Pitched as a cultural hub for almost 500 artists, creatives and designers in inner Sydney with a community green, outdoor cinema, studios and a pop-up gallery, there has been concern around the Rich St. Arts Precinct since it was first floated in 2019, notably around the lack of ‘for-purpose’ space.

‘For-purpose’ creative space is what it says on the tin: designed for the purpose of the end user, which in this case is likely to be creative producers who need industrial IN1 provisions: 24/7 access, container access, hard stand, 3-phase power, high clearance… the list goes on.

And it’s the first thing to go as old industrial spaces are razed so the land they inhabit can be ‘renewed’, ‘redeveloped’ and ‘re-purposed’.

Linda Morris wrote about the Rich St. precinct stalling two years ago in the Herald, discussing the evolution of the precinct into a foodie strip:

“Five years later, the reality is more eat street than arts precinct: the former timberyard in Marrickville’s Rich Street is to become home to a gelato factory and a probable gin distillery…”

She continues, explaining:

“[This site] is on the frontline of a development push in Marrickville that has put musicians, performers and artists in retreat and struggling to find new affordable footholds in the suburb they have made home.”

It’s the same old story. Gentrification drives the wrecking ball, displacing the existing industry and employment, while promises of ‘affordable creative space’ vaporise in the reality of the return required to support new-build investments. Tim Levinson – Urthboy/ Elefant Traks – acknowledges the impact that the creative industry has on industrial areas, noting:

“Artists [play a] role in gentrification, becoming Trojan horses for developers to come in and capitalise on the vibrancy that we create…”

In the meantime, the artists have gone, the space is going, and there seems to be zero provision for the future of ‘for-purpose’ creative production space.

The image above is described as a “creative space designed to spark innovation”, and while this might be true in some sub-sets of the creative industries, it doesn’t apply to too many to list.

Somewhere along the line, ‘creative space’ has become a premium buzzword that makes developers tingle, which is curious, as they are so often vehemently against provisions to include new creative space where existing creative space has been razed.

All over Sydney – and we have no doubt, all other major cities – ‘creative space’ is the newest tag to leverage empty space.

These ad images are both described as ‘creative space’, although neither is affordable.

The noise around ‘creative space’ is cancelling out authentic spaces established, developed and run by creatives that form an integral part of the creative infrastructure of the city. And don’t get us started on co-working…

So, we adapt. Where once the aerie was ‘creative co-working space’, it is now wearing a snazzy new ‘hybrid’ cloak, under which the expanse of what the space offers is on show.

Film and TV location? Check. Photography studio? Check. Production offices? Check. Arts studio space? Check. Inner West gathering space? Check. Creative incubator? Check. Powerful collaborative community? Check.

In 2023, Tortuga and the aerie took part in Left Bank Co.’s Making Space for Culture Incubation Program, supported by the City of Sydney.

The brief went like this:

Following many years working at the coalface of creative space planning and championing alternative development models from overseas, Left Bank Co. realised the need to bring together the property sector and the cultural sector to truly tackle the creative space challenge. For three years running, Left Bank Co. has designed and delivered a professional development incubation program at no cost to participants, thanks to the City of Sydney’s ideas and innovation sponsorship program. The program brings these two sectors together to learn from international models and from one another, with the objective to build networks, share knowledge and better position both sectors to play a role in delivering future solutions to providing creative space. 

And while we are not big fans of the developer culture in this city, this was a fascinating opportunity to relay the factual reality of creative space operation and its specific requirements.

Find out how it panned out here.

In an open letter to the PM, the federation of national peak arts organisations ArtsPeak has asked him to turn back the tide of relentless funding cuts to arts groups. It reads, in part:

We have witnessed sector budget cuts, funding administration changes and destabilising implementation … These changes were made without clearly articulated priorities or a framework which would make evident the government’s cultural vision and rationale.
ArtsPeak has argued that further budget cuts in May will hit small to medium organisations particularly hard, with the funding pool reduced by A$12 million a year.

The plight of the artist-run initiative
One of the hidden casualties of these cuts will be artist-run initiatives. These are some of the most significant small organisations in Australia’s arts landscape.

First known as “alternative spaces”, they emerged around 40 years ago. One of the first was Sydney’s Inhibodress, founded by Mike Parr, Tim Johnson and Peter Kennedy.

Artist-run, self-organised art spaces and organisations are, of course, a global phenomenon. There are currently over a hundred operating here, although the numbers shift constantly. This is a very fluid and dynamic sector.
For instance, Free Range in Perth has been operating for over 15 years, Watch This Space in Alice Springs for 22 years and Trocadero Art Space in Melbourne’s Footscray has just celebrated its ten year anniversary.

On the other end of the spectrum, the one-year mobile project, tarpspace, used a blue tarpaulin as a “physical and conceptual framework” for an artspace. Launched in Adelaide in 2013, it travelled across Australia inviting artists to make projects on, in or with the tarp.

No hierarchy
Many people still imagine these initiatives as no more than an entry point for emerging artists. If their career becomes successful, they imagine artists will leave such groups far behind. But there are many exciting projects that simply don’t fit this perspective.

In Sydney, I found Marrickville Garage – a suburban garage lovingly converted into a gallery space in the backyard of artists Jane Polkinghorne and Sarah Newall.

They work with local councils on projects like Art Month Sydney, where they have organised an inspired range of work using their entire yard as exhibition space. On one occasion they invited their neighbours to give their front yards to exhibiting artists, turning the whole street into a public space of exhibition.

We can also look at the legendary Boomalli Aboriginal Artist Cooperative, initiated nearly thirty years ago by a group of urban-based indigenous artists. Boomalli emphasises curation by indigenous artists, with a broad range of practices.

For artists, they aren’t simply spaces of exhibition, but rather a point of connection for artists, audiences, ideas and projects. They hold the promise of community.

If these are spaces of connection and relations, it follows that they are significant places for artists to create, beyond official art institutions. As the Senate inquiry into the impact of 2014 and 2015 budget decisions on arts funding noted,

…not all artists aspired to work in major companies; small…organizations had inherent value in themselves, and even advantages over large organizations for both artist and audiences, and warranted support in their own right.

Just what is it that makes today’s artist-run initiatives so different, so appealing? Well, imagine a world without them. This thought sends me straight back to 1969, before the Whitlam government and the emergence of a strong Australia Council for the Arts.

It is a world consisting of only State galleries and museums with shows featuring a tiny number of artists – necessarily leaving out the very large and very “excellent” growing numbers of artists that currently practice in Australia.

Of course there’s the smallish commercial galleries; again, not enough, and well, not the same thing. Once the product of radical ideologies about art, and its site of exhibition, artist-run initiatives have evolved into something else.

These initiatives are now significant public institutions. They underline the fact that art is not something that only happens in large galleries and museums: it is primarily “a field of relations among artists living and working in the world.”

Yet their existence is precarious and depends, on the whole, on volunteer labour and the belief and passion of the arts community.

Funding is often limited and various and most initiatives have to scramble for money to survive. The lack of proper public funding for these small energetic spaces is already a scandal.

The funding pool available to small-to-medium arts organisations was seriously depleted by former arts minister George Brandis’ focus on “peak” art bodies.

ArtsPeak co-convenors Tamara Winikoff and Nicole Beyer have warned that when the government allocates grants in May, more than 140 small enterprises will face cut backs, or potentially closure.

All the initiatives I’ve mentioned – and many, many more – lie outside the oft-cited model of such places as spaces, within an arts hierarchy, for young and emerging artists. But one thing they all have in common is that they enrich our art’s ecosystem immensely.

Image: Lesley Giovanelli ‘Continental Drift’ Articulate project space 2015/Silversalt photography

Okay. So, premise. Poor people are not just failed rich people. And our presumption that they are is as cliched and reductivist as the (mono)-culture it produces.

The poor – defined here as those in need of housing help – are critical city players, and not just as economy-fodder. We tend to see poverty as a sign of moral or intellectual deficit but, in truth, poor people might equally be defined as those with goals other than money, those who care more about singing or saving people than hedge-funds or negative gearing.

In this way, poor people are broadeners and deepeners – complicators, if you will – of the urban headspace. Which is why public housing matters, and not only to them, but to you.

When Packer’s casino is built, 70 glittering storeys on a glittering harbor, it is unlikely to house a couple of dozen penniless local artists among the Lear-jet set. But it could, and if Sydney were a healthier, wiser and more confident city, it would.

It’s orthodox to regard cities as fragile ecosystems, where intervention is therefore perilous. And it’s orthodox to see poverty as a canker within this, to be frowned upon, excised, cauterised. But in truth, only monoculture cities are fragile, like monoculture grasslands. A diverse, interdependent city draws resilience from its very complexity. Public housing is a means of guarding this complexity.

This – as much as altruism – is why wise cities require a percentage of public housing in new developments. It’s what’s known as “inclusionary zoning” and in cities like London it applies across the board. Here, the Baird government’s promise to “ensure large redevelopments target a 70:30 ratio of private to social housing” is only a “target” and applies only to private redevelopment of public land.

NSW has a massive 60,000 households on the social-housing wait-list. The Baird government’s much-vaunted “new era of public housing” – and the promised $2 billion construction boom it wears like a monkey on its back – will deliver just over a third of this, or 23,000 homes, over 10 years.

But they compensate in enthusiasm. As we speak, developers are bidding on the first tranche of 3000 social dwellings across six existing public-housing sites at Macquarie Park, Gosford, Tweed Heads, Seven Hills, Telopea and Liverpool.

Why so keen? Are developers the new philanthropists? Uh… no. There’s a sweetener, a big one. They get to build twice as many units again, for private sale, on public land. Essentially, it’s a swap: public flats in exchange for public land.

It’s not necessarily such a bad deal for the public. Mixing it up lessens the stigma, spreads the disadvantage and should improve design quality. But the public nature of both the land and the housing means that we – you and I – should care, a lot.

We should make demands. We should insist that the shaping of these developments is too important to be left (as usual) to developers. That the temptation to flog one inner-city block for five ex-urban ones is resisted; that these developments become beacons for the future; and that purpose-specific community housing not-for-profits are briefed this way.

Why does it matter that inner-cities give foothold to the poor? To see it properly, it’s useful to consider that usually neglected low-income stratum, artists. That the trickle of creatives leaving Sydney has lately become a minor torrent may seem trivial, but in fact goes to the heart of the urban question.

It is a little-known property-fact that artists are a reliable indicator species. All good cities have an artland, which is usually the last slum but one. Place Pigalle, Greenwich Village, Camden Lock; Paddo, Redfern, Erko, Marrickville; life-sustaining habitat for musos, writers, painters, potters, poets, rapsters and cabaret queens.

These colonies may be 10 years ahead of the value-curve, or 30, but they’re always ahead. Not because artists are prescient, getting in early to make a killing. Quite the contrary. Artists are ahead because that’s not even a factor in how they think. This means they’re (generally) poor, which forces creative change.

Typically the process is this. Artists, often young and usually just a heartbeat from dereliction, are first-wave colonisers, followed by architects, poets and musos and then, gradually, bars and cafes. Later, young fashionistas start bussing in from the burbs for the funky thrall. By the time, perhaps a decade on, their parents start to buy – so that former art-dives fetch more millions than they have storeys – the artland is long gone.

It’s an old pattern, this gentrification. But what’s different now is direction. For over a century the pull has been consistently inward, conditioning us to regard the link between creativity and density as inherent, an urban gravity. But now gravity is reversing. For the first time in over a century, creativity is heading out.

Sydney’s artland is no longer Surry Hills, Erko or even Marrickville’s warehouse district. Now, says art-world goss, the art-belt is defined by a two-hour radius from downtown; Gosford, Lithgow, Collector and the Gongs, Mitta and Wollon. This is where the arterati now seek the cutting edge.

You might think this sad but not shattering. We all struggle for foothold in the big city. Art is luxury, hardly the city’s core business. So we don’t owe its creators a living. Right?

Well, yes and no. The erasure of artists from the city demos should give us serious pause, and not only for the loss of core workers.

Artists bring a unique moral flavour to a city; not simply by making art but because, by definition, they have values other – let’s say higher – than money. They are the refiners of the fabric, the cumin and cinnamon in an otherwise less sophisticated stew, the weeds in a damaged landscape that, far from constituting damage, reveal then set about healing it.

And that’s why we should have inclusionary zoning. For our own sakes we should mandate poor people’s housing in all private development, most especially on public land. As it happens, Packer’s casino fits that bill perfectly.

“As any observer of urban renewal knows, artists have a long track record of cultivating an energy that often evolves a place into a true experience, generating creative spaces and an innovative atmosphere that locals and visitors can enjoy.”

Sunshine Flint, BBC

 

But in Sydney, as a scourge of developers raze the last vestiges of Sydney’s industrial inner heart – Redfern, Chippendale, St Peters, Marrickville and beyond – affordable creative space in the city is fast disappearing. The old warehouses that house eclectic and inspiring creative spaces are choking on the dust of construction, crumbling at the strappy-heeled feet of rapid-fire cookie-cutter apartment blocks that snarl for space, reaching higher into the light to… find the light.

While much is made of work/live development masterplans and white papers that suggest new apartment dwellers should work and live in the same space, this is rarely the case and ultimately shared collaborative space is the casualty, ripped out at the roots, never to be replaced.

It’s happened before, this turning of pages and blanking of spaces, the gentrification of the urban soul – London, Paris, Tokyo, New York; now Sydney. And it will continue to happen. But at what cost? What is it that we are erasing?

A former Redfern nunnery, left vacant and crumbling on the corner of William and George Streets, was once home to Bill + George, a “fanciful beast” and artist-run space for many years before a protracted legal fight ensued, which the landlord won.

The final gathering

The famed Streets ice-cream factory deep in the heart of Turrella, supported over 35 emerging artists, who inhabited the sticky warren of freezer rooms and paddle-pop pantries with a twisted appreciation of decrepit space for almost eight years. But in 2007, anarchist art collective Mekanarky Studios melted beneath the fierce glare of the developers’ sights, pooling disconsolately into the gutters. Her artists moved on with pirate-like perseverance to forge new spaces (Tortuga Studios, Salmagundi Studios) but her cavernous halls, crumbly walls and roof that lead to the stars will always be missed.

The list is long of the ones we have lost: Bill + George, Lanfranchis and its memorial discotheque, Imperial Slacks, Space 3, The Wedding Circle, and most recently Salmagundi Studios…

Warehouse people, we are lovers of saw-toothed roofs, peeling paint, shredded steel, gnarly machines squatting in corners, rusted pipes, jagged metal and time-worn concrete. There is soul in these old places, lingering memories that haunt and placate, and there is a ready haul of artists, makers and creatives who are driven to re-interpret the space, playing with the ambiguity that creates.

qtsydney.com.au

inthemix.com.au

Put simply, the reinvention of the once booming industrial spaces of yesteryear is a vital link to ensuring our cities are not scoured clean of the rich cultural capital that is invested within them.

Breeding Ground, Poland 2012 Jasmine Poole/ jasminepoole.com

Breeding Ground, Australia 2012 Jasmine Poole/ jasminepoole.com

Artist Jasmine Poole, who’s series Breeding Ground is concerned with the re-interpretation of space and material, suggests “in light of the churning process of gentrification we question the current reality of cultural gain versus capital gain by entertaining the idea that alternate realities can begin to thrive in these spaces”. 

And the alternative is bleak, a leaching of the sticky stuff that holds our societies together. As Peter Bazalgette writes in The Guardian,

Imagine society without the civilising influence of the arts and you’ll have to strip out what is most pleasurable in life – and much that is educationally vital. Take the collective memory from our museums; remove the bands from our schools and choirs from our communities; lose the empathetic plays and dance from our theatres or the books from our libraries; expunge our festivals, literature and painting, and you’re left with a society bereft of a national conversation … about its identity or anything else.

Increasingly, the world over, examples of tactical urbanism see land being reclaimed for the use of the community, making urban spaces more human centred. And it is now widely believed that the shared creative environments of a city are its gems, hybrid spaces that coddle the thump of its beating heart. In the OASE Journal for Architecture these spaces are discussed as often having “iconic value”, and “operating as a microcosm of the urban condition and replicating the complexity of urban space”.

eud: Enterpreneurial Urbanism and Design

interculturalurbanism.com

So is it not worth considering that the cradles of our artistic inspiration, these decaying behemoths seemingly held together with spit and promise, are worth saving?

In this preening city, with its turquoise seas and malachite necklace of bush, it’s brash commercialism and explosive property market, you’d be forgiven for thinking that no-one cared any longer, that the steady romp of development was eating the place whole, spewing chewed bones of the past in its wake.

Derelict Mona Vale shack sells for $1.8 million/ Daily Telegraph

And mostly, this is true. What is required is a check on the out-of-control overdevelopment of industrial areas, the searing away of their light industrial status to be replaced with cultural cul-de-sacs, a journey to nowhere and back. We are painfully aware of the housing crisis in Sydney, but erecting teetering boxes to house people is not an investment in community. In fact, it is the opposite, lacking not only infrastructure, communal engagement and integrity, but heart.

There is a burning need for some sort of protection for the creative spaces that do still exist in the inner city – they are widely acknowledged and appreciated, but there is little in the way of ongoing support or sanctuary from the churning political and economic maelstrom they exist within. Without them, the communities they forged and support, will be left in cultural limbo.

There is no doubt real estate is a blood sport, trophy hunters in the hunt and kill of the urban safari, razing the cover to raise the stakes…

National Geographic

 

But at this stage, benevolent compassion may be our only hope, to save the creative collaborative spaces of this city before they are hunted to extinction.

“The condos offer stunning views of people who soon won’t be able to afford to live there…” Village Voice

the aerie is boldly open-plan, a cavernous warehouse loft cradled beneath ancient beams, and increasingly filled with inner west creatives. It’s not for some, but for those of us who co-work in this elysian space, with its rusted truss and saw-toothed rooves, the gentle traction of multiple people’s working endeavour is inspiring and uplifting.

In his article Proof that open-office plans aren’t always terrible, published in the New York Post, Michael Clarke considers the burgeoning growth of open-plan work space:

And he is right. In our rapidly expanding social framework there is an increasing desire for collaboration and shared space. From between the two extremes – vast corporate entities with thousands of suited and booted workers: the home-worker, clad in pyjamas and stinking of sleep – a middle ground is emerging; eclectic, engaging co-working spaces that allow individuals to share resources, inspiration and time, while maintaining sole ownership of their endeavour,

Whatever that might be…

Welcome to the aerie, St Peters newest creative co-working space, straddling the highest point of the old brick factory that houses Tortuga Studios.

With nine studios, both open plan and private, and a custom-built 11m-long Oregon hot desk, meeting room, standing desk, communal space and photographic studio, the aerie is home to six businesses already and has room for more…

So come and join us in this light-filled space and discover the benefits of working in a vibrant collaborative space in the heart of St Peters arts scene.

Get in touch here to find out more, book a tour or sneak in for a sticky beak!

At the aerie, St Peters newest creative co-working space, cradled in the rafters of the old brick factory that is Tortuga Studios, the crew have been hard at it, painting, sanding, scrubbing and making magic…

Beneath aged beams and rusted pipes lies treasure, long hidden space that is gilded in light. Here are some progress shots of the late afternoon sun as it sneaks its way in…