Young voices essential in future planning of city

TT: What does an experimental arts festival such as You Are Here have to offer to dialogues around architecture and design in the ACT?

AT: I remember reading an interview with current Chief Minister Andrew Barr, wherein he lamented the absence of young voices from government-initiated community consultation sessions, especially those concerning future building developments and planning in the ACT. Barr's dismay stemmed primarily from developments that had the potential to benefit the community by their dynamism, their capacity to invigorate relatively understimulated sections of the city, and more specifically from the older, broadly conservative quality of the voices that objected to such projects in those sessions.

My point is that impressing the importance of architecture and planning on the audience at You Are Here amounts to engaging the demographic whose voices have the most potential to affect structural changes to the environment in which we live and make art. If they are not naturally making their voices heard in the sessions to which local government appeals for consultation, they should be made to see the import of doing so. That traditional and non-traditional channels should both be used for the facilitation of good planning, architecture, design and art should be common sense.

TT: And what about the event that you're running at You Are Here might facilitate such a change?

AT: You Are Here's artist (and attendee) demographic has traditionally been young, in the fledgling stages of exciting but as yet unproven artistic careers. With my event, (I Hate You) For Sentimental Reasons, I want to inject into their program three voices of authority – not to deliver a slap on the wrist to their intergenerational counterparts, but to employ their weight of experience to affect a stimulating change, or at least food for thought, within a section of society capable of doing great things with that information. And they're not dealing with small fish; these are big, important issues.

TT: So who are these "voices of authority," and what are their "big, important issues"?

AT: Nicola Lambert, an artist and arts facilitator with an impressive career providing arts outreach programs for the disabled and underprivileged, will speak to the ACT's dearth of programs addressing a deficit in this area. Dr Jeanine Leane of the ANU, will speak to the ACT's lack of representation and support for Indigenous writers. And you, Tony, I hope, will show that the ACT could stand for a grand rethink of the way we go about planning this city, and suggest ways this could be achieved. In an ideal world, some great young artists and thinkers will walk away from these talks with the feeling I had when I envisioned this event – that Canberra, as with almost any city, could stand to gain some more positive, impassioned playmakers with their hearts and heads in the right place. And not least in the realm of city planning.