Australians turn to artists to help with urban blight.

Consider colonized Williamsburg, not the Commonwealth one in Virginia but the gentrified and rarified one rife with models and brunching. A few decades ago, no one but the artist would venture there, drawn by the affordable convenience of massive swathes of abandoned industrial space. It was very much artist vs. the city. Eventually commercial and nonprofit development groups took note, and sought to replicate the formula in cities like St. Louis, Detroit and Cleveland.

The formula being: artists are natural born leaders in rescuing decentralized cities from blight, even transforming them into the next hot place to call home.

Each of the aforementioned cities has succeeded in turning their industrialized wastelands around, to a varying extent. Now, our comrades down under are attempting the same.

Australia is a very big place.

And 89% of its population lives in an urban area making it one of the most urbanized countries in the world.

But the nation of 22 million+ has been steadily creeping towards an urban crisis. An over reliance on cars, economic growth bolstered by highway construction, and shortsighted solutions that are threatening a number of their cities and towns.

A spirited editorial compared Australian sprawl to a cancerous growth on one hand, to America, on the other.

“As the colony sprawls outward, consuming resources and despoiling its environment, the inner core deteriorates. This is the route taken by many older American cities…whose cores were ghetto-ised by policies of sprawl favouring automobile and oil industries.”

Fair enough.

“Why this willful denial by Australians?” the editorial continues. “Partly it might be a consequence of our historical ‘escape’ from crowded and often terrible urban conditions in Europe. Like Americans, the promise of wide open virgin lands, seemingly allowing endless expansion and a quarter acre for everyone appeared feasible and was built into a persuasive cult. But it was never true, never sustainable.”

America holds that truth to be self-evident.

As such, social enterprise group Renew Australia is seeking to bolster their city cores by pairing up artists with abandoned commercial spaces in Newcastle, Adelaide and Townsville.

Working under the premise that cities “play an integral part in bringing together diverse communities, offering an alternative to unsustainable urban sprawl and providing a real sense of public space,” they find short and long-term solutions for vacant and abandoned properties until they become viable businesses or are redeveloped.

Started in Newcastle by writer, broadcaster and arts festival director Marcus Westbury in 2008, the program bills itself as “a permanent structure for temporary things.”

Renew has since gone national, a pairing that grants property owners, caretakers and the downtown another opportunity to become cool again.

Images: Brian Costelloe; NASA; Winter for Elbows; Renew Australia; ZeHawk

With Park(ing) Day just around the corner, it seems timely to write about the latest thing to hit the streets of Manhattan: a pop up cafe.

Sponsored by two neighboring eateries – Bombay and Fika – and the New York City Department of Transportation, the pop up cafe is composed of a wooden platform that houses 14 tables and 50 chairs. An attempt at solving the problem of cramped sidewalks which don’t leave much room for outdoor seating, the pop up cafe is part foodie attraction and part public space improvement. In fact, Bombay and Fika don’t offer table service, and anyone who wants to take advantage of the space is allowed to take a seat.

Taking the place of several parking spaces, the outdoor seating doesn’t conflict with the sidewalk traffic, and it’s a project that the DOT is more than happy to support. “Every time we put down just an orange barrel, people just materialize out of nowhere,” said Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan to Streetsblog. “If you build it, they will sit.”

The cafe is all part of DOT’s attempt to make the Big Apple more livable and street-friendly. It has not only expanded its bike lanes, but also announced plans to create two pedestrian plazas on 5th Avenue and Broadway.

The pop up cafe will be removed later this year, but according to Sadik-Khan, if the DOT deems this project a success, there very well may be more of them next spring, which would mean many more creative uses of public space, therefore improving the life of anyone that works or lives in Manhattan.

Image: DNA Info

Editor’s note: This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’s column at EcoSalon, Foodie Underground. Each week, Anna will be taking a look at something new and different that’s taking place in the underground food movement, from supper clubs to mini markets to culinary avant garde.

Mention Detroit and most people will immediately think about the auto industry or music. Not many would think urban farmland. But that’s exactly what Hantz Group, a Michigan-based financial group, is thinking.

The group has been putting together an ambitious and creative plan to turn large acres of underutilized and vacant inner city land into farmland featuring a mixture of cash crops, ornamental gardens and riding trails.

The Hantz Group, with their Hantz Farms subsidiary, hopes to begin with a 70-acre purchase on the city’s east side, an area that was selected due to its low population density of between zero and nine residents per acre. Working with researchers from Michigan State University, Hantz Farms will determine which crops would be suitable for the land, aiming wherever possible to plant edible crops. Land that has been degraded through industrial use, however, will only be planted with non-edible crops such as Christmas trees.

Ultimately, the Hantz Group is looking at turning up to 10,000 acres of inner city Detroit into urban farmland. In a city riddled with real estate dereliction and economic woes, large scale urban gardens may be just the thing to help get Detroit back in the fast lane.

Image: LHOON