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:

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.

But, as I’m reliably informed, people don’t read this blog to hear me wax lyrical about the beauty in the world. Apparently most of you read it because I have a great deal of bile at the immense volume of inept policy, poor decision making, brainless strategies, petty careerism and total disregard for social justice currently on display in my home town of Adelaide.

And because I know a lot of you share my frustration, I want to share a special Christmas gift in the form of a special award. It’s the Award for the Stupidest Piece of Advice I’ve been given in 2011.

There’s been a lot of steep competition in this field. Keep in mind I work with people who think it’s possible for the side of a car park to host a ‘jazz bar’, it was once suggested to me that I arrange for an opera to take place in a public park and I routinely encounter people with job titles related to economic development who don’t know what globalisation is.

But there were two real contenders for the title. And so I present:

Runner Up: Award for the Stupidest Piece of Advice I’ve Been Given in 2011:

“Don’t worry about the Youth Exodus! They’ll all move back when they want to have kids!”

This wins because of its utter disregard for the decline in the mortgage/stable career based social contract laid down through New Deal politics in the face of Globalisation and Economic Rationalism, it’s successful bypass of the cultural factors behind the youth exodus and, most of all, that it’s one of those things you can keep saying without ever seeing a result.

If you really want to argue the point and keep falling back on this truism, then I’m going to suggest you either read Mike Rann’s introduction to the Thirty Year Plan for Greater Adelaide and the corresponding sections which outline the need to attract and retain more skilled labour of ‘working age’. Or, if you want it straight from the Mouth of Youth, Jane Howard’s wonderful diatribe on the topic at No Plain Jane.

Regardless, defeating that very noble runner-up there’s one piece of advice I get routinely that reveals a depth of crippling stupidity behind an otherwise meek exterior. And, thus, the winner of is…

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Award for the Stupidest Piece of Advice I’ve Been Given in 2011:

“You should run a series of for-profit bars and entertainment venues to fund Renew Adelaide! Get a liquor license and you can make heaps of money!”

</drumroll>

Let’s rephrase this so it reads like I hear it:

Renew Adelaide is a project designed to counteract the degree to which it has become economically unviable to run cultural enterprises in Adelaide. Renew Adelaide should fund itself by running a cultural enterprise.

Genius!

So all I need is a liquor license and I can make a live music or arts venue into a cash cow!?! Why didn’t I think of that!?! I could have kept running Format and become a millionaire!!

Let me show a picture which further proves why this is the award winner for Dumbest Piece of Advice I’ve Received in 2011.

This is the Producers Hotel. It was a major, major live music venue for decades, right up until the mid-2000s when, thanks to some particularly skilled planning decisions, housing was built behind it.

It is now vacant.

The Producers is Class 9B compliant and has an existing liquor license. There isn’t a specific regulatory issue why it can’t be used. Unfortunately, because of the close proximity to housing, the beer garden, which used to house local bands and did so for decades, can no longer do so. This limits the venue’s capacity to attract an audience and, liquor license or not, the place isn’t viable.

There are most likely further issues regarding the lease price. The comment I’ve heard on this place is to make it financially viable it’d need to be turned into a pokies bar. By building it’s economic base around gambling addiction and binge drinking, rather than cultural activity, you could simultaneously circumvent the need to deal with the noise restrictions posed by the housing and still make money off of it. But if you wanted to make a living out of it without pokies, you’d need to host cultural activity (particularly live music) three or four times a week.

Personally I don’t like the idea of funding Renew Adelaide by taking advantage of people’s gambling addiction. But that’s the only way you could make this venue pay.

Given this venue, along with the Tivoli, used to provide a major cultural venue for decades, it’s inability to do so now pretty clearly indicates that the market conditions for culturally focused venues is at a low point.

Let’s consider this further. I’ve got a diligent volunteer laboriously plotting back through live music guides from about 1997 through to 2006, which is the time period in which the majority of live music venues seem to have suffered.

This survey is fuelled partly because I played in live bands for years and I think they have a colossal and incredibly positive impact on sense of community and cultural engagement, particularly for those in their teens and early twenties.

But on top of that, I’ve reading the Deloitte Access Economics report for Arts Victoria entitled “The Economic, Social and Cultural Contribution of Venue-Based Live Music In Victoria”, released in June of 2011. If we ignore the cultural and social benefits of live music, which has certainly proved a popular approach up until now, and focus purely on the economic element, the report notes:

…it is estimated that live music in venues generated an additional $501 million in gross state product (GSP) to the Victorian economy in 2009/10, and increased full-time equivalent (FTE) employment by approximately 17,200 persons. The direct economic contribution component was $301 million in GSP and approximately 14,900 FTE positions.

Applying the average expenditure per patron attendance to the estimated increase in direct expenditure suggests there were approximately 5.4 million attendances at live performances in Victorian venues in 2009/10. This compares with approximately 4.3 million attendances to Australian Football League matches in Victoria in the home and away seasons, and 4.7 million ticketed attendances to other live performances in Victoria in 2009 (ii).

What does this mean exactly? It means the 3000 live music performances Deloittes identified as happening in Victoria per week (or 156,000 per year) are worth about $3211.53 in gross state product each week, attracting a total weekly crowd of about 103,800, or about 170 per venue. Note that this doesn’t include major festivals. It’s purely the kind of music that happens at “hotels, bars, nightclubs, cafes and restaurants” (ii).

The report noted around 600 venues in Victoria hosting live music, with 370 of them in Melbourne itself – the greatest concentration of live music venues of any city in Australia. Someone check my maths on this, but I think that means the city of Melbourne hosts about 1,850 performances a week, bringing somewhere near $1,188,000 into the city weekly or 62,900 visitors to the Melbourne city area.

Essentially what we’re looking at here is a sector fragmented into a wide array of small venues that, on their own, are fairly low profit but collectively produce an economic impact and a greater volume of engagement than, as Deloittes notes, the AFL and the wider ticketed cultural sector.

Keep in mind that this is economic impact centred on the activity within the venues: job creation, food and beverage sales and tickets. It doesn’t include the outflow of economic worth that results in attracting higher portions of people into the area around the venue, for example things like coming into the city to see a band but going somewhere else for dinner first, or going to a movie after work to kill time before going to a show or the cost spent on taxis or whatever else.

The other interesting report here is from APRA, who did an Economic Contribution of the Venue-Based Live Music Industry in Australia.

Thanks to Helen at the Adelaide West End Association for pointing out these reports.

If you apply the APRA figures, it’s a bit higher, at $3680 per performance. The APRA survey is focused on venues with APRA membership, which are likely to be a bit larger. Their inclusion of NSW and QLD, which have lesser capital city music scenes but much larger regional touring circuits, makes a city by city analysis a little harder.

And now here’s the bad bit. In wading back through the old gig guides and following from an earlier blog post about the loss of local music venues in the East End, I’ve been trying to do a sort of tentative retrospective economic impact measurement to see how much the collapse of the local music scene has cost us.

Of the nine venues in the East quarter of the city I listed in my former blog post on this topic, six had closed or ceased to have live music. If we consider that, like their Melbourne counterparts, they used to average about 5 performances a week (which, from my reading of the old gig guides, is pretty fair), there’s maybe 30 performances per week less than there was in the late nineties and early 2000s. I’d argue that’s a reasonable figure given the Tivoli, Austral and Producers might have had two or three band bills on at least three nights a week.

Thirty performances at $3211.53 is $96,345. Thirty performances at APRA’s rate of $3680 is $110,400. That’s about $5 million in lost income, lost jobs, lost food and drink sales per year, and about 53,000 lost city visitors, averaging about $94 each a year. Deloittes has that figure at about $95, so I can’t be too far off.

Again, I’m not much good at maths and I don’t have the sociology background to do solid analysis of quantitative data. If that’s your skill set, I’d absolutely love your help going through this stuff.

The hypothesis I’d like to offer here is, if we accept the Deloittes and APRA reports as guidelines on the impact of a local music scene, the decline of our venue based music scene had a direct and negative impact on other cultural activity in the city and, from there, on the city’s early evening economy. This decline could realistically, in the city area, be measured in the millions.

As I’ve said before, once the music venues shut down, the cinemas all shut down. After the cinemas shut down, Hindley Street entered into its real decline. This makes sense as it’s the area that had traditionally hosted the bulk of the early evening economy. And, notably, the youth exodus cemented itself.

If we extend the measurement of economic impact to a more ambiguous attempt to measure cultural factors in the decision making process regarding where people spend their money, things get a bit more complicated. In between 1998 and 2005, people’s cultural consumption habits changed massively, into the ‘Long Tail’ pattern described in this blog in the past. Melbourne successfully captured this by using the Postcode 3000 reforms to retain a high degree of diversity and grow its ‘Laneways’ culture – characterised by a lot of small, owner operated businesses. Notably the healthiest sections of Adelaide (to my eye) follow the same pattern: Ebenezer Place, Leigh Street and, most of all, the Central Markets feature a high density of small, owner operated businesses: a classic spatial rendition of a long tail market.

Other streets do not. They feature single buildings with large foot prints and car parks or larger, more generic enterprise built around the old ‘Anchor tenant’ mentality. The degree of diversity in the city has been undermined by the removal of our ‘fine grain’. We’ve removed that fine grain at the same time as our cultural and spatial consumption habits have shifted increasingly to a long tail pattern. If you see my point.

Think about that for a second. Our city is like Warner Brothers and Sony Music in 2002. It’s still trying to pump out block buster albums when the market is moving to buying a much more diverse array of singles by smaller acts. Major labels lost millions until they adapted their business models to better handle the division between major and minor cultural products because most of the money was coming through the smaller releases, which attracted fewer individual sales but collectively amounted to a much, much larger slice of the pie. They had to adapt their strategy to suit a significant shift in cultural consumption behaviour. Adelaide has done the exact opposite. It does a terrible job of attracting diverse and small cultural enterprise, over relies and over invests on flagships and thus continues to lose millions because it has failed to keep its strategies in synch with existing cultural markets and audiences.

This isn’t a ‘laneways’ issue or a booze issue. Anyone can stand on Rosina Street and look at the matchbox cars stuck on the wall of the car park, and they can go down Solomon Street and look at the graffiti murals from a now long forgotten public art laneways reactivation. Anyone can go to Red Square and get plastered. The problem is that, in between doing those things, and (a) staying home with Facebook and Youtube (b) going to Marion or (c) moving to Melbourne, they’re not choosing Adelaide.

Which brings us back to The Producers. This venue used to thrive on an audience primarily made of up people in their twenties and thirties who came into the city to watch live music. This audience has now been dissolved. On top of that conditions have been put in place to make it impossible to rebuild it because the necessary volume of live music required to attract and retain a commercially viable volume of customers cannot be achieved through poor planning decisions and the location of housing right behind the venue.

Thus, my choice in Stupid Advice Award to those who’ve told me I should fund Renew Adelaide by running for-profit culture venues. It is virtually impossible to run a for profit venue focused on cultural activity, and, again, I have no interest in running a pokies bar. It is impossible to make cultural ventures pay because of a lack of audience and an inability to access resources such as suitable buildings, start-up capital or regulatory concessions to start said venues. Additionally, as Adelaide still hasn’t addressed the shift in market, and still keeps its economic development, its cultural policy and its planning policy in distinct silos, it lacks the capacity to address that market shift. Unfortunately, there are other cities far more aggressively addressing these problems. Hence we’re now in the ludicrous situation of having a regional council in Queensland offering larger sums of money to one of our independent cultural managers for a couple of weeks work than they’ve received for five years activity in Adelaide.

Hence my winning award for stupid advice. It’s not just that it’s impossible to fund Renew Adelaide by running cultural enterprises. It’s that Renew Adelaide exists because this city has resolutely gone about destroying not only its venues but also its audiences and the skilled labour required to attract them to our city.

The degree to which I get this advice from people in senior government administrative positions is alarming in that it indicates a degree to which senior decision makers have yet to grasp what seem, to many of us, rudimentary elements of contemporary economic development, cultural and planning policy. They seem either unwilling or unable to grasp these facts despite both the general community, interstate research and many of their own colleagues saying, in varying degrees, almost exactly what I’ve written above.

And with that, I wish you all a good festive season. And to celebrate, here’s a lo-fi classic from Adelaide ex-patriots Hit the Jackpot now based in the US. Enjoy!

Obviously, the reactivation of a site this large is a job only for the very best of cultural managers and, based on having done our best to help/hinder them in their reactivation of Electra House, we knew the only real contender was Tuxedo Cat, who’ll be turning 199 and 200 North Terrace into a six theatre complex for the Adelaide Fringe. This is, with the exclusion of the Garden of Unearthly Delights, about to become the biggest venue in the 2012 Fringe. Along with Arcade Lane, who are currently taking permanent occupation of their site off Grenfell Street, and Shimmering West’s work in the West End, it heralds a pretty significant step forward in the growth of the Fringe, with the advent of Edinburgh style ‘super venues’ finally hitting Adelaide.

For Renew Adelaide it heralds something else. Firstly, it’s the start of our new relationship with ArtsSA, who are not only taking over from TACSI as our funding body but are working with us to see that something that comes out of this site which makes it easier for people to run creative spaces and culturally focused enterprise in Adelaide.

Secondly, it’s a chance to remind ourselves that the goal of Renew Adelaide isn’t just about putting people in buildings, it’s about seeing them succeed. This is an immense project and whilst the in-kind commitment from the owners and developers is getting well over the $75,000 mark, ultimately the expenses of setting up and running the venue rest on the bankcard of Cass and Bryan from Tuxedo Cat. What we need to look at here isn’t just how to get into the building, but how to make it possible for someone to curate the kind of activity that can, within the space of a month, attract 20,000 or more people into Adelaide and thereby kick start our early evening economy, counteract the lack of small performance and rehearsal space and provide an avenue for locally produced content to seep back into our city.

The building is the medium. It’s, to use a term borrowed from a council interstate, the ‘Cultural Managers’ that produce the activity that produces the audiences that create the much fabled ‘city vibrancy’.

For us to attract and retain skilled ‘cultural managers’, we need to recognise their projects cost money, even if their industry isn’t a high yield, profit driven field. Melbourne and Sydney’s matching grants, creative spaces programs (modelled, notably, on the Renews), and direct funding through councils like Cairns, indicate that investing in this area is seen as worthwhile for cities actively trying to develop a cultural economy. Adelaide competes on a national level and, during Fringe, on a global level for people who know how to go into an empty building and, within a short time frame, give thousands of people the chance to turn off the television and visit that site.

Right now, Renew Adelaide has the capacity to arrange access to a building. This reduces a significant hurdle, but it doesn’t magically create ‘city vibrancy’. For that to happen, we need to look at the pathways for turning ‘cultural managers’ into financially sustainable enterprise. Ultimately our goal over the next six months is to identify what’s working both here and elsewhere, what’s not working, and what we need to do to make ventures like Tuxedo Cat succeed.

For those of you interested in sneak previews of the site, get in touch. We’ve already arranged one initial site inspection but we’re keen to take our supporters along on the journey.

And for those of you with a particularly nerdy interest in this area, I’d also encourage you to look at the structure, operations and funding systems creating some of the comparable spaces interstate and overseas, such as Queen Street Studios and River Studios.

The reactivation of 199 and 200 North Terrace is made possible by Le Cordon Bleu, Commercial and General and Maras Group. Renew Adelaide is funded by, and works with, ArtsSA with the specific goal of identifying further pathways for those trying to set up creative spaces. The production, venue management and reactivation of this iconic building is being undertaken by Tuxedo Cat.

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:

STUDIO LINGO, a Renew Adelaide Project which has been running alongside it’s shop-buddies, LittlestVINTAGE since July 2011, is having a celebratory break up party. All the details are below – please do come along.

Studio Lingo have been great to work with over the last few months. On behalf of Lara and the Renew team, we’d like to thank them for their hard work and wish them all the best in the future. Thanks and we’ll see you on December 4th!

***

WHEN: Sunday, December 4th

WHERE: 98 Prospect Road

TIME: 2 – 4pm

WHAT:

• Live Art
• Drinks and Nibbles
• Sale Prices
• Great Christmas Gift Ideas

STUDIO LINGO is an artspace run by Michelle Lee and Mandi Whitten which has supported over 60 local, South Australian artists of a wide genre and of varying experience since opening it’s doors in July 2011.

It’s focus has been on making sure affordable art is accessible to it’s Adelaide clientele by presenting artists’ work for sale with minimum mark-up and maximum exposure. The beautiful, open and light gallery space on Prospect Road, available only through the generosity of Maras Group and the innovation of Renew Adelaide, has been paramount to the success of STUDIO LINGO’s ideals.

STUDIO LINGO will be closing it’s “bricks and mortar” store on December 24^th 2011, but will continue curating group exhibitions in the future so keep an eye out on the website for the next up-and-coming show.

***

And then Matthew Westward wrote this brilliant article in The Australian entitled The Festival State  Needs Leadership about how we really badly need to invest heaps of money into gigantic flagships and how if we don’t like gigantic flagships we’re all, and I quote, ‘philistines’. And I got all worked up and was about to bring out all my usual Bilbao Syndrome comments. And then I thought, “This is too easy” and stopped.

On another note, thanks to everyone who has submitted applications for the project manager position and spaces. I’ll be in touch with you all shortly, and I’ll return, as soon as possible to my antsy blogging antics with an admission I probably got it wrong with rehabilitation sub-codes, news from my quest to find a critical history of liquor licensing (success!), tentative links between the collapse of the city’s live music venues and the death of its cinemas and YouTube clips pertaining to Manowar’s 2007 concept album Gods of War.

The upshot of this is that Renew is now hiring a new project manager, with applications due on Monday, October 31st. Here’s a brief excerpt from the Position Profile:

Renew Adelaide is currently seeking a Project Manager to support our existing staff in that process. This position is a fixed term contract of between $28,500 and $38,000, 0.6FTE to 0.8FTE, beginning upon receipt of our funding in November and guaranteed until June 30^th, 2012 with extension subject to further funding.

The principle tasks of the Project Manager are to:

(1) Facilitate and support creative and community initiatives entering into, using and exiting buildings and spaces provided by supportive property owners.

(2) Work with the General Manager to ensure buildings are safe and access is achieved through appropriate legal and insurance frameworks.

(3) Work with the General Manager in managing day to day operations of Renew Adelaide, including communications and general project management.

(4) Work with the Publicity Manager in supporting Renew Adelaide’s public profile.

(5) Some events management.

This position would suit those with prior experience in production, project and events management, and with an active interest in urban planning and the community.

If you’re interested in working for Renew Adelaide, can I ask you to:

(A) Download the Position Profile and Information for Applicants here.

(B) Download the Application Form here.

(C) Download and read our Strategic Plan here – it’ll help you understand what we’re aiming to do in 2011/2012.

If you have any questions or problems downloading the forms email us here. I’ll be on leave next week. I’ll still check my email but responses might be a bit slow.

The film being screened was Echotone, which is screening again on Saturday 15^th of October at 6PM. Here’s a little clip:

I pretty firmly believe this is a must see for anyone looking to see what happens when you disconnect development and planning policy from cultural policy – particular when cultural activity is one of the city’s major draw cards. A large part of the film centres around the decision to zone high rise, high end apartments next to long standing local music venues, thereby killing off the very ‘vibrant culture’ which made the city so attractive – and ultimately economically viable – to begin with.

Echotone is screening as part of a partnership between the Festival of Unpopular Culture and the Mercury. You can come see Angela from the Mercury talk about it tonight at 7PM at AC Arts as part of the Nigel Koop Variety Hour, and – again – I’ll be discussing these themes on Tuesday night’s City Makers Talk About Making Cities Panel, also at 7PM at AC Arts.

Austin is Adelaide’s sister city, which is interesting because Echotone makes it sound like we share a sisterly disinterest in protecting locally produced culture, indicated by a penchant for zoning high rise apartments next to music venues. Similarly the scene in the trailer in which an irate Baby Boomer demands he has a ‘right’ to shut down pre-existing cultural businesses because they’re ‘terrorizing’ him is eerily reminiscent of Adelaide.

I’ve been looking a lot at what happened to our music scene around the turn of the century, and looking into the hunch I’ve had that it decreased substantially in the wake of noise restrictions, increased inner city housing, pokies, the new BCA, increasingly paranoid liquor licensing and the rising monopoly of larger, alcohol focused venues, and a regulatory and administrative environment hostile to local music. I’ve been thinking it’d be interesting to do something comparable to what Libby Raupach’s Theatre Spaces and Venues Audit did for theatre venues, but for those smaller, less High Culture spaces not attached to the funded arts sector. That report found there was a lack of spaces, and I think the same thing is, in anything, more prevalent in the non-funded, non-government driven live music sector.

The point here isn’t the local music itself. The point is looking at venues that housed cultural activity made by people who live in and around the city of Adelaide, and thus amplifying the sense that the city ‘belongs’ to the people who use it, rather than simply serving as a great big mall with a couple of universities. What I’m trying to see is if a decrease in those venues, which supported participatory cultural activity, decreased (a) when I remember them decreasing and (b) whether that decrease synchs to any of the other ‘Adelaide in decline’ statistics from around the turn of the century.

As far as I can tell so far, they do.

Those of you who are older will be able to tell me what I’ve missed here, but I’ve been trying to trace the number of music venues that used to be active in the East End, estimate how frequently they used to host shows and make an estimate of their capacities. I’ve been looking at old gig guides from dB, Rip It Up and the Advertiser’s now defunct The Guide and there’s definitely been a shift away from live music to pre-recorded music – the volume of venues solely hosting DJs (i.e: some guy in the corner playing mp3s whilst everyone sits around drinking) has gone up exponentially, and there’s an increase in the volume of solo performers – those guys who sit in the corner playing covers on acoustic guitars quietly enough they don’t disrupt either the neighbours or the drinkers. And a pretty solid decrease in the volume of actual bands.

This stuff is harder to track because no one seems to have kept any records on it. So I’m posting my rough hunches here to get feedback from those who remember better than myself – let me know how far off you think I am:

I picked 2005 as the cut off, as I remember it being virtually impossible to get a show around that time. I think we played The Jade Monkey and the Prince Albert almost exclusively for about two years because there were no other small venues. Thank god for Zac and DK for taking the risk to set up some amazing venues.

I haven’t had time lately to connect that back to other stats on the city properly, but from what I can tell, during that time period crime in South Australia went up, and the SAPOL report on Alcohol in Crime seems to confirm it went up particularly within the city of Adelaide. The ABS stats I remember wading through a while back makes it look like the youth exodus became a real issue in 2001 and, despite truisms to the contrary, I still think it’s a major issue – and it’s identified as such in the Thirty Year Plan for Greater Adelaide. I can’t find decent longitudinal data for economic strength in the city area – I know there’s a much cited claim that Rundle Mall went from holding a 20% market share of retail in the metro area to a 5% share or something, but I can’t find anything proving that. It’s also notable that once most of the music venues closed, all the larger cinemas shut down (except the Mercury and the Palace Nova). If we combine the potential pull the cinemas and the music venues used to have, I don’t think it’s unrealistic to say they were capable of attracting somewhere around 3000 people into the city on a weeknight for a cultural purpose – as separate from a purely alcohol based night economy, distinctly divided from an office work/retail driven day time economy that ends, pretty abruptly, at 5PM.

Any who has a better memory of the local music scene of the nineties and early two thousands – please do get in touch, I’d love to get your thoughts on the topic.

Friday night sees the launch of two things. Most obviously, there’s the Festival of Ideas. Most likely to go horribly wrong, there’s The Festival of Unpopular Culture. The directors of both, Sandy Verschoor and Stan Mahoney respectively, are interviewed on local radio show The Scenery here.

As the ‘executive producer’ of the Festival of Unpopular Culture (which essentially means I give Stan ‘advice’) , there’s a couple of panels in here which are basically my own hobby horses. Both of those hobby horses are essentially the themes I discuss on this blog – namely, governance and urban planning.

To that end, can I strongly, strongly suggest anyone who ‘enjoys’ reading this blog, attends the following:

(A) The Government Engagement Strategy, 2:30 Sunday October 9^th. Old Methodist Meeting Hall, 25 Pirie Street. For more details click here.

Starring Lisa Philip-Harbutt (Community Arts Network), Teresa Crea (Port Festival, Norwood CC’s lead creative), Brenton Caffin (TACSI, former professional World Darts Champion*) and Will Emmett (Left Right Think Tank, appearing courtesy of the Festival of Ideas).

And if that’s not enough…

(B) City Makers Talk About Making Cities, 7PM AC Arts (NW corner of Light Square), Tuesday October 11^th. More details here.

Starring Craig Allchin (Six Degrees, Melbourne’s whole Laneways thing), Steve Maras (Maras Group, Adelaide’s East End), Christie Anthoney (AC Arts, the Adelaide Fringe from 2004 to 2008), Josh Fanning (Merge, Collect and Magazine Space) and me (this blog). There’ll be a bar for this one, open from 5. So come by after work and you can get terribly drunk on cheap ‘champagne’ and talk about urban planning. It’ll be like a party!

Anyway.

Those of you who regularly read this blog will know that I enjoy picking fights around the intersection between the terms ‘community’ and ‘government’, particularly as they relate to decisions on who gets to use space and in what way. The above forums are an opportunity to watch me do that in the real world, where you can throw things at me and shout down my harebrained theories.

Speaking of which, I have this theory that the way we frame and define ‘community’ means it’s always about robbing people of their own agency and legitimising the position of gatekeepers – academics, policy makers, community engagement officers and people working within large organisations charged with, or building their sense of authority off of, working with and representing the general public.  I also have a theory that this approach pretty much fundamentally stuffs up the way we think about governance.

That theory is based on personal experience. With both Format and Renew Adelaide, when we started we were routinely referred to as a ‘community’ organisation or otherwise positioned as plucky, naïve ‘youth’ scamps. As soon as we crossed certain borders indicative of activate agency or the appropriation of certain types of power there was a shift in attitude and more people started to see us as a profit based exercise, or essentially capital motivated or something. Which is weird, because the larger we’ve grown the more stretched our resources have become.

It’s been an interesting transition. It was like we could only be perceived as ‘community’ provided we remained powerless. As soon as we ceased to be powerless and started doing things like getting liquor licenses and signing leases, we began fielding request for funding, complaints we’d sold out, accusations we were exploiting artists, or the homeless, or the community, requests to provide resources to organisations with fifty times our resources – all which seemed kind of bizarre given neither Format nor Renew make money. It was as if there was no point between running an unsustainable squat and running Red Square. As a non-government organisation producing a reasonable volume of activity, it was assumed we were well resourced and had money coming in from somewhere, despite what I assumed was overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

There are two major points at which that switch seemed to happen, and it was like we were perceived to have suddenly snapped from ‘underground’ to ‘overground’.

The first was in finding ways to legally occupy space, either through having access arranged by organisations like Fringe and signing a formal rent in Format’s case, or having partly paid staff who knew, roughly, how to deal with the legal frameworks around the use of space.

The politics of using land is intense, and there’s an obvious and long history around it, whether you’re talking about European colonisation, the Strangways Act, affordable housing, or public art projects. Who gets to use space, under what conditions and how is politically pretty full on.

I was on a panel with a bunch of people running ARIs in Newcastle last week, looking at the transition from ‘illegitimate to legitimate’. The basic consensus is that if you stay illegitimate – operating spaces without correct development approval, squatting, or dodging along hoping you don’t get caught, you can’t cover costs, you risk fines and police or council intervention, you usually can’t provide resources to the people who want to use your space and sooner or later you almost certainly will burn out, give up and get a normal job.

But as soon as you become legitimate you get the shit kicked out of you by local councils as they try to apply a regulatory framework designed for large scale development to small scale no or low profit activity, and more people start to assume you’re running on a purely self motivated, for-profit basis and treat you accordingly. It’s like there’s no room for anything in between operating illegally and running a huge beer barn with a pokies lounge. The idea that someone might want to legally and safely run a space, without wanting it to be (a) an illegal appropriation of private land or (b) a pure profit venture, seems incomprehensible.

The second snapping point relates to policy and dealings with the government sector. The standard attitude towards me by a lot of government employees is that, provided I can be located as a ‘community advocate’, I should be giving endless supplies of free consultancy purely because I’m a ‘change maker’ and that they’re doing me a favour by giving me a chance to have my voice heard. This seems to be a common experience by a lot of people working in what could loosely be described as ‘the community sector’. It’s as if the mindset of governance is that large institutions have a monopoly on knowledge, and we should be thankful we’re being asked our opinion.

The thing that pisses me off about it isn’t the self righteous, ignorant, bullshitting by essentially exploitative failing bureaucrats and weak willed aging academics. The problem is that it makes it hard to work positively with the vast array of incredibly good people working in government and large institutions.

The converse of that is the numerous public sector employees who are always struggling against a perception that they’re officious, irrelevant, stupid and self centred no matter how hard they work, how good their intent or how vast or significant their engagement with their community. A lot of the time when I’ve dealt with good people in the public sector, it’s like they’re expecting me to attack them.

Discussions regarding policy always seem to fall into this sense that perspectives ‘of the community’ are completely helpless without a ‘gatekeeper’ working for a major institution (usually either government or academic), and that anyone in the position of ‘gatekeeper’ is almost certainly a doddering bureaucrat.

These two themes are both about governance. They’re about the perception we live in a world divided between a whiny and inept community who can’t take care of themselves and an exploitative, power hungry and lazy government just trying to collect their pay checks. They’re about the degree to which that perception infiltrates the interactions we have in shaping how we govern and how we locate the power to govern.

At the extremes, I think those stereotypes are true. There are a lot of whiny and inept people who sit at home with their big screen TVs, complain about the government but don’t actually do anything to shape the country they live in. And there are a lot of inept bureaucrats wasting everyone’s time. That said, most people aren’t at the extremes and there’s a lot of people frustrated by the widespread notion that democracy is something that takes place once every four years.

When I think about the conversations I’ve had regarding issues of power and governance, it’s like we don’t know how to talk to each other without assuming there’s some sort of profit driven transaction going on. Every conversation seems to find itself falling into this sense that one party is a used car salesman, and the other party is trying to get a great deal on a 1998 Nissan Pulsar. The notion of working towards collective consensus or pursuing a ‘user generated’ or deliberative democratic process is underwritten, more or less, by the degree to which every interaction is tainted by a belief that you’re trying to exploit each other.

That said, you don’t fix a problem by looking at what doesn’t work. And there’s a lot about governance that doesn’t work. I figure you fix things by looking at what does work and then trying to replicate it. So when I was starting Format, instead of writing off the government sector, I went out of my way to engage with it. What I found was a lot of people who wanted to get involved, but their involvement tended be constrained by a system of governance that reinforced the sense of ‘us and them’. It did so in such a way that, even when our activity was directly reflective of their organisational strategic plans or projected outcomes, they couldn’t work with us unless we found ways of making it look like we were helpless (usually by adopting the title of ‘youth’), it could only occur within very fixed parameters (you can get funded to be a ‘youth artist’ but not pursue an interest in social justice) and it had to occur in such a way that ‘accountability’ could be assured, which is a polite way of saying power always stays with the government sector, regardless how poorly equipped that sector is to respond to new problems or produce long term changes. Because if you give money, resources or decision making powers direct to ‘the community’ they’ll apparently use it to do something dodgy. An empowered community almost automatically becomes a bunch of jerks looking to run an illegal bar.

What I also found was a lot of people with backgrounds in some form of community advocacy or activism had gone into the government sector and developed an entire language around how you get that sector to actually do things. But that language was entirely about finding the cracks, weaving through them and trying to connect a living, fast moving culture, driven by real people, to a governance system designed for the 19^th century.

I found that system worked best when you knew how to engage with it, find the people who knew that language and see them as colleagues rather than people working government. But to do that, you needed to know their limitations and understand the terrain in which they worked. And you needed to be able to actually find them.

The two panels I’ve advertised above are essentially the people I’ve talked to who have provoked the most interesting conversation on these themes. If you’ve ‘enjoyed’ this blog, talked to me at the pub, argued with me, or been outraged by the stuff I’ve written here, it’d be great to see you in the real world as part of the Festival of Unpopular Culture. Please do come along.