Sydney - We Need to Talk. A love letter to Sydney...

There are still a few days left to catch Wendy Murray’s exhibition Sydney - We Need to Talk at Cross Art Projects in Sydney. The exhibition features some of the illustrations that Wendy made for the book of the same name (which you really should download, if you haven't already!).

I was honoured to be asked to speak at the launch of the exhibition. Taking inspiration from the title of Wendy’s exhibition (which started life as a poster that inspired our book), I wrote a letter to Sydney. Here it is…

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Dear Sydney,

We need to talk.

I’m not sure I know who you are any more.

I’ve spent most of my life with you. But in the past few years, it seems to me like you’re becoming harder and harder to live with. And it’s not just me who’s noticed. You’re more and more sterile, more hostile, more expensive. You’re meaner and hotter and more divided.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty of things that remind me why I loved you in the first place, and why I’ve stayed with you for so long. Your jacarandas in spring. A stroll and some shopping on Beamish street on a busy Saturday. Our local public school and its awesome school community. A sunny winter’s weekday at any of your beaches. The crispy hot broad-bean felafel at Cairo Takeaway. Tuesday night funk throw-downs at 505. The surprise appearance of fresh graffiti on your trains and posters on your walls. The energy and shared purpose of a big Sydney Alliance assembly.

But for all that great stuff, I’m not sure I love who you’re becoming.

Maybe you’re getting less loveable because of the company you’re keeping. You’ve spent a lot of time lately long hanging out with some dodgy characters.

Your buddies Barry, Mike and Gladys are cases in point.

Like Gladys. She said when she hooked up with you that making you less expensive was her #1 priority. But she’s been selling off your public housing, and refusing to introduce rules making it a requirement for her developer mates to provide cheap housing in the new towers and suburban estates that are making them rich. She won’t even introduce rules to stop tenants getting kicked out of their homes through no fault of their own.

Just last week she said that your public spaces were big priority and that she’ll appoint a new minister for public space. Meanwhile, her and her friends have privatised publicly-owned assets worth over $9 billion in the last ten years. They supported private advertising on the sails of the Opera House. They put sniffer dogs instead of doctors at our festivals (not to mention on train stations in the west). They put our ovals and schools behind spear-topped fences.

She said her pals in Canberra should be doing more to stop you burning up, by doing something about climate change. But she’s spending billions of dollars on a mega-freeway project that will choke you up with cars for years to come.

Not to mention the fact that she wants to spend $2 billion knocking down a couple of your stadiums to help out her mates.

And even when she tries to do the right thing by you, she seems to have a knack for fucking it up. Just ask the trees on Anzac Parade that had to die unnecessarily for the light rail, or the people in places like Ryde and Canterbury where there’s been over-development without infrastructure.

I could go on. If I’m honest, there are times I really want to leave you.

And I’m pretty sure my friend Wendy is thinking about ditching you too. But then, maybe despite herself, she seems to keep caring for you.

She’s seen what you’re turning into, and she’s trying to snap you out of it – to use her art to show you what you’re becoming, but also to remind you of your best side, to show you how much better you could be.

And when me and a bunch of my friends at Sydney Uni started getting together every week to talk about you, to try to make sense of what was going on with you, one of her posters on your walls inspired us to write you a big open letter.

So, we got together in little groups, and we wrote some stuff: about displacement, and dispossession, and decommodification, and democracy, and a bunch of other d-words!

And then she took our words, and spent hours in your streets, and patiently drew a series of beautiful images that both responded to, and challenged, the words we wrote.

And then, she lovingly packaged the words and the images in a beautiful book, with a cover hand-printed using an ancient press and with pages hand-stitched, all wrapped up in one of her beautiful posters. Maybe she was hoping that you might actually notice us and how much we care about you, because of the care we took in making the letter that we wrote for you.

So, I’m inspired by Wendy, and I’m not ready to break up yet. Instead, me and my friends are taking a leaf out of Wendy’s book. We’re going to spend some quality time with you, hanging out in your streets and talking to other people who love you and wish you could turn things around. We’re not going to go quiet and tolerate your bad side, but we’re not going to give up on you either.

Sydney, we want, we need, to talk.

Love, Kurt

Outdoor Advertising and Public Space

So, there was controversy here in Sydney a couple of weeks ago about the NSW Government's decision to force the Opera House to display an advertisement for a horse race.

I wrote an opinion piece for the Sydney Morning Herald about the broader issue of advertising and its impacts on public space.

Premier Gladys Berejiklian's intervention to insist the Sydney Opera House allow blatant Racing NSW advertising on its sails is objectionable for many reasons.

Most worryingly, it signals a new intensification of the ongoing privatisation of our public spaces through advertising. The surfaces of our city are being remade as advertising space before our very eyes. ...

You can read the rest of the piece here.

There was a great protest down at the Opera House on the night in question - you can read about that here.

I've had a bee in my bonnet about advertising in public space for a while now ... and published an article in Antipode a few years ago about the global outdoor advertising industry. You can find that here (email me if you're interested and have a hard time accessing it).

And there's also a piece about hacking outdoor advertising and the decommodification of public space in the new book I've been involved with writing, Sydney We Need to Talk!.

New book - SYDNEY WE NEED TO TALK!

I'm excited (and proud!) to announce the publication of a new book that I've been involved in pulling together.

It's called Sydney -- We Need to Talk!

It has been written by a group of folks at the University of Sydney -- geographers, plannings, political scientists, visual artists, staff and students -- who have been meeting every week to talk about our work on the politics of urbanisation. We're all either thinking about Sydney and/or thinking from Sydney. There are essays on decommodification, dispossession, democratisation, degrees, domains, dimensions, domesticity and digitalisation (we started riffing with d-words, and couldn't stop).

Each essay is co-authored, and while each essay features work on Sydney, it also travels somewhere else. We bring Sydney into dialogue into other cities where we're working, including Jakarta, London, Barcelona, Hong Kong, New York and beyond.

The book was designed by artist Wendy Murray, who has also responded to each essay with a series of illustrations.

You can find out more about the book and its making, and download a free copy of the book, at the website we've set up here.

The list of contributors is: Brittany Betteridge, Pratichi Chatterjee, Leah Emmanuel, Amy Fairall, Bradley Garrett, Mini Graff, Kurt Iveson, Rupert Legg, Sophia Maalsen, Marilu Melo, Wendy Murray, Madeleine Pill, Dallas Rogers, Jathan Sadowski, Alistair Sisson, Amanda Tattersall, Sophie Webber

Article on safety and public space in The Conversation

I was invited to contribute something on safety and public space for a series of articles in The Conversation called Cities for Everyone. Figured I should post it here too!

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The central role of public spaces in the social, cultural, political and economic life of cities makes it crucial that they're accessible to everyone. One of the most important qualities of accessible public spaces is safety. If people do not feel safe in a public space, they are less likely to use it, let alone linger in it. Perceptions of safety are socially produced and socially variable. It is not simply the presence of crime - or "threatening environments" - that contributes to lack of safety or fear.

All sorts of measures are put in place to make public spaces safer, from design to policing. But when we consider the effectiveness of these measures, we always have to ask: whose safety is being prioritised?

Women and members of ethnic and sexual minorities are among those who experience particular kinds of threats, abuse and violence in public spaces. If we don't account for the social dimensions of safety, there's a risk that measures designed to enhance safety will have the opposite effect for some urban inhabitants.

Follow this link for the rest of it, with links to further research etc.

Cities and Citizenship Event in Sydney

I'm excited to say that we're having an event here in Sydney on Thurs Feb 22 called "Cities and Citizenship". It's a Sydney Ideas event, with some fabulous speakers who are in Sydney that week to participate in a workshop that Amanda Tattersall and I have organised to discuss the democratisation of cities.


Amanda and I will be talking about our work on urban alliance building, and we'll be joined by Helga Leitner from UCLA, Mark Davidson from Clark University, and Simon Tormey from here at the University of Sydney.

You can find more info and register here... it's free, you should come!

The Green Revolution Game...

OK, this is completely off topic ... but in cleaning up an old office, I have just found a good, working version of The Green Revolution Game. The graf lover in me wants to keep it just because the fonts are so cool. But it's not for me, and before it ends up in a skip, I'm hoping someone might want to rescue it.

I don't really know much about it, beyond the basic idea that it's a role-playing game about agriculture and development. It was developed as a teaching tool in the 1970s by Graham Chapman from Cambridge. You can read a piece by him in Area from 1973 about how the game was developed, how it works, and its purpose here.

You can read a brief piece from the New York Times in 1982 about how the game was being used at the World Bank here.

Pics below.

Email me at kurt.iveson@sydney.edu.au if want it. I'm not charging for the object, but will need you to pay for postage (which might not be cheap, given its size and weight). First in, best dressed...

The urban geography of attitudes to marriage equality (or, did car drivers vote 'no'?)

Yesterday, the Australian Bureau of Statistics announced the results of the postal survey it was directed to conduct by the Turnbull Government about the Marriage Act. Across Australia, 61.6% supported changing the Marriage Act to allow same-sex couples to marry. Yay!

But the uneven geography of this vote has also attracted attention. The 'Yes' vote was slightly lower in NSW - largely because 12 of the 17 Commonwealth electorates that had majority 'No' votes were in NSW, and specifically, in Western Sydney. This map of survey results has been doing the rounds:

Map of Survey Results in Sydney. Source: https://marriagesurvey.abs.gov.au/results/response-map.html

There are some particularly sharp divides here. Grayndler (not named in the map above, it is the purple electorate that sits in between Sydney and Watson) had a high 'Yes' vote of almost 80%. Watson, right next door, had a high 'No' vote of around 70%.

So, what should we make of this difference? How should we try to explain it? A few articles are popping up on the theme....

In this piece in the Guardian, Sam Dastayari - a Labor Senator from the region - argues that people in the region tend to be socially conservative. As for why this is so, he is quoted as saying: "The only demographic indicator that matters is ethnicity", and that any explanation based on a single religion would be incorrect. "[It’s across the board – Muslim, the Coptics, Christians, communities from migrant backgrounds contributed to voting no."

Likewise, Andrew Jakubowicz writes in The Conversation that "social conservatism among many ethnic communities loomed large as a factor" in the 'No' vote in Western Sydney". But he tells us not to essentialise this conservatism, and suggests a range of factors that might explain it:

The opposition to same-sex marriage ... was particularly resonant in communities where people have fairly poor educational backgrounds, somewhat limited English language skills and their information is mediated primarily through religious institutions.

So, in localities where there are strong communities built around Eastern Orthodoxy, Islam, Eastern Catholicism, African Christianities, Asian Christianities (ranging from Catholic to Evangelical), and even in other areas with pockets of Orthodox Judaism, there were singular funnels of information presented in cultural and moral terms.

There’s little information available to those people from any other source that they would trust, or to which they have easy access.

He goes on to argue that "It is important not to allow stereotypes to overwhelm analysis", and that "This is not simply about religion; it’s about culture in a more complex sense".

My colleague Dallas Rogers has written a piece for the ABC which seeks to head-off the stereotypes of those in 'the west' that are ever-present in discussions of Sydney's urban geography, and which are being hastily mobilised in some of the initial reactions to the poll. He worries that:

The discussion about the No vote will almost certainly follow a familiar narrative: the west is full of variously conservative new migrants, old people and ethnic and religious minorities. Religious and migrant media will come under fire. The familiar troupe of derogatory Westie, migrant and religious discussion will follow.

Dallas doesn't seek to explain away the poll results. Indeed, he identifies himself as a Westie who voted Yes, and as one who is disappointed by the results in this part of Sydney. But he makes a really important point when noting that:

The temptation might be to think about the diverse peoples and communities of western Sydney as the sole custodians of their views.

While the vote was clearly uneven, there were lots of 'No' votes from people outside Western Sydney, and lots of 'Yes' votes from people in Western Sydney, so we should not fall into the trap of focusing only on the colours of that map above. He also goes on to point out what we might forget now that the results are in -- that this postal poll was an incredibly divisive political tactic deployed by the Turnbull Government, which many have criticised for the fear-mongering and hate that it unleashed.


So, while it's tempting to try to explain the unevenness of the vote with reference to some of the rather obvious correlations between the poll results and the socio-demographic characteristics of an electorate derived from the 2016 Census, it's best not to jump to easy and unsupported conclusions.

Sure, there are significant differences in factors like religion, income, and education between majority 'Yes' electorates in inner urban areas like Sydney and Grayndler, and majority 'No' electorates in Western Sydney like Watson and Blaxland:

	Sydney	Grayndler	Watson	Blaxland
No Religion (%)	43.7	40.7	15.6	13.4
Avg Weekly Income ($)	933	997	490	462
Bach Degree or Higher (%)	43.8	42.6	22.9	17.3
English only Spoken at Home (%)	51.0	66.5	28.5	25.5

There are also some data that are surprising. For instance, of these four electorates, Sydney has the lowest percentage of people born in Australia:

	Sydney	Grayndler	Watson	Blaxland
Born in Australia	39.2	59.1	44.4	43.9

But before we start reading explanations from these correlations, note that there are also stark differences in other characteristics of the majority 'yes' and 'no' electorates, like public transport usage:
 

	Sydney	Grayndler	Watson	Blaxland
Public Transport to Work	35.7	38	25.2	21.3

Were people in Western Sydney more likely to vote 'no' because of their education levels, or because they are more likely to drive a car to work? There's a good correlation for both, but I haven't seen anyone try to explain the results in Western Sydney with reference to public transport usage! That's because, as they say, correlation does not equal causation...

More sophisticated analyses are going to be required to better understand which of any correlations might have some explantory relevance. And of course, such an analysis would need to take account of a range of other factors beyond simple demographic differences.

For instance, in his piece in Junkee, Osman Faruqi argues that:

The huge variation in the result across electorates has a number of factors, but is partly driven by the fact the No campaign appeared to focus its resources on migrant and non-English speaking communities while the Yes campaign spent its time and energy turning out the vote rather than convincing people to change their position on the issue.

I don't whether this is right, but it certainly does stand to reason that we'd need to look at the geography of the campaigns and information if we're interested in the geography of the result.

Sounds like something for some human geography students to get getting on with...!