Fluid cities create - Page 5

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 20: Cities on the Edge
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Marcus Westbury

NEWCASTLE ISN'T WHERE it used to be. Even since my own childhood the geographical isolation has changed. That Newcastle felt as far from the cultured world as was possible to be in an English-speaking country. But no city – even Newcastle – is truly and entirely on the edge anymore. Whereas once most media and most transportation came via Sydney, today Newcastle plugs into a hundred channels and cheap daily flights to Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. The people of Newcastle are plugged into hundreds of thousands of global conversations – on blogs, websites, forums, mailing lists and bulletin boards. Newcastle exports a little culture now, and speaks directly with culture makers. Novocastrians post their photos, share bands they have seen, the events they have attended across networks of parallel global communities.

Newcastle's cultural connections are no longer scholarships, study tours, sabbaticals, reciprocal exhibitions or the passive receipt of culture broadcast from the great cultural centres of the world. Newcastle connects via the spontaneous, organic interactions that take place weekly, daily and hourly. Local artists and musicians have global communities with like minded people around the world.

Newcastle is part of the fluid forces of global cultural exchange – not as the top of a global pyramid but as part of a network of point-to-point cultural connections. Its cultural significance is measured less against whether it impresses Sydney, Melbourne, London or New York than who it connects directly to. Whether it prospers culturally will not be measured by purely by international art and style magazines, but by whether it is a hub or just a spoke, a consumer or a producer, an innovator or an afterthought in the global cultural milieu. That is a far more vital cultural measure than whether you have a landmark museum and a collection of Old Masters.

In a world made up of thousands of diverse subcultures or niche cultures, it is madness for a city to aspire to be just like other cities. Cities need places to celebrate the nature of culture that we have now. They need places where people uploading videos to YouTube can meet each other, and venues small enough to cater for the new diversity of contemporary music scenes. They need bars, galleries and performance spaces designed to capture the new paradox of communication: local work of international significance and international work of local significance.

Cities must trade in cultural cringe for a growing sense of confidence in our distinctiveness. They must try to be somewhere, not anywhere in the extended global sprawl of electronic suburbia. Cities must wilfully believe that the unique combination of events that may fuse here is just as compelling as those that may fuse somewhere else. Cities need to involve their people in making and remaking their own mythology, and create something that is truly unique.