The City of Sydney is not doing enough to pull creative industries into the heart of the city, a leading urban design professor has said.
Adrian McGregor, managing director of McGregor & Partners, is concerned that creative agencies are being banished to the suburbs as the financial sector forces up rents for inner city offices.
“We continue to push creative people further and further away from the city … We have a concentration of creativity in Surry Hills and a few other outer suburbs, but the creativity in the City of Sydney needs to be increased through companies located in it.”
McGregor said he would like to see the new development in Barangaroo on Sydney Harbour Foreshore play a role in incubating creative industries.
“One of the important things we need to consider in Sydney is how we continue to foster creative industries,” he said.
McGregor is one of 100 people named as Sydney’s Most Creative People for 2009 as part of the Creative Sydney festival.
“The creative festival is supposed to be about supporting the creative culture of the city, but the planning regulations and the lack of economic incentives are not encouraging start up agencies to locate in the city,” he said.
Earlier this year McGregor’s firm won the TOPOS Landscape Award in Germany, becoming the first non-European agency to win it.
McGregor said Australian urban designers were lagging behind their European counterparts and that at present there were no “exemplarily” Australian urban works to be shown.
“I think we have a long way to go still, there is a lot of mediocrity in the Australian industry, and we need to raise the bar.”
George Street in the CBD was one example of how Sydney lacks well thought out and useful urban planning, according to McGregor.
“It’s the busiest street in the city and has no room for pedestrians to walk, the whole city is designed for cars," he added.
As a city, McGregor suggests authorities start thinking more carefully about the environmental contributions urban spaces make to cities.
“We need to be thinking about new infrastructure that moves away from reliance on fossil fuels. We need to be future proofing our cities for the coming oil price increase.”
Along with the environmental and economic reasons for improving urban areas, McGregor claims urban areas play another fundamental key role in society.
“The streets of a city are the true democratic space for us to mix in. They are really important because they belong to everyone and therefore all activities they support need to be well catered for — they add to the richness and diversity and livability of the city.”
