MAPPING CULTURE

1. INTRODUCTION
1.1 Project overview and objectives
This project, entitled ‘Mapping cultural venues and infrastructure in the City of
Sydney local government area (LGA)’, is a key action under the City of Sydney’s
Strategic Plan Sustainable Sydney 2030 , an ongoing commitment to achieve the vision
of a green, global and connected city. It is particularly relevant to Strategic Direction
7 of the plan to develop a cultural and creative city. This project has the following
objectives:
● Develop a classification system of cultural venues and infrastructure as a
framework for mapping existing, new and emerging cultural venues and
infrastructure in the city;
● Collect and analyse relevant data of cultural venues and infrastructure in 10
village areas within the City of Sydney;
● Create maps for the City to disseminate information concerning cultural
venues and infrastructure to the benefit of the cultural sector and general
public;
● Submit a full final report (detailed methodology and results of venue and
infrastructure mapping) and draw out recommendations on cultural cluster
and other policy and planning implications.
Western Sydney University’s Institute for Culture and Society project team has been
working with the City of Sydney to map cultural venues and infrastructure in the city,
with an aim to develop a ‘Cultural Venues and Infrastructure Database’ to improve
the volume, visibility and analysis of related spatial data. This project supports the
identified need to ‘deal more broadly with arts, creative enterprise, and community
facilities to increase understanding of the relationship between specific sectors’ as
outlined in the Request for Quotation document (no: 1916) (City of Sydney, 2016a,
p.4). Mapping and visualising the City of Sydney’s cultural infrastructure provides a
strong foundation for identifying these interrelationships. It is also important to the
tasks of maximising current assets, identifying hidden or under-utilised spaces, and
supporting new cultural and creative activities. This project enables layering of
further data - such as planning and regulatory frameworks, rental and property
prices - which can produce new knowledge and insights for a range of interested
and involved parties to inform future funding, research and planning activities. We
view the impact of the design and development of this database as being twofold:
first, informing the proposed Cultural Infrastructure Plan; and, second, as a
foundation for future cultural resource data to be added (e.g., digital events) to
expand and enrich the database and the City of Sydney’s work in the cultural sector.
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