MEDIA RELEASE
22 JULY 2011

The Urban Dream Brokerage
Ilott Concert Chamber, Wellington Town Hall
6pm on Friday 29 July
Free entry

Sweet Dreams Made From Property And Art

From electronic poetry to urban rooftop gardens, a reinvented speakers corner to art that lights up the sky, a free public forum at the Wellington Town Hall this coming Friday promises to ignite discussion about a more creative future for Wellington City.

The Urban Dream Brokerage is run by public art programme Letting Space in association with the Wellington City Council, and challenges Wellington artists and property developers alike to come up with creative uses for vacant and underutilised space, to provide a more vital inner-city. The forum twists the format of countless reality TV shows, where artists pitch to an all-powerful panel. Artists and then property owners will pitch their creative ideas to a panel and the audience.

The organisers Sophie Jerram and Mark Amery from Letting Space are tight lipped about the exact nature of the pitches that will be revealed on the night but promise an entertaining evening.

“They range from the surreal to the eminently practical,” says Mark Amery. “But all are effective in engendering discussion about how we can make Wellington a more creatively satisfying environment to live and work in, in the face of a lingering recession that asks question about current models of economic operation.”

This is the second Urban Dream Brokerage. In May 2010 Letting Space had to turn people away from the City Gallery, as a packed house watched dragons become petitioners. Property managers and artists alike impressed the crowd with visions of art inside elevators and boatsheds, a new age therapy stronghold and gargantuan lightshows. A number of those projects have come to light, says Jerram, including Bronwyn Holloway Smith’s Pioneer City, which Letting Space recently produced inTaranaki Street, with a real estate showroom trying to capture expressions of interest for the first settlers for a city on Mars.

This year The Urban Dream brokerage is sponsored by Wellington City Council as part of the council’s public engagement period for the Toward 2040: A Smart Green Wellington. Toward 2040 details what Wellington City Council think Wellington needs to do as a city to make sure it continues to thrive in a rapidly changing local and global environment.

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