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

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