In a couple of days, barring major accidents, natural disaster or the emergence of a concentrated City Deactivation Strategy (CDS), Tuxedo Cat and Renew Adelaide will be formally announcing our Vibrant Cultural Boulevard Strategy (VCBS). Also, Renew Adelaide will finally be launching a new website and this blog will formally become what it’s always been – me making smart alec comments about topics I barely understand.
In the meantime, there’s a couple of things to get you in the mood for the Festival season. The first is former professional darts champion and TACSI CEO Brenton Caffin talking about Tuxedo Cat’s last main street reactivation strategy’s interactions with the local authorities, presenting the radical notion that pragmatic, empathetic approaches might translate into bureaucracy:
On a similarly radical note, I’d like to draw attention to the City of Parramatta’s latest initiative – an $80,000 pot of funding for social innovation. The idea of a social enterprise or social innovation grant at the LGA level is, along with the notion of matching funds for cultural enterprise, one of the major initiatives I’ve been repetitively told is utterly impossible to implement at the local government level. To those who’ve told me this, here’s your precedent. I look forward to working with you on replicating this in South Australia. It shouldn’t be too hard given TACSI has already set up a system for administering and evaluating a much larger program right here in Adelaide.
Finally, something else people told me could never happen: Lada Gaga’s smash hit ‘Bad Romance’ has finally been adapted into a medium we can all understand: Chinese contemporary operetta:
