culture

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<img src="https://counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/78258/count.gif?distributor=republish-lightbox-advanced" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1">
GUEST OBSERVER
In 2007 US creative cities “guru” Richard Florida was flown up to Noosa to tell the local city council how they, too, could become a creative city.
Noosa was one of a long line of cities across the globe queuing up to pay big bucks to the US-based academic-entrepreneur. “Being creative” had become an almost universal aspiration. Who would not want to be a creative city?
And so Creative [insert name of city here] signs sprang up in the most unlikely places, along with stock shots of creative young things hunched over laptops in cafes.
Ten years later, different gurus are being flown around and the signs have been replaced by Smart [insert name of city here]. The stock shots are much the same, but now the young things are being innovative, disruptive and above all “smart”. That’s the trouble with fast policy: here today, gone tomorrow.
Below the surface more tectonic shifts can be felt. In its first outing in the mid-1990s the “creative city”, associated with thinkers such as Charles Landry, was an energising vision of a new role for cultural creativity in our cities.
Now expanded in democratic fashion beyond the world of “high art” to embrace popular, everyday creativity, culture would be a key resource for the 21st-century city.
Culture could re-activate the decayed industrial zones of the inner city, breathing new life into the dead infrastructures of factories and power stations, dockyards and tram depots, schools, barracks and banks. Culture could renew stale urban identities, catalyse new aspirations and stamp a different global brand on long-dormant cities.
And with the creative industries – culture plus all things design and digital – all that was needed were some creative people and a bit of entrepreneurial flair. Then we would have one of the industries of the future.
Creativity broke cities away from the old bureaucratic top-down planning silos of the industrial city and let them approach the future holistically. Culture would be what cities do best, earning a living and enjoying it at the same time.
By the time Florida had left Noosa the discontent was growing. Big investments in photogenic CBD developments seemed more intended for the creative class than local citizens, generating massive real estate profits while the suburbs languished unloved.
Creative industries turned out not to be so inclusive after all. They failed to soak up all those unemployed dirty industry workers and were reliant on educated workers willing to work their way up on low pay and high debt.
The turn of the smart city
Since the global financial crisis the energising vision has been around social justice, citizenship and the right to the city, with a return of community and activist-focused arts activities. Creatives are now less Californian start-ups and more counter-cultural “post-capitalists”.
Enter the Smart City, creativity without all those messy cultural bits. The tech start-ups were just as cool, the fab labs and hacker spaces just as disruptive, but now slotted onto a very different agenda.
This too promised a re-invention of the city, not now a cultural re-imagining but a complete re-tooling of the social and governmental infrastructure of the city. Courtesy of some very big global tech companies, a new digital infrastructure could be rolled out, applying sensors, data-capture devices and large-scale computing power to urban life.
Smart cities are data cities, promising efficient management of transport and utilities, security, and customised commerce. If the early Creative City embraced the messiness of city life, viewing it not as chaos but creative fecundity, the Smart City give us a clean utopian picture of the perfectly transparent city.
It’s messy on the surface, but with a big data back-room providing bespoke information for almost any aspect of urban living your care to ask for. What’s not to like?
A corporate taming of creativity
That the brains of the Smart City – as envisioned by its corporate promoters – are increasingly embedded in its walls rather than its inhabitants reveals much about the trajectory of the digital economy so closely tied to Florida’s conception of the Creative City and its industries.
Internet scholar Jonathan Zittrain has described the rise of “app” culture as a betrayal of the creative potential unleashed by the mainstreaming of the internet. If the open internet was messy and chaotic, Zittrain argues that it was correspondingly “generative”, promoting experimentation and creativity.
 
The app increasingly represents the corporate-driven pacification of the internet. AAP
By contrast, the “app” represents the pacification and domestication of the internet: its transformation from a productive medium to an infrastructure for consumption and marketing. Apps sort our music and photos for us, tell us where to eat, how to get there, and what to watch afterwards. The price of the newfound convenience that renders smart phones so addictive is a shift in the balance of control away from the end user.
For Zittrain, the “applified” world is, “one of sterile appliances tethered to a network of control” – which is not a bad description of the corporate blueprint for the Smart City.
As urbanist Adam Greenfield has observed, the corporate world has taken the lead in both envisioning and promoting its version of the “informated” city. It looks suspiciously like the commercial internet projected out into physical space.
The promise is one of efficiency, convenience and security: smart streets that adjust traffic flow in real time, walls that change images to suit our tastes (which have become indistinguishable from market preferences), even floors that cushion us when we fall.
For all the talk of disruption, the paradoxical promise of the smart city is one of data-driven efficiency and predictability. The promotional materials feature the same smart young things, freed up from the impositions of daily life (traffic, shopping, routine decision-making, even driving), to do … what?
Whose city is it?
There are surely possibilities here, but the version of smart city as automated city looks inhuman. It promises to serve people by rendering them increasingly efficient, perhaps to the point of their own redundancy.
To subject the future of the city to the corporate imaginary is to concede too much to the galloping privatisation of our cultural and informational infrastructure.
What if the right to the city were also a right to participate in shaping its information infrastructures and their implementation? Can we envision an alternative to centralised corporate control of the city’s data? And how might public priorities be redefined in ways that distinguish them from the private imperatives of the ruling tech giants?
These are the guiding questions for our June 15 symposium in Melbourne, which explores the possibility of another kind of urban culture beyond the tightly controlled formats of the Smart City/Creative City.
<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/justin-oconnor-11847" target="_blank"></a>
<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/justin-oconnor-11847" target="_blank">Justin O'Connor </a>is professor of Communications and Cultural Economy, Monash University.
<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/justin-oconnor-11847" target="_blank"></a>
<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/mark-andrejevic-21617" target="_blank">Mark Andrejevic </a>Guest Lecturer, Monash University; Professor and Chair, Department of Media Studies, Pomona College.
<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/justin-oconnor-11847" target="_blank"></a>
Both are authors for The Conversation.
<a href="https://theconversation.com/profiles/justin-oconnor-11847" target="_blank"> </a>
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jchancellor-FAypfDUnLy

Creative city, smart city... whose city is it?

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EXPERT OBSERVATION
The current climate has ushered in in a seismic shift in work culture, as many employees transitioning into a work from home set-up.
Australia’s largest privately held co-working space provider, working from home will welcome in a new era where a distributed working model becomes the new normal.
“At Hub Australia, we are already seeing an increased demand for space from companies who may have previously favoured a long-term commercial office model. As many workers, and more importantly their managers, adapt to working from home, the need for the same quantity of space at headquarters will reduce. The importance of having place for businesses and their teams to connect, learn and innovate will not go away. The culture of professional co-working spaces is well suited to meet this demand”.
Along with this, offices will have to shift their focus from real estate providers to a more experience-centric model in order to attract people to come to the office. Traditional working as we know it is being flipped on its head at a rapid pace.”
Here, Brad gives us his predictions for the key changes shaping the workforce:
Goodbye to the traditional office lease
“As we see it, the traditional office lease will be less relevant to companies post Covid-19. There was already a movement by corporates to have part of their office requirements met by flexible workspace operators, Covid-19 will serve to quicken the pace of this movement, but also to enlarge it. Organisations will need to offer work from home flexibility, as well as provide access to a ‘work base’, which could be suburban work hubs and CBD co-working spaces.”
A move to distributed working
“A single headquarters with high densities in an open plan environment no longer seems like the best idea post Covid-19. We’re predicting that employers will need to cater for a distributed workforce and provide multiple working environments, that could be a company HQ, home and third spaces.
Work-life balance, commute times and the rising cost of living means that working closer to home has long been a priority for many employees. But not everybody’s home is going to be an appropriate work environment, and many employees crave the social and community aspects of the workplace, so blending of the two will be essential.”
Set-up for virtual success
“Not only will flexible working become the new norm, but co-working providers will need to innovate their offering. At Hub Australia, we are launching a virtual offering at the start of May that offers members the ability to join the community virtually, with access to mailing packages, software discounts, video conferencing and the ability to work flexibly from Hub Australia locations when they need to. Setting members up for success virtually will become the norm.”
Brad Krauskopf is the CEO and Founder of Hub Australia
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j.ballantyne1990-6AQqhLzZaK

The future of the workforce is a distributed model: Hub Australia

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Australia has come a long way in terms of planning and development, but times are changing fast. 
With <a href="https://www.urban.com.au/architects">architects</a> recognising the impact on climate change and urban sprawl more so than our government, we are seeing projects that challenge the status quo and influence social change through thoughtful design. 
Design can be used to address social equity and diversity in urban environments by providing affordable housing, green space, sustainable living, appropriate density and a green lean towards public transport and cycling facilities. 

Collaborating with other architects and the community to leverage projects that deliver a deep and sustained social benefit is at the forefront of this movement.  
This allows architects to call out social and environmental inequality by simply providing alternative living and civic spaces with the idea of working with communities instead of working for them. 
With erosion threatening beachfront properties along the coast of Western Australia, Queensland and New South Wales, and the threat of rising sea levels impacting where almost 40% of all Australians livelihood, smart design and planning is most important to influencing and adapting the way we live to retain our lifestyles. 

There are a few projects that unknowingly push the boundaries in opening up discussions between communities on sustainable living and the impact of urban sprawl such as <a href="https://www.urban.com.au/architects/breathe-architecture">Breathe Architecture’s </a>Nightingale proposal for Ballarat.

<figure><a class="colorbox colorbox-insert-image" href="https://res.cloudinary.com/dz9xllyip/image/fetch/q_auto:good/https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/www.urban.com.au/s3fs-public/pictures/article-images/11325664-3x2-940x627_0.jpg" rel="gallery-all" title="Rendering of the Nightingale Ballarat project by Breathe Architecture"><img alt="" class="image-article-full-width-580px" height="387" src="/s3/files/styles/article_full_width_580px/public/pictures/article-images/11325664-3x2-940x627_0.jpg?itok=_BUzUGSu" title="Rendering of the Nightingale Ballarat project by Breathe Architecture" width="580"></a>

<figcaption>Rendering of the Nightingale Ballarat project by <a href="https://www.urban.com.au/architects/breathe-architecture">Breathe Architecture</a></figcaption></figure> 
The architectural form of the project is driven to respond to its surrounding heritage brick industrial buildings along Davey Street and the city centre of Ballarat.  
Breathe’s design strategy is to provide more with less, with untreated, tactile and durable materials recycled where possible.

The landscaped courtyard and gardens offer the ability for deep root planting, which encourages residents to grow and sustain vegetables and plants. The facade is also immersed in native plants giving a deep sense of community pride. Through careful material usage and recycled content where possible, Nightingale Ballarat is to be a carbon zero emissions building. Recycled water, renewable energy sources and high quality waste management attribute to the future residents low cost living.

“Nightingale Ballarat has been designed to make sustainable living simple. Common elements like the roof garden and deck, laundry and clotheslines, bicycle parking and shared building services offer a collectively better outcome. By providing meaningful social and utility-based spaces, we look to encourage interaction and activity with friends and neighbours.” - <a href="https://www.urban.com.au/developers/nightingale-housing">Nightingale Ballarat </a>Resident Package.

Open walkways with vertical greenery connect the apartment levels, creating spaces for residents to stop and converse. All apartments have an east or west facing living areas with a private balcony providing planter boxes to allow greenery to grow along the facade as well as natural ventilation and daylight adding additional amenity for the residents.

The development has opened up a major discussion for Ballarat residents about the negative impact of urban sprawl, with the population set to grow by 40,000 people in the next two decades. Nightingale offers the first socially beneficial solution that the residents of Ballarat recognise more as a typical Melbourne development and thus are not yet accustomed to within their own city. 
Victoria’s satellite cities are growing at a fast rate as well as Melbourne’s outer suburbs and in Ballarat alone, there are undeveloped, empty lots within the existing city structure that could be developed respectfully to accommodate for this population growth. 
 

<figure><a class="colorbox colorbox-insert-image" href="https://res.cloudinary.com/dz9xllyip/image/fetch/q_auto:good/https://s3-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/www.urban.com.au/s3fs-public/pictures/article-images/86a357642d9acbbb786ca1cd7569f38c_1.jpg" rel="gallery-all" title="Rendering of the Ivanhoe Housing Estate in Macquarie Park, Sydney"><img alt="" class="image-article-full-width-580px" height="387" src="/s3/files/styles/article_full_width_580px/public/pictures/article-images/86a357642d9acbbb786ca1cd7569f38c_1.jpg?itok=M1YFNhcX" title="Rendering of the Ivanhoe Housing Estate in Macquarie Park, Sydney" width="580"></a>

<figcaption>Rendering of the Ivanhoe Housing Estate in Macquarie Park, Sydney</figcaption></figure> 
A project unfolding in the Sydney suburb of <a href="https://www.urban.com.au/new-apartments/macquarie-park-nsw">Macquarie Park</a> is the Ivanhoe public-private housing estate. 
The development is an integrated social housing precinct that offers community facilities, a school, retail, green space and ‘tenure blindness’ for residential properties. 
This is a social leap into disbanding the stigma between private, social housing and rental properties as tenure blindness offers a connectivity of all diversities and demographics.

The existing <a href="https://ivanhoeestate.com.au/">Ivanhoe Housing Estate</a> is set to be demolished to provide an updated private-public mixed community precinct to which benefits social and environmental strains. 
The architecture practices involved with the project are <a href="https://www.urban.com.au/architects/bates-smart">Bates Smart</a>, which produced the masterplan, <a href="https://www.urban.com.au/architects/candalepas-associates-0">Candalepas Associates</a>, <a href="https://www.urban.com.au/architects/turner-studio">Turner</a>, <a href="https://www.urban.com.au/architects/cox-architecture">Cox Architecture</a> delivering residential and community facilities and <a href="https://www.urban.com.au/architects/hassell-studio">Hassell</a> whom are responsible for the project’s urban design and landscape architecture. 

The development will include 3000 apartment units replacing the 259 current social housing units on site with a private vertical high school for 1000 students, a 120-bed residential aged care, two childcare centres, a supermarket, cafe’s, specialty retail shops, a multi-functional centre with a hall, gymnasium, pool and outdoor play areas and exercise stations. 
Local infrastructure will be improved for easy accessibility and connectivity and sustainable measures such as solar panels, green roofs, water capture and reuse as well as incorporating car-share facilities and a bicycle space for each dwelling keeps the precinct at a six Star Energy Rating.

The Ivanhoe Housing Estate opens Australian’s eyes to how we perceive each other and help to break down social barriers of classism and elitism that we may hold against each other. 
As communities integrate and Australia becomes one of the most multicultural countries globally, we must progress in our thinking and feelings towards each other to which density can provide that close kinship. 
The proposal has been massively influenced by community engagement and have opened up to existing residents and locals to participate in the discussion. Having social or privately owned apartments not perceivable by the public domain encourages social equality and a deconstruction of stigmatic and biased views once shared between community.

 
The architecture and urban planning industry can progress forward and benefit from a sense of personal accountability and understanding on the issues that face us in Australia. 
The outcome of these projects can no longer be just a building, but a living entity that impacts social life, so instead of thinking about providing shelter, we need to think about providing a higher quality of life.

 

 

 

 
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