Sydney - We Need to Talk!

SYDNEY - WE NEED TO TALK! Vol.2 / Introduction

This second volume of Sydney - We Need To Talk! is a production of the Urban Crew - a group of people who have been meeting together every week in the Madsen Building at the University of Sydney to talk about cities. We’re academic staff, postgraduate and undergraduate students, and occasionally interested others from a range of academic disciplines.

In 2018, the Urban Crew made our first little book. Sydney - We Need to Talk! was titled after a Wendy Murray poster of the same name. That title captured the state of our relationships with the city in which we live and work. Some of us have spent all or most of our lives in Sydney. Others are more recent arrivals. All of us have come to care about it, and to worry about it. “We need to talk” simultaneously evoked the need each of us felt for one of those ‘state of the relationship’ conversations with our city but also from our city, and our desire to generate a collective conversation with our fellow Sydney-siders about the fate of our city and other cities too. “Collective therapy for despondant urbanists”, we called it.

Since that time, some of our Crew have moved on to other places, and new folks have joined in. We’ve kept on talking and thinking about our city, even through the pandemic when our physical homebase in Madsen was shut down to gatherings for many months. And as had happened back in 2018, a little book project started to emerge from those conversations. As we talked about our work, many of us found ourselves researching and reporting on the ambivalences of particular places - deep love and unease, loss and hopefulness, past and future. And so, this collection of essays about places in Sydney started to take shape. In some ways, Volume 2 offers a kind of response to Volume 1, writing from a different kind of vantage point on our city. To explain...

To grapple with the state of our city is to think about the relationship between places and processes. Geographer Doreen Massey’s (1994) influential work on place and space sought to foreground this relationship. Places, she argued, are “constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus.” These relations, she suggested, are “real relations with real content - economic, political, cultural - between any local place and the wider world in which it is set.” She continues: 

If places can be conceptualized in terms of the social interactions which they tie together, then it is also the case that these interactions themselves are not motionless things, frozen in time. They are processes.

But, this is not a one-way relationship, in which places are passively shaped by processes that stretch across space and time. Rather:

There is the specificity of place which derives from the fact that each place is the focus of a distinct mixture of wider and more local social relations. There is the fact that this very mixture together in one place may produce effects which would not have happened otherwise. 

In Volume 1 of Sydney We Need to Talk, we approached this relationship from the ‘process’ side of things. We wrote a set of collaborative pieces on processes like dispossession, digitalisation, decommodification and democratisation - and we explored the different ways that such processes were unfolding in Sydney and across the different places we have researched. And we also had fun working with artist Wendy Murray to make our own little book - the hard copies we produced were partly printed on a very old Piscator printing press, the pages were stitched together by hand, and the book was wrapped in hand-pulled posters.

In Volume 2, we’ve approached things from the other direction. Each of the essays here focus on a place in Sydney. Most (but not all) of those places are inner urban - a zone of intense flux right now. Each essay seeks to evoke a sense of those places, and their significance to us - be it personally, politically, and/or professionally. And in telling the story of that place, each essay inevitably seeks to understand the broader processes that shape it. It’s a Sydney thing, so gentrification processes feature in several of these essays. But there are other processes and relationships foregrounded in these pages too - not least the on-going colonisation of unceded Aboriginal land that Sydney is founded and expanded upon, the privatisation of urban services, and relations of diversity like the city’s multiculture and nature-culture relations. And as with Volume 1, we’ve been lucky that Wendy has been part of our journey - peeling back the lights of the CocaCola sign, sketching our places, and taking charge of another interesting printing process, this time online.

The essays were all written way back in 2020 … it’s possible we took the Urban Crew’s aversion to the grind of academic publication expectations a little too far this time! With everything that everyone has had going on it has been challenging to get this collection over the line, but we’ve finally found the time and the place for them. From our 2024 vantage point several of them feel like little time-capsules from that time - we were still in the thick of COVID-related interventions in city life, and some of the places we wrote about have most definitely moved on. But … such is urban life right? 

Indeed, reflecting across these pieces, several include an implicit or explicit lament for places as they once were. One of Massey’s concerns in writing about place was to ensure that such laments did not cross the line into a form of nostalgia for places as ‘pure’ before being ‘contaminated’ by processes from beyond their borders. Such purity and borders were themselves fictions, she insisted - even as they are powerful fictions that continue to shape politics, often in quite reactionary ways. Other pieces evoke a sense of ‘home’. But again, we hope we’ve done this in a way that acknowledges the multitude of attachments that adhere to places, and seeks to understand the ways in which some of those attachments are privileged while others are not. Hopefully, across this book, our evocations of place and home tend more towards a more progressive kind of ‘critical memory’ as advocated by Houston Baker Jr (1994) - a memory that can simultaneously draw on the past as a source of critique while also being critical of those pasts.

References 

Baker, Houston A  (1994) Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere, in Public Culture, 7, 3-33.

Massey, Doreen (1994) A Global Sense of Place, in Space, Place and Gender, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.