities and Aboriginal Affairs.

There are however a few other interesting things about the new Ministry, based on the list reproduced below from the Australian:

• Consistent with his election commitment, O’Farrell has brought planning and infrastructure together under one Minister, Brad Hazzard (Wakehurst), who is also Minister Assisting the Premier on Infrastructure NSW (another election promise). However he has also appointed Andrew Stoner (Oxley), the Nationals leader, as Minister for Regional Infrastructure and Services. In effect this means that there are two Ministers with responsibility for infrastructure, as well as by implication the Premier. It will be fascinating to see how this pans out.
• O’Farrell has retained and broadened the regional ministry concept introduced by the previous Labour government back in 1997. The previous government also adopted then gradually abandoned a corresponding regional approach to the delivery of both State-wide initiatives (eg, the State Plan) and metropolitan ones (eg, the Metropolitan Strategy), while retaining the regional minsters, often in name only.
• Under the new government, regional ministries now cover most of the state. Three of these regional ministries (Central Coast, North Coast and Western NSW) are held by MPs with seats in the relevant areas. Two (Hunter and the Illawarra) are held by MLCs, while the sixth (Western Sydney) is held by O’Farrell himself (again an election commitment). The new Government’s embrace of regional ministries and the appointment of Stoner as Minister for Regional Infrastructure  and Services may signal a return to a more regionalised approach to deliver, though what that means within Sydney is yet to be seen.
• While it is an encouraging sign of the region’s significance to the new government that O’Farrell appointed himself as Western Sydney Minister, it is unfortunate that not one of the new faces in the Ministry is from Western Sydney, despite its strong representation in the new government. The Cabinet is overwhelmingly made up of members from the North Shore and rural areas – understandable to some extent, given the nature of the Coalition government and the fact that virtually all the Western Sydney MPs were neophytes, but still disappointing.  O’Farrell should move to redress this imbalance in the appointment of positions such as Parliamentary Secretaries and Committee Chairs and members.
• The appointment of George Souris (Upper Hunter) as Minister for the Arts (as well as Minister for Tourism, Major Events, Hospitality and Racing) was a surprise to some who had expected the addition of the Arts to Robyn Parker’s (Maitland) portfolios of Environment and Heritage. While keeping Arts with Souris’s other responsibilities may be more consistent with the current Departmental structure, linking it to Environment and in particular Heritage would have seemed a more natural fit. Hopefully the Arts portfolio will enjoy a higher profile and more funding under the new Government, irrespective of who has Ministerial responsibility for it.
• The Ministries of Climate Change and Water have disappeared from the new Cabinet. The implications for the corresponding departments are yet to be announced, though one possibility is that responsibility for Water will fall under the Resources portfolio and Climate Change – assuming it has a future as a separate entity – under Environment.

A couple of updates on my last post:

First, a letter from Sandy Thomas (another member of the Sydney Morning Herald Public Transport Inquiry that reported last year) published in today’s Herald offers another and probably more achievable scenario on how the North West Rail Link (NWRL) can be built without loss of face by either Federal or State Governments.

He points out that the former State Government submitted a detailed proposal to Infrastructure Australia (IA) for funding for the NWRL. The letter notes that despite this, the funding for the Parramatta-Epping Rail Link was subsequently offered by the Federal Government from another non-IA pool. In summary, Thomas proposes that the previous State Government’s NWRL application for IA funding be revived and properly examined by IA as a basis for funding the North West line.

Second, it has been suggested that a “number eight” for my list should be full retention of the old Kings School site in Parramatta in public hands.

One of the last actions of the Keneally government was to announce that the bulk of the site would be retained and redeveloped as an arts and cultural precinct, with the sale of a small section to the Catholic Church providing some funding. It would appear that the Church still harbours some desire to obtain the whole site and the new government has not yet indicated whether it will continue to support the precinct proposal.

I strongly support this cause, but the “top seven” actions I listed in my last post were mainly to do with public transport infrastructure and strategic planning. However, reassuring the Western Sydney community that the Kings School site will be retained and developed as planned by the previous government (and not sold to fill some budgetary “black hole”) is something Mr O’Farrell could do easily in his first 100 days.

If I prepare a similar ”top seven” for Western Sydney, developing the Kings School as an arts and cultural precinct in public hands will certainly be on my list!