MAPPING CULTURE

9. RECOMMENDATIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS FOR
CULTURAL MAPPING
Recommendations for future cultural mapping are highlighted in relation to the six
priorities that the City of Sydney has identified in order to ‘optimise Sydney’s
strengths, address its most pressing challenges and refocus the City of Sydney’s role in
building a distinctive and vibrant city’ (City of Sydney, 2014a, p.24). These priorities
include:
1) Precinct distinctiveness and creativity in the public domain
2) New avenues for creative participation
3) Sector sustainability: surviving and thriving
4) Improving access, creating markets
5) Sharing knowledge
6) Global engagement
Our recommendations emerge from the design, development and analysis of the
Cultural Venues and Infrastructure Database communicated in this report. Overall the
database aims to inform the City of Sydney’s proposed Cultural Infrastructure Plan
(City of Sydney, 2014a, p.64), as well as to provide a foundation for future cultural
resource data collection and knowledge sharing (to expand and enrich the database
and the City of Sydney’s work in the cultural sector). Our suggestions strongly
resonate with the multi-faceted and open-ended process of ‘deep mapping’ (Roberts,
2016), a key driver of future research and the approach for expanding upon the
Cultural Venues and Infrastructure Database built to date. The ethos behind this
approach is ‘to present place as always open to the addition of supplementary voices,
democratically positioning existent past, present and future knowledge and, thereby,
building a structure of connectedness’ (Springett, 2015, p.629). Outlined below are
recommendations for future research based upon ‘deep mapping’ and the City of
Sydney priorities.
1) Precinct distinctiveness and creativity in the public domain
This priority seeks the following outcomes: ‘Creativity to be more frequent and visible
in the city’s public domain and its precincts through a critical mass of activity – large
and small scale, temporary and permanent. Initiatives should amplify and explore the
unique characteristics and histories of each village and reinvigorate urban spaces and
infrastructure with creative imagination.’ (City of Sydney, 2014a, p.41). Three research
avenues related to this priority area are described below:
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