MAPPING CULTURE

Data Source # of venues Approach
Cultural venues extract from Floorspace and Employment
Survey
5,260 Synthetic
Cultural venues provided by City of Sydney and other sources 1,128 Analytic
Other venues used for cultural activities from FES (in shape
files)
268 Analytic
Crowd-sourced survey data (non-overlapping venues only) 50-100 Analytic
‘Theoretical’ total cultural venues mapped ̃6,700
Table 5. Data sources, approximate number of venues and approach
As explained in our interim report, the above figure is ‘theoretical’ for several reasons.
First, in our mapping of spatial and value chain categories, not all ANZSIC codes can be
easily mapped, as we discuss in the respective sub-sections below. Some of the
entries, although they share the same ANZSIC code with a cultural venue, do not
correspond to any of our spatial categories. For example, ticketing agencies are
included in ANZSIC 7299 ‘other administrative services n.e.c.’, which covers a variety of
administrative offices, a significant proportion of which do not involve cultural
activities of any kind. These entries, therefore, needed to be filtered out from the list
of spatial venues. Second, there is invariably some overlap between venues identified
by different sources, which need to be merged rather than duplicated. Third, in the
case of the value chain analysis, we have allowed venues to have multiple roles. A
theatre is a site of cultural creation, production, use, dissemination and, in some
cases, education, and could be counted in that analysis up to five times. The total of
spatial venues, therefore, does not equal the total number of value chain roles
assigned to venues. The ArcGIS and spreadsheet files, however, include all venues,
irrespective of whether they have been assigned one or multiple value chain roles.
Each of the entries has been individually checked by the team by verifying their
current status (name, location, function) through internet searching. Our final
database, after removal of all the duplicates, closed-down venues and ‘non-cultural’
venues, recorded a total of 3,106 cultural venues. The breakdown of our cultural
database by sources is presented in Table 6. Although we received additional data
from the City of Sydney (i.e., the 2016 Fringe Festival sites, the City of Sydney
accommodation grant recipient list, and a list of music related businesses) at a later
stage, the final number of the cultural venues is much smaller than our original
projection.
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