Spatial impacts of Melbourne's ‘agent of change’ principle and Brisbane's ‘designated entertainment precinct’ policy on the fairness of live music venue access

This paper employs a chrono-urbanist perspective to examine the effects of two contrasting policy strategies on the travel time required for local residents to participate in local live music scenes. We use Melbourne's ‘agent of change’ principle and Brisbane's ‘designated entertainment precinct’ as contrasting policy approaches to investigate the impact of these policies on urban centre-periphery and cultural engagement. We examine these policy approaches to determine the extent that precinct-based policies may risk excluding certain cultural activities from the chrono-urbanist notion of ‘the 15-min city’. This research uses venue-mapping of the two case study cities to demonstrate the chrono-urban impacts of the dispersed and cluster approaches to the management of urban and suburban live music venues. We then super-impose maps of public transport nodes/facilities over our venue maps to present empirical evidence on the possibilities and limitations of these two different policy approaches. One of the primary conclusions we draw is that the dispersed venue clusters in Melbourne show more positive results in terms of fair and equitable live music venue access to the residents of the city who live in outer suburban areas.