Kate Shaw

The Place of Alternative Culture and the Politics of its Protection in Berlin, Amsterdam and Melbourne

At the same time as changing global political-economies of land use are displacing low-income people from inner cities, countering socio-cultural forces are inspiring marginal communities to resist. This article focuses on the loss of places used by alternative cultures in the inner city, and the effect of their claims to a right to the city and to difference. Some cities are turning to their planning and heritage systems to protect the place of alternative culture, but unexamined use of these strategies can cause as many problems as they solve. The article considers some more reflective responses from three city governments that cannot afford to lose the symbolic capital of their (sub)cultural economies.

Docklands Dreamings: Illusions of Sustainability in the Melbourne Docks Redevelopment

The redevelopment of Melbourne’s docklands—the largest urban development project in Australia—has been the subject of various official narratives in the course of its 20-year realisation so far. Many of these have invoked aspirations—‘visions’ or imaginaries—of sustainability, including, variously, economic, environmental, social and cultural sustainability. Through documentary sources used to establish these narratives, this paper tracks the changes in vision against changes in the local political-economic context and examines their effects on the ground. The paper argues that, while each vision was intended to some degree to rescue the development from the failure of the preceding one, only the most recent phase represents any deviation from neoliberal development-as-usual, and this is more to do with the intensifying criticism of the project’s failure to demonstrate any kind of sustainability than it is the implementation of an articulated aspiration.

Independent creative subcultures and why they matter

Independent creative subcultures, in their various hybrids of music, theatre, art, and new and old media, are the primordial soup of cultural evolution. They have the capacity for a highly definitive influence on their participants – catalysing the transition from consumer to producer for instance – often conferring much broader cultural and social benefit. Creative subcultures make continuing, well-documented, contributions to established city cultures for relatively low outlay. Indie creative activities in particular do not make much money and they do not cost much to set-up. They tend to cluster in areas characterised by low rents and non-residential uses such as retail and industrial areas, but as third wave gentrification reaches into the dark pockets of many cities, cheap rental properties are becoming scarce. This article uses time-series maps of inner Melbourne to show a pattern of tighter and tighter clustering of indie cultural activities as alternative spaces disappear. It looks at where they are going and why, considers the implications of this pattern for the ‘creative city’, and suggests some policy initiatives to help maintain and nurture independent creative scenes. As Melbourne’s live music scene is particularly vulnerable to displacement from increasingly dense and contested inner-urban space, the article focuses on interventions relating to music venues.

Commentary: Is There Hope for Policy?

State policies in Cape Town, Auckland, Mumbai and London are openly driving gentrifi cation. These policies have a global pattern: writing on Cape Town, Visser and Kotze identify “the role of neo-liberal local governance in the context of global city ambitions so central to third-wave debates ... as central to these unfolding processes of gentrifi cation” (p. 2567). Redistributive local policies in the interests of the poor are overshadowed by the South African government’s efforts to “aggressively grow” the national economy by making its cities “globally competitive”. A raft of neo-liberal policies, including restructuring government and deregulating markets, paved the way for corporate and institutional investment which produced direct and indirect displacement consistent with ‘Anglo-American’ theories of gentrifi cation. In New Zealand, Murphy argues that an “ostensibly aspatial programme” of economic reform (p. 2521), associated also with restructuring government and with deregulation of the national planning system, resulted in a predictable ‘neoliberal spatial fi x’ for property developers and Commentary: Is There Hope for Policy?

Discretion vs. regulation and the sorry case of Melbourne city plan 2010

Introduction In the 1990s the former Kennett government made fundamental changes to the Victorian planning system. Central to these are the Victoria Planning Provisions (VPPs) which set out the structure of local planning schemes across the State. The VPPs include a general State Planning Policy section and provide for local variation through a Local Planning Policy Framework (LPPF), itself made up of a Municipal Strategic Statement (MSS) and local planning policies. The MSS contains the planning objectives of local city councils and the strategies to achieve these; the local policies are more detailed and area or issue-specific. The LPPF is the only significant element of the planning scheme to be prepared by councils and tailored to local concerns: all other components of the schemes, including zones and overlays—the tools with which councils are to implement their planning policies—are standardised.

University students and the ‘creative city’

In the last decade, city governments throughout the world have pursued various prescriptions for a ‘creative city’ with varying degrees of success. In Melbourne, strategies have included a revitalised arts policy, liberalisation of liquor laws, an increase in ‘al fresco’ dining and the encouragement of celebrity architects in the design and development of new buildings and precincts. Although Richard Florida’s notion of a ‘creative class’ actually originated with university students at Carnegie Mellon, and in some ways centres on students, the role and place of students in Melbourne has not been taken into account in any substantive local policy initiatives or place‐making strategies. Educated young people are major players in the ‘creative cities’ of urban geography and planning literatures, especially those of multi‐local orientation who might be expected to bring ‘cosmopolitan’ attitudes and treat social differences as a source of creative potential. Drawing on the situation in contemporary central Melbourne, in which a large population of international university students is indeed located in what the capital city council considers a ‘creative city’, this paper explores the extent to which the students themselves are engaged in the production of space. Through analysis of their uses and views of city spaces, the kind of city to whose formation they are contributing is revealed.

Renew Who? Benefits and Beneficiaries of Renew Newcastle

Critical urban literature has for over a decade raised concerns about the fixation with the use of ‘culture’ and ‘creativity’ to catalyse urban renewal. The concerns range from discomfort with the boosterist hype of such strategies, to questions regarding their impact on cultural producers and outcomes for wider communities. This article reports on a case study of the Renew Newcastle arts-led urban regeneration programme, a temporary use and creative activation initiative which is being rapidly replicated throughout Australian cities despite limited evaluation of its activities. The research questions the achievability and sustained compatibility of the programmes objectives for local physical and social activation, economic development, and support of the arts and creativity. A mixed-methods approach is used to explore social and economic change in Newcastle since Renew began, and the perceived role of the programme within this. The research finds that Renew is making variable contributions to its objectives which are to some extent incongruent. The findings contribute to the growing literature on arts-led regeneration that shows that many contemporary theorisations of the process are overly celebratory.

Planetary urbanisation: what does it matter for politics or practice?

Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid are two highly regarded urban scholars who have made some important contributions to urban geography and social theory over the years. Their respective works on matters of neoliberal urbanisation, globalisation, scale and Henri Lefebvre merge seamlessly in their recent joint venture, an expansion of Lefebvre’s concept of planetary urbanisation into “a new epistemology of the urban” (Brenner & Schmid, 2015a). Not surprisingly, perhaps, given the reach of the effort and the high standards of the field of critical urban studies into which they are launching the prototype, Schmid and Brenner are finding themselves in hot water. Taking as their starting point a critique of the contemporary notion of the “urban age” – that ubiquitous popular conception that more than 50% of the world’s population now lives in cities – Brenner and Schmid (2013, 2015a) suggest profound political and practical implications from the way the urban is considered and defined. Their argument is derived largely from a reading of Lefebvre’s thesis of the “complete urbanisation of society” that renders urban boundaries meaningless. They make a series of propositions – what they call “epistemological guidelines” in their first airing in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR) (Brenner & Schmid, 2013, p. 19) – that follow from the critique of the urban age. These are developed further in an article in City (Brenner & Schmid, 2015a) into seven theses. Richard Walker (2015) has already provided a robust response to the latter article in an unfortunate editorial decision to publish the article and response in the same issue, which raised the temperature of the debate somewhat. Walker’s piece deals sharply and authoritatively with the theoretical and philosophical values of the seven theses for social science, and is treated to a reply on Brenner’s Urban Theory Lab website (Brenner & Schmid, 2015b) that gives as good as it gets. At the request of the Comment editors for Planning Theory and Practice, I will reflect here on the normative and practical potentials of the planetary urbanisation thesis. I should note at the outset that I am always more interested in the application of theory, though I can appreciate

Place-making or place-masking? The everyday political economy of “making place”

Abstract As redevelopment and gentrification strategies globally continue to be aimed at attracting wealthier residents and consumers in an effort to drive economic growth, concerns for and interventions in the interests of social equity appear decreasingly relevant. Government, private sector and community organisations have of course worked together in different times and places to implement programs that are more rather than less inclusive – the variations always depending on the spatial politics of the context. This paper examines contemporary discourses and practices of place-making in Melbourne, and asks whether ways of thinking about urban redevelopment as place-making in this time and place are likely to enable the inclusion of social equity in these urban “improvements”.

Place-Making in Megaprojects in Melbourne

This article analyses state-led place-making practices in Melbourne. The two levels of government that influence planning in Melbourne make much of the city as ‘culturally vibrant’ and ‘creative’, and have incorporated creative city-inspired place-making principles into many layers of the planning system. An examination of the development of two mixed-use megaprojects in central Melbourne reveals however that ideals of culturally engaging public places, and indeed of creative landscapes for middle-class consumption, wither in the face of more basic imperatives for economic development. In these case studies the ‘creative city’, no matter how the idea is interpreted, has little traction either as a set of inclusive place-making principles or as a gentrification strategy. The article concludes that the creative city-inspired place-making objectives in the planning system at both state and local levels are ambiguous in their overall intents and completely unsupported by statutory controls. Such place-making objectives as are realised are the compromised results of the interplay of uncoordinated decisions, delivered at the pleasure of the developer.