Futurecity Founder Mark Davy recently visited Sydney to fulfill high-profile speaking commitments as well as undertaking meetings, round tables and visits to begin to plot out the role for Futurecity’s new Sydney office. First up, Mark appeared on live TV where he was interviewed about the future of creative cities on ABC 24. The next day, his presentation at ‘City Talks Design/Lord Mayor Forum’, at the invitation of the Lord Mayor of Sydney, Clover Moore, was standing room only and generated a fertile discussion between leading developers in the city, artists and cultural consultants. As part of the Remix Sydney summit 2015, Mark spoke on the Creative Cities Panel alongside Richard Evans of Barangaroo, Marcus Westbury from Renew NSW and Mary Darwell of Arts NSW. This was followed by a workshop hosted by Futurecity which reflected on the role of placemaking and focused around a series of key questions which in turn were fed through to the ongoing #growingmycity debates at the Foyles Gallery exhibition in London. The following day, Mark then took the stage at Remix for a final time to present a keynote lecture on the rise of the creative neighbourhood.
We have found a very positive response to our work and presence in Sydney, in particular our approach that encompasses cultural auditing, mapping and cultural placemaking as well as cultural branding for developments and urban transformation. We were delighted to have met with key figures and organisations across culture, infrastructure and government in the city and have been hugely impressed by the staggering level of infrastructure investment underway, and appetite for ingenuity within this.
Mark’s Remix Keynote will be available online soon. In the meantime, we are publishing here Mark’s reflections on the opportunity Sydney has, with unprecedented flow of capital flooding into the city’s redevelopment, to rewrite the rules and promote its identity as one of the world’s great creative cities.
The Rise of the Creative Neighbourhood
Why should Sydney invest in culture and placemaking? The short answer is because modern businesses are increasingly influenced by the attraction of ‘real places’ that offer originality and authenticity, and provide a distinct cultural narrative to an international, choosy and transitory workforce. Modern industries such as Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) are highly selective about where they are prepared to locate (or relocate) their businesses, but they and other creative industries are able to choose from a range of dynamic and exciting world cities, each competing for their business, for tourism and inward investment. Increasingly, creative and mainstream businesses are moving to cities where the residential area, the business district, the leisure offer and the knowledge and cultural quarter are one and the same.
Modern cities are ‘mixing it up’ and this goes someway to explain the burgeoning interest in the power of culture to create authentic, interesting and original places and the methods needed to create them. This is why REMIX Sydney was such an important event bringing together creative leaders, tech-pioneers and entrepreneurs from around the world to explore new methods and process new ideas that might influence our new urban centres and shape and influence the new creative neighbourhoods.
In my keynote speeches for the City of Sydney and REMIX Sydney I set out new ideas for culture-led placemaking and the notion of ‘museums without walls’. I believe the property industry has a responsibility to invest in the look and feel of the city and to consider its entrepreneurs as the next generation of patrons of the arts by using artists and creatives to commission everything from ‘bins to buildings’. This means recognising the creative opportunities for a highly original and creative approach to the design of the landscape and public realm, architecture and infrastructure and commercial and community space. There is ample evidence of how this approach is becoming mainstream in London’s property market, where developers have shown how culture can be embedded in new residential, leisure and commercial property schemes from the outset.
In recent years Sydney has invested in an ambitious public art programme, live music, new theatres, a range of festivals, high-profile sports events and the highly popular VIVID festival of light and ideas. However it is important that culture thrives outside of the public sector. The business community needs to participate, engage and to take risks. Culture is noisy, opinionated, exciting, emotional and provocative and offers the unknown. Sydney’s unique mix of great climate, stunning scenery, an international population, a rich ecology and a complex historic past provides an accessible narrative for new ideas for the role of culture in our built environment.
Optimism and ambition should drive the debate over the future of Sydney, to plan an urban landscape that heralds the age of the digital native; one where the online world of shopping and entertainment is at least as important as the offer of the physical world. The importance of digital media in cultural and business sectors is high. Customers share good (and bad) news, talk about their experiences, review everything, use Twitter, Whatsapp and Pinterest to communicate, blog, send photographs, write comments on review sites and post every experience online.
The real value of digital media, however, is in creating a diverse and loyal audience for the sporting, leisure and creative activities that take place throughout the city. Repeat visits and integrated communication of events and exhibitions amount to online PR for a place and its unique offers. Building a strong online identity with a constant flow of virtual activities, offers, information and social media links is a key factor in establishing the Sydney brand. A strong digital presence will shape the city’s identity by offering a two-way opportunity to learn, engage and develop relationships with residents, both business and residential.
REMIX Sydney has shown that the next few decades will see online technology grow and mutate at a fast pace, ultimately permeating daily and working life to a degree that cannot be readily predicted. The key task for this young, future-facing city is to ensure that its buildings, spaces and places have a built-in flexibility, able to readily adapt to new and unpredictable ways of working and living. A new ‘pop-up’ city, multi-functional, with purpose-built public-event spaces for music, theatre, sport and dance, and outdoor exhibition spaces for the promotion of visual arts, crafts, festival and design.
Successful places, in spite of all their individual particularities, have a common ‘taste’, a similar atmosphere. Futurecity sums this up as ‘seductive’ – by which we mean urban space as a playful, lucid, varied, changeable, beautiful, sexy, rewarding, surprising experience. We believe that successful urban placemaking is about seduction – and that culture is the key to unlocking the seductive power of city space. As Pablo Picasso said “It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction,” and as an agency, we think the developer of the future will be less interested in the mechanics of planning than in the art of temptation and persuasion through culture. From public art, historical reference points, food and creative environments to architecture, public events and private passions, culture is what make places enticing and exciting. The Futurecity position is that culture, in all its myriad forms and expressions, is essential both to the business case and to the social evolution of this future community. There is no doubt that if the private and public sector can enjoy the process of collaboration, then Sydney will be able to brand itself as unique, and a new urban model mixing creativity, business and community to form a 21st century world-class city.
Mark Davy: Founder Futurecity
photo credit: Vivid Sydney Opera House 2011 via photopin (license)