Alternative Media Group

Redfern to reinvent itself

Author:

Angus Thompson

Posted:

Thursday, 20 August 2009

Redfern’s major players are putting their heads together to resuscitate Redfern’s business precinct, starting with a slap of paint on the dreary shutters that line the suburb’s main street.
The City of Sydney Council and the Redfern-Waterloo Authority are enthusiastically backing the Redfern-Waterloo Chamber of Commerce in an initiative to enliven the shopfronts along Redfern and Regent Streets by removing roller doors or encouraging owners to lend them as canvases for future art projects.
The idea was pioneered in Seattle by community activist Jim Diers, who sort to revitalise community ownership over drab urban spaces, and will be the first charge of a new branding exercise for Redfern’s business community.
Following the recent release of a precinct study that put forward recommendations to salvage the commercial viability of the suburb, Greens Councillor Irene Doutney pleaded fellow councillors to see the urgency of the project.
“Those roller doors are just appalling… It’s such a discouragement to people to use the street at all,” she said, adding that the shutters added to the perception that the area was unsafe.
“You could do any sort of art competition to really sort of jazz those shutters up and encourage people to remove them.
“There are shops without shutters and their windows aren’t smashed. It’s harping back to a past that really isn’t relevant anymore.”
Mary Lynne Pidcock, President of the Chamber of Commerce, agreed that dangerous perceptions of the area was the most crippling factor in Redfern’s marketability.
A 2007 study that almost a quarter of Redfern’s shopfront’s were vacant premises, a statistic that has slightly improved due to upgrades by Sydney City Council.
At the celebration of Redfern’s 150th anniversary, Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore passionately rebutted talk that the suburb was being left behind its neighbours, saying that the City had put millions into the upgrading Redfern and Regent Streets, and transforming Redfern Park and Oval with a $32 million makeover.
The City will now contribute $17,800 towards devising a marketing strategy to reinvent Redfern, similar to the exercise undertaken in Glebe earlier this year.
Ms Pidcock said a consortium of Redfern’s major players would be meeting soon in order to forge a new identity for the precinct.
“There are many brands already in the Redfern-Waterloo area, they’re very strong.
So what we’d like to do now is to develop…an overarching brand for all of this area that will speak to all of those brands…and it will be what people begin to think about Redfern,” she said.
Reiterating Ms Pidcock’s sentiments, Redfern-Waterloo Authority CEO, Robert Wakelin-King, added that it was necessary for the entire community to feel like they owned the brand that Redfern took on.
“It’s also very important that we get the views and the input from the community, because at the end of the day it’s their area, it’s their place, and so therefore ultimately it’s their brand, whatever it is that comes forward,” he said.
A succession of residential developments, including the long-anticipated North Eveleigh plan and a proposed 18-story tower block at Lawson Square, is also anticipated to bring a surge of new life into the area in the next few years.
Mr Wakelin-King said the streetscape was beginning to pick up, but a lot still needed to be done.

Councillor and Redfern resident Irene Doutney says the roller shutters make the area appear unsafe

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