DIY architecture: Squatspace and the Tour of Beauty

Catalogue essay for Concrete Cultures, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Sydney

By Zanny Begg

If I could change things here I would shoot the social engineers, all the academics, all the town planers, all the government planners, all the architects, all ivory tower dwellers who do not have any concept of what the people want and need. They just get bright ideas and then go and inflict them on the people - oh they claim to consult, to go through due process but in reality they don’t… Leave us alone, let this place heal, go play social games somewhere else. Ross Smith, Redfern resident and regular Tour of Beauty participant, 2007.

Redfern/Waterloo has long been regarded as a “problem” area for Sydney which successive social planners, architects, academics and town planners have sought various ways to remedy, police or contain. The heart of Redfern is The Block which is home to one of Australia’s strongest and most established urban Indigenous communities. But the suburb is also home to several public housing projects and various strong working class and migrant communities. The relatively low costs of rent, and the previously undeveloped nature of the suburb, means that it has traditionally been a place for students and other poorer residents to rent and, maybe for lucky low income families, to take out a mortgage. Its close proximity to the city, however, has meant that it has also been in the sights of urban planners and developers whose “bright idea” is to transform this area into a high density cosmopolitan haven for “city living”.

In late 2004 the NSW state government established the Redfern/Waterloo Authority (RWA) which has the specific purpose of ensuring a rapid gentrification and development of the suburb. The RWA choose nine sites for development across the area including a school, a hospital and the disused rail yards. These were to be transformed from places for study, care or work into spectacular attractions which would bring people into the suburb for leisure, entertainment and the joys of city living. Concurrent with this emphasis has been a push from developers to build new flats and high cost apartments which they hope will attract a new type of resident into the area.

The result is that Redfern has a congested and contested demography – an explosive mixture of the newer, more wealthy, residents and eager homebuyers looking to cash in, the long term and more established Indigenous community determined to stay, the Department of Housing residents hoping to hang on to their flats and a drifting community of low income renters looking for houses close to the city which are not yet renovated out of their price range.

It would be stating the obvious to say that Sydney is in the grip of a housing crisis. This affects not only first home buyers who are trying to buy their piece of the Australian dream, but also young renters and low income families who have given up on any dreams of ownership but still struggle with finding a secure place of abode. Horror stories abound of over 150 people turning up to for a rental inspection at your average run-down inner city terrace and Real Estate agents accepting rent auctions and other outrageous forms of competition to choose the occupants. The transformation of Redfern/Waterloo from a suburb of public housing, rental housing and low cost living to a place for urban “yuppies” is a microcosm of this process in the city as a whole: a strange blind post for various urban planners and government representatives who express concern over “housing issues” yet fail to connect the dots to reveal this particular picture.

It was into this congested mix that SquatSpace decided to intervene with their Tour of Beauty project. As long term residents of, or visitors to, Redfern/Waterloo, and as an art collective which grew out of the Broadway Squats (2000) and from a community with an enduring interest in the politics of space, the members of SquatSpace wanted to draw attention to some of the issues confronting this important area of Sydney. They wanted to make a work “about Redfern” but felt uncomfortable about making any definitive statement about the processes taking place. The consensus: a loose, ongoing Tour of Beauty where SquatSpace invited local residents, activists, or people with an interest in the future of the suburb to speak about their concerns in various locations across the area. The exact mix of speakers varies each time, as does the locations visited, but some consistent themes are addressed: gentrification, democracy, community control, public housing, over development.

One of the aims of the tour has been to create a sustainable model of art activism which creates ongoing and affective relationships between those in struggle over housing and other issues of urban space, artists and those in solidarity. The tour has been enormously popular both with the participants and with the local activists who have enjoyed the greater levels of community interest and support the project has generated. It was launched at the Disobedience exhibition at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery (September 2005) but its open ended, low cost, DIY nature, has meant that it has been able to continue without funding and independent of the museum context and has been re-run over 15 times since the original exhibition in various other contexts.

SquatSpace describe their role in this work as akin to DJs. They don’t vet what the speakers say, or provide any sort of script through which the problem of gentrification must be explained, but they choose who speaks and in what order. Each tour is a different interaction between speakers and participants with the SquatSpace members, dressed in their distinctive uniforms, helping facilitate discussion at various points along the way. The result is a hybrid mix of participation and preconstruction, open ended and predetermined meanings. Projects such as these blur the boundaries between art and activism, audience and artwork creating a new synthesis between culture and praxis.

The Tour of Beauty reverses the top-down approach of the RWA by building a bottom up picture of the suburbs of Redfern and Waterloo and the various needs and wants of its residents. It opens up (rather the closing down) channels of communication and allows a diverse picture of urban life to emerge. If we accept the French philosopher of urbanism Henri Lefebvre’s idea that space is not only constructed through the buildings that enclose it, but also through the social relationships which constitute it, then SquatSpace are DIY architects of inner city Sydney. For the last three years they have been building a psycho-socio-geographic map of Redfern/Waterloo which represents an impression as enduring as any of the buildings which form the contested nature of this place.

Interviewed in the 2016: Archive Project, artwork by Keg de Souza and Zanny Begg (www.2016archiveproject.com).