Today over half the world’s population lives in cities; this despite the fact that cities occupy only about 3 per cent of the earth’s land surface. Urbanisation has provided valuable economic, social and cultural opportunities, but are our cities at risk of becoming soulless? Might we be in danger of making our cities places where business goes on as usual but life in its real sense is lost ?

This blog aims to start a conversation about how can we work together to create more liveable creative cities. How can we improve the design of our urban spaces to enhance our well-being: to be more sustainable, more creative, and more viable? Our cities and urban spaces must fulfil many needs, from making us feel secure, to enhancing our sense of identity and belonging, to giving us the space to play and socialise.

What in particular is the place of art in the city? Is its function to celebrate, to reflect or to challenge our perspectives? Is it to help us dream and renew our imagination? What meaning does it add to our lives and public spaces? Thinking Through The City welcomes your comments and contributions.

This is a blog for everyone. We hope it will attract comments  from people – citizens – of all ages, cultures and professions. What is it that you love about this city, or indeed any city?  What’s missing?  What would you change if you had the opportunity? Follow our conversation threads or add some of your own, either way, feel free to scroll down the page to add your comments or reflections.

Remember, you don’t have to live in Norwood Payneham & St Peters to have your say!

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American sociologist Oldenburg was one of the first to recognise the role of places such as coffee shops, bookstores, pubs, and hairdressing salons as spaces for socialising and building community. He referred to them as third spaces: un- planned places, beyond work and home, where unrelated people could connect.

It is not surprising then that when I talk to people about the precinct they often comment on how much they enjoy the local coffee shops, bookstores and pubs.

But what’s been exciting for me is the discovery of groups of local residents initiating their own cultural activities across such spaces. One such remarkable cluster of local citizens is the Kensington Arts Group. Formed over six months ago by Kensington residents, they have developed a unique arts program including music and literature evenings in the local pubs, and sustainable visual arts projects in collaboration with local schools – an extraordinary feast of cultural activities for the enjoyment of everyone in and around Kensington.

Such community driven initiatives are I think a reflection of a different kind of citizenship in action – an inspiring form of artistic citizenship – one that uses the arts as the vehicle for building community and affirming our humanity. I look forward to more developments like this.

Teresa Crea Lead Creative

This is the founding philosophy of the Kensington Arts Group; an intentional, collective community effort, to bring art and creativity to life in Kensington; to bring the community together and make it a better place to live.

In October 2010, a couple of neighbour’s letter dropped the neighbourhood and called a community meeting.  Ten people turned up and called themselves the Kensington arts group. Since then there have been a music night and a poetry evening in the local pubs, a month long gates festival involving local schools, kindy’s and residents, a secular walking Christmas carol singing night and a film screening night at the local Norwood pool.

The Kensi arts group is strongly supported by the Kensington Residents Association – which also provides the valuable framework and capacity for other similar ‘by the people’ initiatives.

Whilst we busy ourselves in being prosperous, our elderly are often left to feel redundant, our young can have little connection to their local community, and our sense of place is often strongest where we work, not where we live.  This is about actively challenging those things.

It’s not about the interests of one particular person or group – it’s about creating a platform and opportunities to harness the individual creativity of all residents, young and old, local school students and families, local artists and local businesses, through art and creative initiatives. The group reflects diversity of age, experience, perspective and interest and there is a genuine effort to incorporate those varied talents to achieve something satisfying for both community and participants.

The Kensi arts group is about creating a platform for the local community, by the local community, to come together to share something.

 Trish Hansen, Kensi Art Group

Recently Georgia and Laura form 3D Radio conducted a vox pop for Thinking Through The City on what young people wanted in Norwood Payneham and St Peters. The program went to air on October 13 … and the verdict…?  Youth were keen to see more of a vibe generated in the city through live music and events.  Culture and creativity are the glue that create meaning and enrichment in our lives, and today the term creative communities is being used far and wide, but the challenge remains how to truly generate opportunities for individuals to be creatively engaged as active, creative citizens.  Allied to the notion of ‘artistic citizenship’ comes the idea of  ‘cultural sustainability’…

Not growing up in Australia, I am still amazed whenever I see the local fauna out and about, especially in an urban situation.  My encounter, with our marsupial resident, started me thinking; why is it such an unusual or exceptional event to see koalas or other indigenous animals in our suburbs and why can’t we take a more fauna-centric view towards our cities.  Perhaps, if we want our cities to be truly liveable and sustainable for all, we should cast our thinking wider than just the city’s human inhabitants.  Is there a benefit to be gained by designing for wildlife in the city?  Not simply form the point of view of curiosity, but from an ecosystem wide perspective.

When we add wildlife as a measure of success within our cities we start to add a new level of performance to the planning and design of our urban environments.  For example, a measurement of bird species is not simply a count of animals.  The type and number birds in an area can also represent the diversity of tree species, habitat quality and extent of urban woodlands in the city.  Similarly, the number of koalas in the urban environment could signify the quality of habitat corridors and vegetation, whilst frogs could reflect the health and distribution of the creeks and water bodies. By using animals as a performance measure in our cities, we start to move away from the usual ‘function’ defined outcomes for infrastructure, especially green infrastructure (our creeks, wetlands and open spaces).  If we are aiming to create liveable cities, perhaps a more diverse approach to design and planning is needed to allow us to achieve liveable and sustainable environments where bird song, koala sightings, bee hives, butterflies and frog spawn are measures of success rather than the usual social and economic indicators we use today.

Perhaps next time you are out in the suburbs try listening for the bird song and look around you.  Does the amount of birds reflect to quality and quantity of trees around you as well as the shade and amenity of the street?  Or consider this, if a street has no song, what amenity does it provide for people.  How sustainable and liveable is that street?

Accidental Urban Designer – Warwick Keates – Director WAX Design

My role was to oversee the redevelopment of Dunstone Grove – Linde Reserve from concept to detailed design and final delivery. I am really pleased how the design objectives have translated into reality. It is a real oasis – away from the adjoining roads and traffic – a really pleasant place to be that enhances the community’s enjoyment of the environment.    We naturalised, as much as possible, Second Creek and created artificial rock pools to allow for the natural habitat and fauna to re-establish and the community to interact with it.  Already there has been an increased number of ducks; three families of ducks have been raised since the pools were established – even during construction works!  Further we have been advised that frogs have returned to the creek. They have been heard at night and bubbles are frequently seen here.

I could talk for hours on the reserve’s many inclusions such as stormwater harvesting for reuse to irrigate this reserve & beyond, artworks, environmental sustainable design initiatives + more.  I’ve already booked my son’s first birthday party here, that’s how proud I am of the finished product.

Sam Dilena   NPSP Asset & Special Projects Manager

(further to an earlier post and in response to the conversations and presentations made at Thinking through the City’s first forum: Incubating Creativity)

One major problem in my mind with the gallery model of engaging with contemporary art, is the convention – appropriate when the main audience for a given show is the group of potential collector/investors, but in-appropriate in the case of much contemporary practice – of supplying free food and drink to all-comers. Openings are fun, and a good chance to catch up with friends, or to network, or to celebrate together the culmination of a lot of thinking, care and physical effort, but often they are packed wall-to-wall and the worse of occasions to get a real feel for the art itself, which may require solitude, or at least some space for a worthwhile engagement. It often strikes me as bizarre that it is taken for granted an artist will put up the time, labour and material cost to make the work, and then in effect, is also expected to pay (to otherwise entertain) their viewers.

This convention is a habit rather than a necessity I am sure, and one that several Artist Run Intitiatives (Feltspace and Format in Adelaide for example) are dispensing with, supplying wine and/or beer at a cost rather than handing it out. No one seems to mind.

There are other models too that combine different notions of sustainability with relaxing over a drink or meal, alongside an art experience:

Crate59 in Cairns supports emerging artists by sub-leasing a portion of the gallery space that fronts their complex of studios to an iconic local business ‘Billy’s Coffee’ (which shifts from its home at Rusty’s Markets weekly on the days the markets are closed). Great coffee and a rich mix of curated and high rotation artist run shows creates a relaxed and inviting way to spread the ‘opening’ out, to sustain and give a platform to a diversity of local artists and to extend the invitation to people that might not venture into a gallery otherwise – as their website says “Art + other = good”!

but the rich mix of conversation sparked by presentations, continuing over wine and food as the evening progressed: the – often conflicting – ideas, attitudes, desires, and opinions about what conditions ‘creativity’ requires (what it even constitutes – in relation to both ‘art’ and business) and consequently the – again at times conflicting – plans hatched for the ‘incubation of creativity’ within a local matrix, has continued to play on my mind.

Up the top, in terms of my own response, is the absolute provocation I feel reading Gavin Artz’s post following the forum. He titled the post “on being provocative” but went on to suggest his key focal points were not provocative at all, merely common sense… ie: that business and ‘creative practioners’ really want the same thing, and that this same thing amounts to new value in the form of wealth creation. Aaaaaah (my heart sinks a little right here) once again, as seems typical of late (across all sectors and, increasingly – sadly, for me… progressively, in Gavin’s terms – in every little crevice of daily life) the bottom line for success is how much money will be made.

I admit, it is extremely hard to make an acceptable living out of art practice over any length of time (in itself, it requires both creativity and business-sense) and I do believe new models are necessary to sustain and encourage a rich creative social fabric (some of Gavin’s ideas and some of the ideas expressed at the forum: business mentorships, and virtual teams of art/business collaborators have real merit and offer marked possibility for both individual artists, business interests and the general cultural good)… but I have a real problem with pitching wealth creation as a goal in and of itself. I also have a problem with the notion (he brackets the fact that in expressing himself this way he is indeed being provocative)… that council provision of gallery and/or studio spaces would constitute the ‘artificial creation’ of ‘sheltered workshops’, a ‘moribund’ idea he suggests, whose ‘time has passed’.

As time passes (and specifically given current conditions of global economic instability) an overly strong focus on the imperative value of economic wealth implicitly under-values the subtle, often intangible personal and social experiences that make a life feel ‘worth’while, regardless of their commercial benefit. It strikes me that ‘shelter’ from the need to ‘succeed’ commercially, whether artificially created, or naturally occurring (through the individual or collective desire for ‘other’ values… for places where risk and the possibility of failure are given space) is of high value.

Lisa Harms

It is really important that we create an environment where young people and artists can express themselves.

If we don’t afford them this opportunity our young people will move to other places and our city will lose much of  its dynamism and creativity. We will be the poorer for this loss.

Michael Hickinbotham,  Managing Director  Hickinbotham Group

So to being provocative – one big missing element of the evening was business. Not creative business, because they were well represented, along with local and state government and government and nongovernment cultural agencies, but business not directly connected with the creative realm seemed absent. This was as unfortunate for those businesses not attending, as for those that did, because building a unique sense of creative industries will mean being inclusive of businesses that don’t see themselves as having any need for creative practice and getting them to understand how they benefit from creative business and creative community activity. What the evening did highlight was the significant, international standard of local creative people that doesn’t get the recognition their reputations would indicate. This is an almighty community resource for both culture and business, but business needs to know how to work with this resource as much as creative practitioners need to know how to work with the commercial.

Some of the strongest themes were brought out by Eamonn Vereker, owner of the glass blowing studio where the event was held. Eamonn is someone who has learned through hard won experience what is needed to maintain creativity while running a business. He has developed a virtual team to handle different aspects of the business, allowing him to do the thing that creates value in the first place; glass blowing. He has learned enough about business to understand the gaps in his skills and interest and what is best for his studio. The big need he pointed to in developing creative industries was mentoring; this is a peer to peer education around a real business and a great practical starting point for demonstration the mutule benefit in linking business with creative practice. Sculptor Andrew Stock followed up with another crucial progressive notion, that art, while fulfilling its cultural and creative ends needs to think of itself in business terms as well. This is the idea that there is no dichotomy between art and business and that any enmity between the two is an artificial creation whose time has passed.

This paints a very interesting picture for how the City of Norwood, Payneham and St. Peters can do creative industries different to other attempts around Australia and the world. If we start from an understanding that creative practitioners want to work with business, then some of the more moribund ideas raised (that’s being provocative) can be side stepped. The idea that the council can provide a gallery space, or studio space is not going to resolve the problems in developing a truly creative industries hub. What is required is a brokering of relationships between local business and local creative people to achieve both business and creative ends. Often these groups want the same thing, but have difficulty in speaking the same language. The benefits arise from these very differences, but this also means relationships don’t just happen; they need to be managed and encouraged.  If you want a space, how about somewhere businesses and creative practitioners can develop projects that have both creative and business outcomes. These spaces can be a virtual; it is the relationships and the sharing of knowledge and approaches that are important. The council could encourage virtual teams where a number of business with complementary skills, business interests and networks can work together to create new value through working with the creativity in the community. I think we have moved beyond the idea of taking art away from our daily lives in galleries, or some type of sheltered workshop (that may be a bit provocative) to a much more mature relationship between creativity, business, culture and community. To me, creative practice is where new value and wealth is created and getting the full range of creative practice working meaningfully with business is the challenge, but success means we are all better off and I don’t think that is a provocative idea.

Gavin Artz