Inspiration needed to help build a truly creative city



This was published 10 years ago

Inspiration needed to help build a truly creative city

By Jess Scully

You don't have to tell Sydneysiders there's a land crisis - just ask us to calculate the percentage of our income spent on it. These days, 60 per cent of a house and land package goes towards that precious patch of earth. Inflated as it may be, in this city, we still haven't worked out our land's true value.

Less than 7 per cent of Australia is arable land, yet we're paving over the best of it with suburbia. Of our state's perishable vegetables, 80 per cent are produced in the Sydney basin. Another 27,000 hectares of that farmland is set to disappear in the next 20 years. Despite the pressures of population growth, household sizes in Sydney are falling - 30 per cent will be single person by 2031 - while ''housing obesity'' bloats building size. Sprawl pushes us apart socially, drives up the cost of infrastructure, and reduces opportunities for interaction across the span of the city.

Urban expansion and higher-density living are seemingly inevitable, so can we, at the same time, improve quality of life, encourage social cohesion, stimulate innovation and investment, and adapt to a new economy?

The commonly-presented alternative to endless suburbia idealises cycle-friendly Scandinavian cities, green-roofed New York and the gentri-funked laneways of Soho or Shoreditch. Couched in the lingo of new urbanism and clad in hipster aesthetics, it's easy to see why accusations of elitism have tainted the movement.

Fixed-gear bikes and loft conversions don't save cities, nor do gurus like Richard Florida, commanding upwards of $60,000 to tell cities how to attract the ''class'' of knowledge workers considered to be at the centre of the new economy. While these roving packs of bespectacled, Wallpaper-toting globetrotters may be a boon for baristas, it is harder to prove they do much for anyone else.

Internationally, there is a growing backlash against the ''image city''. Groups in Toronto and Hamburg have raised questions about the difference between genuine renewal for residents and window-dressing for visitors. In Seoul, top-down beautification, symbolised by the successful ''daylighting'' of the Cheonggyecheon stream, may have come at the expense of community-led, locally-distinctive solutions for city life.

The most creative models for the urban age are closer to home, smaller in scale, more practical and inclusive than those that rate on annual hot city lists. One example is in western Sydney. Architect Hugo Moline worked with the Kapit-bahayan (''attached houses'') Filipino housing co-operative in Canley Vale, to design a layout that comfortably houses six families on two standard blocks, with a communal deck, library and vegetable garden. Kapit-bahayan is development with a new kind of land value in mind: it's not about the size of your pad, but what you can do with the resources you have, and the people around you.

Creative cities are collaborative efforts, born from bottom-up projects and consultative big picture plans. To start with, we've got to learn to share with each other. Initiatives like Sydney's invite us to build human networks through micro experiments, from harvesting neighbours' surplus fruit to setting up a magazine-sharing box in an apartment block.

Truly creative cities encourage mixed-use experiments and more intensive use of space. In Bangkok, tucked away beside the cinema on the sixth floor of a shopping mall, the Thailand Creative & Design Centre provides resources to build industries for the information economy. Giving students and creative practitioners access to a huge library, meeting spaces and a materials bank, it democratises creative practice by taking it to the high street, and makes it accessible with late opening hours and subsidised memberships.

On a larger scale, cultural precincts offer a chance to accommodate diverse uses and test out ideas. Projects don't have to be expensive - they don't even have to be permanent - they just have to offer inspiration, and more thoughtful ways of using the land we have.


There's an enormous opportunity, for example, in Barangaroo; while tall poppies and developers debate, a container city could spring up to house small-scale retailers, creative studios, venues and bars. It's been done before, in Cholula, outside Mexico City. This kind of inventive, adaptable development is what Charles Landry calls ''civic creativity'', problem solving for the public good.

On Friday, the Premier announced a plan to dedicate Walsh Bay's Pier 2/3 to the arts. It is a commendable move, but the extent of the transformation is crucial. An active creative precinct is more than a monument to culture, or a place for high-end performance and exhibition. For inspiration, Sydney could look to the creative-led redevelopment that has transformed Yokohama's shipping yards into a vital, productive precinct centred around BankART.

Over the past six years BankART has converted an old bank, a former NYK shipping warehouse and linked spaces around Yokohama City into accessible, flexible spaces to foster interaction between creators and audiences. A public-private partnership houses educational programs, exhibition, retail, even a pub; affordable playplaces for residents and work spaces for emerging industries.

It's not just art for art's sake, but creativity as an instrument of city-building. It will take proactive communities, forward-looking policy, and a celebration of diversity and fringe culture to change the way we use and value land in Sydney. Authenticity can't come from a handful of planners and developers. It starts with multiple authors, broader access, experimentation and learning to share.

Jess Scully is the director of Creative Sydney.

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