Planning, Culture and How To Shut Down a 40 Person Theatre

One of my favourite activities is looking at the disparity between cultural and planning policy at the local government level. It’s a hobby I have to keep in check, because the volume of local government agencies who successfully connect the two is pretty limited. The silo based structure of local government, and the nuance of ‘accountable’ systems of management drawn from the Westminster system, tend to ensure cultural policy, planning and, in addition, economic development often operate at a distinct distance from each other, often to the point of contradiction. Looking into this disconnect is one of the key things I’m hoping to do (funding permitting) with Renew Australia sometime soon. Sporadically you do encounter examples of councils doing very well in this respect, but they’re exceptions rather than the rule and the change is often driven by a very small number of extremely forward thinking people in the administration, teamed with a couple of elected members.

There’s a couple of classic markers of a disconnect between planning and cultural policy that keep jumping out at me. I’m writing some initial thoughts on them up here for your thoughts, and in the hope I’ll encounter other examples which indicate alternate approaches. So my initial observations of the cultural and planning policy disconnect are:

(1) The presence of strategic planning initiatives budgeted at between $100,000 and $200,000 in synch with active attacks on community driven activity and small business already delivering upon the suggested outcomes of those policies.

At the moment City of Marrackville appears to be the best example of this with their much lauded attempts to cripple a local multi-purpose, independently community art space called The Red Rattler. In between the various renditions of the story I’ve heard, Marrackville council has invested significantly on a cultural plan to increase the volume of creative spaces in the city area, whilst simultaneously costing The Red Rattler a similar rate in miscellaneous fees, including $15,000 for parking. You can read their cultural policy here. Note the sections in which they state the following:

Council will provide a range of infrastructure and programs and services to support and reflect the diversity of local arts and culture, including arts and cultural facilities, community facilities, libraries, open spaces, and public places.

And, from there:

Council recognises the importance of urban land-use planning to the local creative industries and will work to create favourable conditions to attract and retain creative businesses within the local area through its planning controls.

This would, I assume, have been developed by either a consultancy organisation or working committee comprised primarily of senior cultural or potentially economic development staff. Unfortunately, whatever department they produced it within, it didn’t synch over to the actions of Planning and Development, and thus the policy and the practice were exact opposites.

So the sad thing here is that the council had an opportunity to work with an existing and highly successful independent initiative already delivering on their cultural policy, but the application of planning and development fees and regulations ultimately did the exact opposite. The parking fee was later waved by the elected members after a lawyer working pro-bono found the fee was somewhat legally dubious. The problem came from the administration, not the elected councillors. That’s important because it questions the idea that administrative behaviour abides by a sense of ‘accountability’ back to the community.

The organisational definition of ‘accountability’ within government is something I’m still struggling to get my head around. The Marrickville cultural plan states that their task is to ‘provide a range of infrastructure’ – not to allow or facilitate non-council businesses or associations to produce that infrastructure themselves. It seems to be a common experience that if you want to implement an activity within your community, even when it synchs with the local government cultural policy, you need to go directly to the elected members. This is a shame as it produces fractious and difficult relationships with the administration, and ultimately takes more effort, time and money for everyone. It would be cheaper and more effective for Marrickville council to simply wave fees, allocate seed fudning and support things like the Red Rattler than to ‘provide’ cultural infrastructure themselves. But this doesn’t seem to happen, and the usual excuse seems to be ‘accountability’. As far as I can tell, it IS accountable for a council to illegally charge a parking fee from an incorporated association. It ISN’T accountable to allocate resources from a council directly to an incorporated association to spend on their own infrastructure. This strikes me as being more about control over resources and keeping power within the systems of governance than being accountable to the delivery of outcomes of social or cultural good. But maybe that’s just me.

This leads us to the next commonality.

(2) Attempts by council administrators to implement cultural outcomes despite having no formal or other experience as cultural producers.

This is surprisingly common nationally. The usual indication of it is a lack of seed funding or support for existing initiatives of an ongoing nature, coupled with a series of low controversy, low impact ‘safe’ events – usually either murals or similar low cost public art or sporadic ‘street markets’. As noted above, the interesting thing about this approach to increasing cultural activity is it is actually far, far more expensive than a grants or funded partnership program for a lesser result. Sporadically I’ll find bitter ex-council employees who’ll give me figures of anything up to $30,000 for a single day events with attendence stats that are either blatantly suspect or simply don’t seem to exist. I’ve been given figures of $10,000 to $15,000 for single murals and novelty street furniture. This is usually three to four times the amount similar events cost when run by people or organisations with skills specific to cultural production.

Again, my theory here is that the issue isn’t about cost, the issue is about ‘accountablity’ or, more bluntly, control. It IS accountable to give resources to a government employee to ‘provide’ culture. It ISN’T accountable to give resources to a non-government, non-professional or community or arts focused worker, because god knows what they might do with it. Which makes sense, except cultural work is actually kind of a skilled profession, and it’s not a skill that’s usually found within the local government sector. Sorry to any council workers reading this. I’m not trying to be mean. But cultural work and government work aren’t the same thing.

The analogy I’m making here is that the local government sector increasingly views the production of culture as something they ‘provide’, whereas their structure and human resources are generally geared more towards administration. The idea that they’re going to ‘provide’ culture is a bit like a library saying it’s going to stop buying books and the librarians are all going to start writing them themselves. After all, they know about books – they spend the whole day cataloguing and managing information systems about them. And if they buy books from a publisher or author, how do they know that publisher or author is writing work relative to the community the library serves?

This attitude, as far as I can tell, is because the local government sector has it’s roots in parishes and Court appointed Justices of the Peace, which began to take on a more formal structure in the early 1800s as urban populations started to grow in the UK. As a system, local government’s administration is a mixture of Parish registers and representatives of the Crown, and thus essentially feudal in nature. It’s traditional role has been to keep records and manage the hoi polloi. The idea it should play a role in cultural policy seems fairly new, barely older than the use of the word ‘Vibrancy’, and thus the inherent nature of the system means it tends to see ‘vibrancy’ as something council should ‘provide’ or ‘produce’ for its populace, in the same way it was traditionally expected to ‘produce’ safety, hygiene and order. Hence, it’s possible to try to charge a community space $15,000 for parking despite it turning out that such a charge is actually kind of, well, illegal and still claim to be acting ‘accountably’. The power over resources has remained within Council. No real control has been given to anyone else, which is more or less how ‘accountability’ seems to work.

(3) The penchant to allow wider community need to collapse in the face of vocal minorities. 

This one is harder to understand but seems to have it’s origins in the idea that everyone should have their own little patch of land and that it’s a god given right not to have their life on that patch of land impeded on by anyone else. Which sort of makes sense, until you see it resulting in someone moving behind a live music venue, complaining about the noise and getting a focal point of their local community shut down. The old urban myth here is that the Seven Stars over on Angus Street stopped hosting bands because of a single noise complaint. I’d never really believed that, until I watched this:

This was brought to my attention by Jane Howard of the No Plain Jane blog.

 

Apparently it IS possible for a single person to cripple a focal point for the community with a few well timed noise complaints. This didn’t used to be possible because communities were too small, too cohesive, geographically fixed and if you decided to do something like shut down the local pub because it kept you up past 11PM, all the people who used that pub would probably be your neighbours and they’d, quite literally, beat the shit out of you.

That’s not an exaggeration. Reading back through histories of local government regulation, there are examples of constables and Justices of the Peace refusing to enforce certain ordinances because they feared the backlash of their neighbours. There’s examples of people who ‘dobbed’ on their neighbours for doing things like using their house as pub being tarred, feathered and driven through the streets of London.

Not that I’m suggesting we return to mob rule, but it would be interesting to see how things changed if the decision by an individual and a couple of building compliance officers had to be openly and publicly stated in front of the communities they were impacting upon, and their job security or right to continue living in that area hinged on the capacity to negotiate a compromise – preferably by a Restorative Justice methodology rather than mob rule. As it is, the regulatory system seems to preference individual rights over the collective. Thus, the accountability is to the system (which says a noise complaint breeches planning ordinances) rather than a community. Again, I’m not implying that’s all bad and we should resort to the mob mentality of 17th century London, but it is interesting that a common feature that keeps coming up is the capacity for outcomes benefiting lots of people to collapse through a system which places the greater volume of weight on individual complaints.

Again, these are just initial thoughts. Your response or ideas are, as always, appreciated.