“Vibrancy is kind of like pornography,” is how one of the more candid dinner parties I attended recently began. “It’s impossible to define, but you know it when you see it.”
As someone who started their hospitality career in the same year that the lockout laws were declared in Sydney, I share the frustration of many about the widespread usage of the somewhat vague term “vibrancy.” At the same time, however, I am desperately relieved that it’s become such a common theme in public discussions about hospitality and culture.
Since 2013, and for my whole career, my industry has traded under siege; the scapegoats of government and media for alcohol-related street violence; the subjects of harsh and restrictive laws that devastated our trade and creative industries. In my advocacy, I’ve long described our planning and liquor licensing system in NSW as “hostile”, and even today find it difficult not to feel resentful at the way that whole period of our history played out.
It was only a few weeks ago, as I prepared to speak at the Time Out Future Shapers roundtable event, that I realised things had changed. The system, for the most part, is no longer hostile. For the first time in my life, all three layers of government – federal, state and local – are at the table, with an appetite for reform and a good faith understanding of the damage that’s been done.
We have a 24-Hour Commissioner, Michael Rodrigues – in my opinion, one of the most effective bureaucrats in NSW government history – who has managed to effect more change in terms of deregulation in his relatively short tenure than most do in a lifetime. The lockout laws are gone, and the liquor and planning system, while not perfect, is in the best state it’s been in for a long time.
Still, there’s a sense that we’re not done. Are we vibrant? Certainly in some places. Any list of vibrant parts of Sydney would have to include Enmore Road – but as president of the business chamber representing Newtown and Enmore, I often hear the complaints: that Enmore Road is dead during the day; that many eclectic day retailers have been squeezed out in favour of a saturation of small bars; that those many small bar owners are now eating their young to survive; and even more so when there isn’t an Enmore Theatre show to bring two thousand people to the strip. I would argue that this isn’t true vibrancy.
True vibrancy has to have something to do with serving the wants and desires of the community. A high street should be an authentic kaleidoscope of a community – a well-curated, well-balanced ecosystem of businesses that reflect the people who live there, and give punters a reason to go out rather than stay in.
Somewhere along the way, in our decade of campaigning to “keep Sydney open” we conflated vibrancy with deregulation, and bought into the lie that if government gets out of the way and lets private industry do its thing, we will have a vibrant city. But this, I would argue, is the “easy” problem of vibrancy; one of getting the balance of laws right. I use the term “easy” not to downplay the immense work that has gone into this space over the past four years. I use “easy” to highlight just how difficult the “hard” problem is.
To ask a question inspired by an ancient proverb, why is it that on a strip like King Street, Newtown with its 16 Thai restaurants, when one closes due to poor trade, another opens in its place?
Why, in amongst 11 local chicken restaurants, is a KFC planned to open, as was recently reported? Who do we see about that? Who is pulling the levers here?
The sad reality is that real estate agents and private landlords are Sydney’s true high-street culture curators. It might surprise you to learn that decisions around what type of business moves into the vacant spot near your house in Leichhardt is likely made in a swanky real estate office in Double Bay, on a Zoom call with a private landlord from Hong Kong.
Not only are these decision-makers usually out of touch with the zeitgeist of the community the building exists in, but culture-building and vibrancy is so far from their radar, it fades into irrelevance. Only two things ultimately matter to them: dollars per square metre, and how deep the tenant’s pockets are. Not how original the idea is, or how unique it is to the area; not how well it will serve the market in its location; not even whether the tenant is likely to still be there trading in 10 years’ time. And you can forget about the community’s needs. Simply: the highest bidder with the biggest purse.
Sydney’s commercial real estate market, with its roaring valuations that even Covid couldn’t stifle, is considered so blue chip that much of the world has its money parked here. Passive investment creates disconnection between ownership and end use, which further diminishes the likelihood that cultural curation will be taken seriously.
The penchant our neo-liberal society has for producing capital for capital’s own sake – in contrast to the classic liberalism of the 1950s and ’60s, when the focus on markets and capital was for the broader goal of making our lives better – I would argue, has also had an equally devastating effect on our culture. The hard, expensive task of creating new and innovative culture simply isn’t as viable as remaking something old. The result is painfully familiar to us all: what is “new” often becomes a reboot or remake of something “old”. The philosopher and art critic Mark Fisher had a more bleak diagnosis, contending that 21st century culture is just 20th century culture through higher definition screens. A cursory look at the billboard and box office charts shows that this “nostalgia” culture is now deeply ingrained in film and music industries; from Barbie, to Super Mario Bros, to Taylor Swift’s “Era’s” Tour, and Eminem’s “Death of Slim Shady”.
In my lived experience, this stagnation is true of hospitality and retail venue design – every new bar of the 2020s seems to be a 90’s listening bar with 100 more vinyl records than the last one that opened, or a 1920’s speakeasy, or some other expression of a time and place now lost.
Every new restaurant is a 19th-century-style grand brasserie, or a New York steakhouse. Every new retail store is a frozen yoghurt chain. We sell nostalgia, because it lands well in the market, and it’s cheap and easy to recycle old ideas. What is our “era” today? What are the markings of change or progress that will define this period in the future, in a way that the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s and ’80s are so clearly defined?
This cultural stagnation is the inevitable effect of the neoliberal capitalism that is ingrained in much of our society – and if we want to get serious about culture-shaping for the future, we must shake off its yoke. But I don’t think we need to overthrow capitalism to begin to solve this problem.
An approach offered by classic liberalism might be to treat this as an issue of “market failure” to be solved by regulation: the government stepping in to legislate controls around the connection between property ownership, both local and overseas, and end use, or to force the issue of cultural curation when private landlords cut leases with tenants. Extending the federal government’s new levy on foreign investors who leave residential property vacant for more than six months to the commercial space is an option that would certainly increase supply, but it’s hard to see how this approach would get at the “hard” problem beyond driving market rent down.
It might be solved by the injection of capital: the government introducing a grant or accelerator program to assist prospective businesses to craft a business model, and selecting a location perfect for their dream business; and perhaps a grant for landlords who select tenants who have gone through such a program. The City of Sydney’s recently announced creative land trusts program gets this right, and is what’s needed to shield good creative work from the oppressive force of Sydney commercial rents.
This too, however, won’t get at the “hard” problem as it pertains to the lion's share of high street commercial properties, which are for-profit use, rather than the not-for-profit use the trust program is limited to.
Which brings us to the most terrifying, yet in many ways inevitable, possibility of all: that the “hard” problem can’t be solved by government alone. Terrifying, because it would mean we can’t use our familiar lockout-era toolkit to solve it via political lobbying or taking to the streets in protest. It involves all of us: cultural leaders, business chambers, creative associations, industry bodies – and yes, commercial real estate agents – coming together to work hand in hand with government to make the building of 21st century culture a priority.
To find out more about James Thorpe and Time Out's 2024 Future Shapers, head over here.
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