Cultural Infrastructure Study Tour
Location: San Francisco, USA;
Toronto, Canada
Year: 2019
Property innovation for making space for culture
At Left Bank Co., we are passionate about making cities creatively and culturally rich. Through our ongoing work in this field, we have identified a number of international organisations that are taking innovative approaches to the delivery of cultural and creative infrastructure. In particular, Artscape in Toronto and the Community Arts Stabilisation Trust (CAST) in San Francisco are most notable for their innovative property models that achieve long-term affordability, security of tenure and scalability for creative organisations, as well as high value returns for property owners and governments.
Deciding it would be invaluable to learn more directly from the source, we organised a study tour to visit and develop partnerships with Artscape and CAST. Both entities have several unique facilities in their respective cities, catering to a wide variety of creative sectors and different uses. Through site visits and interviews with people involved with creating, managing and using the spaces, we unpacked the nuances of their distinctive approach, and ways in which their models could translate to the Australian context.
We are now skilled at how to deliver creative and cultural spaces within our cities to be truly valuable and strategic assets, and are committed to applying these insights and models back at home. Through sharing of knowledge, brokering relationships between developers and cultural operators, and bringing our expertise to new project opportunities, we can supplement our local experience with knowledge from our strategic partnerships with Artscape and CAST, offering us direct access to their expertise to shape, test and refine these innovative approaches.
If you are a developer, policy maker, funder or creative organisation seeking to better ways to embed creative and cultural space into the urban environment, contact us to discuss how we can work together. You can read more about our discoveries and insight here , or contact us for an in-house presentation to your team.