Creative Cultural Venues

Cultural infrastructure refers to ‘hard’ or physical infrastructure and generally covers arts, cultural and creative venues, as well as businesses and peak bodies, broadly categorised as follows:

1. Community spaces for participation and/or artmaking:

These are spaces that support individual or collective use. For example: makerspaces in libraries, community gardens, First Nations-led Keeping Places and multipurpose community centres that offer arts workshop spaces, or support creative hobby groups and arts organisations

1. Creative practice and development spaces:

These are spaces that support art form development and professional creative practice. For example: rehearsal rooms, writers rooms, artist studios, studio and workshop spaces, relevant education providers (including art, theatre, dance, music and film schools), co-working spaces, not-for-profit artist-run centres or galleries, digital media arts production (film, video, music, gaming), not-for-profit arts organisations and peak bodies, First Nations artist-led initiatives and cultural venues.

1. Performance and exhibition spaces:

These spaces are characterised by cultural venues and infrastructure for audiences or spectatorship. For example: major performing arts venues, live music venues (like, hotels, bars, cafes and clubs), museums, arts galleries, art centres, heritage and discovery centres, comedy clubs, arena entertainment venues, drama and dance theatres

1. Commercial and enterprise spaces:

These spaces belong to creative businesses (e.g. advertising, architectural, fashion design, photographic services). For example artists, creative manufacturing (like glass, jewellery, ceramics), creative publishing, creative digital media, music recording studios, film and video production, post-production and distribution, cinemas, radio, television, web broadcasting, creative retailing (commercial art gallery, art or craft supplies retailing, music instruments retail, book and record stores, antique goods, performing arts companies)

1. Festival, event and public spaces:

​​​​​​​These are spaces for temporary, unplanned or ‘special event’ cultural use in the public domain. For example, heritage assets including adaptive reuse, parks, gardens, halls, market spaces, privately owned public spaces, public art, pop-ups, and ‘unusual’ spaces like rooftops, backyards, cafes

No, while there are particular cultural venues which are more likely to be located in the Parramatta CBD (for example, major performing arts venues that show international work and are likely to attract visitors as well as residents), the recommendations will apply to suburbs across the Parramatta Local Government Area. As such, we are interested in hearing the views of all people including those that have a view on the cultural infrastructure required across Parramatta’s suburbs.

We anticipate that the cultural infrastructure in neighbourhoods and suburbs will be quite different from the CBD, and reflect the particular character and interests of those communities. For example, for communities with a particularly strong interest in music, cultural venues such as music rehearsal rooms or recording studios might be integrated into multipurpose community centres, and the local café might open Saturday nights to host live music performances.