Gentrifying Collingwood: Melbourne’s art & access question
Artist studios & community art spaces can bring real
change & impact to a city, as well as to the individual artists who are
able to secure a space to work. They also, however, can be harbingers of change
and gentrification, with any arts-led redevelopment always a balancing act of working
for the existing or incoming communities. Collingwood Yards in Melbourne has recently
moved into a former college building redeveloped by local architects Fieldwork,
and as Tahney Fosdike discovered by visiting the building and resident artists,
that balancing act is a precarious one.
Collingwood Yards hails itself
as a response to Australia’s crisis of affordable arts space. But is it as
simple as taking some idle buildings, polishing them up and calling it an arts
district – or is there a muddier question of sincerity?
Formerly a technical college, the site – just 4km north of Melbourne’s more established arts district that hosts Arts Centre Melbourne and National Gallery of Victoria – had sat abandoned for a decade before its redevelopment under the management of Contemporary Arts Precincts. The redesign, headed by Melbourne-based architecture and interior design studio Fieldwork, retained heritage characteristics on three multi-level buildings dating back to 1912, including an art deco entrance, original plane trees, and a Keith Haring mural. On the changes, in conceptual terms, Fieldwork wrote in their project manifesto:
“What infrastructure can be designed or improved to unite artists and audiences in a meaningful and ongoing way? Our vision for the Collingwood Yards is one of minimal interventions, precise incisions, accidents (of the artistic kind), evolution and creative collisions between artists and their public.”
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In more plain language, Collingwood Yards’ first director, Marcus Westbury has explained that the redevelopment of the former Collingwood Technical College aimed to create sustainable, affordable, long-term homes for the arts under objectives of creativity and security.
Comprising 50 tenancy spaces, the facelift of the derelict property presents a community-oriented model for supporting the arts. The finalised space hosts hospitality venues and independent retailers, plus social enterprise organisations and art spaces like Arts Project Australia, WestSpace, Bus Projects, and Liquid Architecture, alongside artists in studio spaces.
Long before opening, tenants moved in. In 2020, Melbourne art critic Andrew Stephens wrote, “Walk through the gateway of Collingwood Yards, and you might feel you’ve found some sort of small-scale utopia for artists—the sort of community- focussed environment where collaboration, exchange of ideas and a permeating atmosphere of creativity are all at the fore.”
After years of delays, Collingwood Yards officially opened in 2021 during a brief window between Melbourne’s extended COVID lockdowns. However, it’s hard to find much written about it, beyond eager puff pieces about its early days (Melbourne art criticism has a habit of not being all that critical). Analysis of its post-development state is far and few between, but talking with members of the local art world reveals that Collingwood Yards perhaps branded itself as the city’s new “home” for the arts too soon.
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“That title of Collingwood Arts Precinct, perhaps that should have been something to be earned, rather than labelling a place in that way and then expecting it to happen,” says Australian contemporary artist Emily Floyd, who joined Collingwood Arts just before COVID, adds that “with all the precarity around artists’ lives and around small organisations – it has not necessarily transpired as the space of shelter that we had hoped for.”
Floyd studied at the building when it was a technical college in the 1990s, after they opened enrolments to female students. Though disarming to learn in a male-dominated environment, it was cheap access to space, skills, and technology in the inner city. Returning to rent a studio, Floyd says, is like having “something that was free basically sold back to you.”
Such incongruity speaks to the neighbourhood’s gentrification. The site’s suburb of Collingwood was, and is still in many ways, working class, though Floyd says Collingwood, even back in the 1990s, has always been in a “state of becoming.” Its constant urban upheaval is very on-the-nose, too. One side of Collingwood Yards faces 1960s council housing towers. Another side is a brand-new luxury hotel. Floyd often steps out of her studio to take a break from the noises of construction of nearby developments, sitting in the courtyard to rest her ears.
“There’s been confronting dialogue around what it means to work cooperatively and what it means to be in that area and confront gentrification. That just continues to grow and grow. But it will take a long time for a sense of access to be achieved,” Floyd says in reference to disorganising, a ‘quasi-institution’ between WestSpace, Bus Projects, and Liquid Architecture aiming to create dialogue on building an arts ecology on-site via interdependent practices over institutional structures. Yet, like Collingwood Yards itself, there’s little evidence of what they've achieved outside signalling idealism.
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Per their website, Collingwood Yard also posits itself as resisting the area’s gentrification. Fieldwork, too, says they created Collingwood Yards in “gentrifying Collingwood” to “make the artistic process less remote and more relevant to the social and cultural fabric of the city.” True, it’s not another capitalist venture amongst Melbourne’s dense, high-rise developments of paper box apartments, and is more of an open space infiltrating art into public life, with room for artists where they’re usually priced out.
Even with these promises and its freshly polished face, the average person might not know how to actually visit Collingwood Yards. Entering through either street entrance, they’ll happen on an empty gravel courtyard surrounded by minimally signed brick buildings. It’s quiet. Entering passageways or flights of stairs is counterintuitive. They’ll awkwardly poke around or turn around and leave.
Floyd agrees, “There's this kind of disorientating architecture so they can't even find the spaces they're looking for. Or if they wander around, they don't know what's private and what's public.” Or, per my friend that grabs takeaway coffee on site, “There’s art there?”
![]()
Regular arts audiences familiar with the site might know how to discern what’s accessible. They are brave enough to navigate the buildings and know, despite vague signage, that they can enter a gallery, for instance, but not an artist’s studio.
Outside this niche group, the main walk-ins come for Hope St Radio. In Fashion Journal magazine, Bronte Winnem summed up the well-known wine bar’s clientele as the “stereotypes of Melbourne aesthetics” and “rich people cosplaying as poor.”[1] When I worked at a gallery on-site, I’d wonder (grumble) to myself: if I can’t afford a knock-off drink here, who are these guys? Not artists, arts workers, or anyone in my tax bracket. Yes, Collingwood Yard’s main traffic might be this hot urban elite, but they’re coming for social clout rather than to foster an artistic community or resist gentrification.
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Floyd highlights Collingwood
Yard’s need for quality rather than quantity audiences. Or, rather, valuing
non-visible audiences over aesthetic ones. This was the original goalpost, at
least, as suggested in a comment to ArtEdit[2] from former CEO Sophie Travers, who said that Collingwood Yards “belongs to the
tenants and the community.” Similarly, in an exit interview with Artshub,
Marcus Westbury also spoke of the site’s design and structures promoting
collaboration and cross-pollination, saying: “Ownership of the whole community
is really important. I think the next step is about creating a space that is
owned by and brings the best out of that community.”[3]
Ironically, their governance creates barriers to these goals. Floyd says that “people might compare it to an arts cooperative in Berlin – but those historical cooperatives were set up by artists and artists run. That's where [Collingwood Yard] organisations haven’t had power. It’s a top-down model. It’s like: well, you can have this space, but you have to pay rent to be in it, and we’re not invested long-term in your capacity to achieve income.”
If a sense of community is to be developed on-site, it relies on organisations and artists staying long-term to develop it. Collingwood Yards was realised with $20m of government, philanthropic, community, and commercial support. But funding is not ongoing, and tenants must finance their stays. The model first subsidises the rent of arts spaces via rent paid by for-profit spaces, like Hope St Radio. Collingwood Yards then scopes that rental fee through quantitative surveying and provides a discount on the value of real estate. Per Floyd, this is done “under a banner of creativity and access.” Still, with Collingwood being a highly desirable area. Even with discounts the rent is beyond most budgets – artists work other jobs to afford the space to then, paradoxically, use it less.
![]()
“We have seen organisations
defunded during the time I’ve been there,” Floyd says. “So, we don’t
necessarily see the Yards as a space of shelter for important organisations. If
you can't stay in space and you don't have continuous operation, then it's really
difficult to contribute to important dialogues.”
Floyd says such landlordism, though, sits alongside a genuine desire for access and diversity. Almost three years since the site opened, Floyd argues for the right conditions to make this a reality: less displacement of tenants, cheaper studios, recognition of precarious funding conditions, and tenant representation on the board. After these needs are met, they can focus on community building to make the site what it has always wanted to be.
Lofty goals are realised with intention and action, not confidence alone. Collingwood Yards finds itself in less of a renaissance marching towards utopia than an adolescence in the throes of wanting to achieve its dreams. The transition from a derelict college to a supportive model for the arts relies on its future decisions forefronting accessibility and sustainability.
![]()
Formerly a technical college, the site – just 4km north of Melbourne’s more established arts district that hosts Arts Centre Melbourne and National Gallery of Victoria – had sat abandoned for a decade before its redevelopment under the management of Contemporary Arts Precincts. The redesign, headed by Melbourne-based architecture and interior design studio Fieldwork, retained heritage characteristics on three multi-level buildings dating back to 1912, including an art deco entrance, original plane trees, and a Keith Haring mural. On the changes, in conceptual terms, Fieldwork wrote in their project manifesto:
“What infrastructure can be designed or improved to unite artists and audiences in a meaningful and ongoing way? Our vision for the Collingwood Yards is one of minimal interventions, precise incisions, accidents (of the artistic kind), evolution and creative collisions between artists and their public.”
In more plain language, Collingwood Yards’ first director, Marcus Westbury has explained that the redevelopment of the former Collingwood Technical College aimed to create sustainable, affordable, long-term homes for the arts under objectives of creativity and security.
Comprising 50 tenancy spaces, the facelift of the derelict property presents a community-oriented model for supporting the arts. The finalised space hosts hospitality venues and independent retailers, plus social enterprise organisations and art spaces like Arts Project Australia, WestSpace, Bus Projects, and Liquid Architecture, alongside artists in studio spaces.
Long before opening, tenants moved in. In 2020, Melbourne art critic Andrew Stephens wrote, “Walk through the gateway of Collingwood Yards, and you might feel you’ve found some sort of small-scale utopia for artists—the sort of community- focussed environment where collaboration, exchange of ideas and a permeating atmosphere of creativity are all at the fore.”
After years of delays, Collingwood Yards officially opened in 2021 during a brief window between Melbourne’s extended COVID lockdowns. However, it’s hard to find much written about it, beyond eager puff pieces about its early days (Melbourne art criticism has a habit of not being all that critical). Analysis of its post-development state is far and few between, but talking with members of the local art world reveals that Collingwood Yards perhaps branded itself as the city’s new “home” for the arts too soon.
“That title of Collingwood Arts Precinct, perhaps that should have been something to be earned, rather than labelling a place in that way and then expecting it to happen,” says Australian contemporary artist Emily Floyd, who joined Collingwood Arts just before COVID, adds that “with all the precarity around artists’ lives and around small organisations – it has not necessarily transpired as the space of shelter that we had hoped for.”
Floyd studied at the building when it was a technical college in the 1990s, after they opened enrolments to female students. Though disarming to learn in a male-dominated environment, it was cheap access to space, skills, and technology in the inner city. Returning to rent a studio, Floyd says, is like having “something that was free basically sold back to you.”
Such incongruity speaks to the neighbourhood’s gentrification. The site’s suburb of Collingwood was, and is still in many ways, working class, though Floyd says Collingwood, even back in the 1990s, has always been in a “state of becoming.” Its constant urban upheaval is very on-the-nose, too. One side of Collingwood Yards faces 1960s council housing towers. Another side is a brand-new luxury hotel. Floyd often steps out of her studio to take a break from the noises of construction of nearby developments, sitting in the courtyard to rest her ears.
“There’s been confronting dialogue around what it means to work cooperatively and what it means to be in that area and confront gentrification. That just continues to grow and grow. But it will take a long time for a sense of access to be achieved,” Floyd says in reference to disorganising, a ‘quasi-institution’ between WestSpace, Bus Projects, and Liquid Architecture aiming to create dialogue on building an arts ecology on-site via interdependent practices over institutional structures. Yet, like Collingwood Yards itself, there’s little evidence of what they've achieved outside signalling idealism.
Per their website, Collingwood Yard also posits itself as resisting the area’s gentrification. Fieldwork, too, says they created Collingwood Yards in “gentrifying Collingwood” to “make the artistic process less remote and more relevant to the social and cultural fabric of the city.” True, it’s not another capitalist venture amongst Melbourne’s dense, high-rise developments of paper box apartments, and is more of an open space infiltrating art into public life, with room for artists where they’re usually priced out.
Even with these promises and its freshly polished face, the average person might not know how to actually visit Collingwood Yards. Entering through either street entrance, they’ll happen on an empty gravel courtyard surrounded by minimally signed brick buildings. It’s quiet. Entering passageways or flights of stairs is counterintuitive. They’ll awkwardly poke around or turn around and leave.
Floyd agrees, “There's this kind of disorientating architecture so they can't even find the spaces they're looking for. Or if they wander around, they don't know what's private and what's public.” Or, per my friend that grabs takeaway coffee on site, “There’s art there?”
Regular arts audiences familiar with the site might know how to discern what’s accessible. They are brave enough to navigate the buildings and know, despite vague signage, that they can enter a gallery, for instance, but not an artist’s studio.
Outside this niche group, the main walk-ins come for Hope St Radio. In Fashion Journal magazine, Bronte Winnem summed up the well-known wine bar’s clientele as the “stereotypes of Melbourne aesthetics” and “rich people cosplaying as poor.”[1] When I worked at a gallery on-site, I’d wonder (grumble) to myself: if I can’t afford a knock-off drink here, who are these guys? Not artists, arts workers, or anyone in my tax bracket. Yes, Collingwood Yard’s main traffic might be this hot urban elite, but they’re coming for social clout rather than to foster an artistic community or resist gentrification.
Ironically, their governance creates barriers to these goals. Floyd says that “people might compare it to an arts cooperative in Berlin – but those historical cooperatives were set up by artists and artists run. That's where [Collingwood Yard] organisations haven’t had power. It’s a top-down model. It’s like: well, you can have this space, but you have to pay rent to be in it, and we’re not invested long-term in your capacity to achieve income.”
If a sense of community is to be developed on-site, it relies on organisations and artists staying long-term to develop it. Collingwood Yards was realised with $20m of government, philanthropic, community, and commercial support. But funding is not ongoing, and tenants must finance their stays. The model first subsidises the rent of arts spaces via rent paid by for-profit spaces, like Hope St Radio. Collingwood Yards then scopes that rental fee through quantitative surveying and provides a discount on the value of real estate. Per Floyd, this is done “under a banner of creativity and access.” Still, with Collingwood being a highly desirable area. Even with discounts the rent is beyond most budgets – artists work other jobs to afford the space to then, paradoxically, use it less.
Floyd says such landlordism, though, sits alongside a genuine desire for access and diversity. Almost three years since the site opened, Floyd argues for the right conditions to make this a reality: less displacement of tenants, cheaper studios, recognition of precarious funding conditions, and tenant representation on the board. After these needs are met, they can focus on community building to make the site what it has always wanted to be.
Lofty goals are realised with intention and action, not confidence alone. Collingwood Yards finds itself in less of a renaissance marching towards utopia than an adolescence in the throes of wanting to achieve its dreams. The transition from a derelict college to a supportive model for the arts relies on its future decisions forefronting accessibility and sustainability.
[1] www.fashionjournal.com.au/life/aesthetic-friendships-melbourne
[2] www.artedit.com.au/destination-art-collingwood-yards
[3] www.artshub.com.au/news/features/exit-interview-marcus-westbury-director-collingwood-yards-262154-237040
Tahney Fosdike is a writer and editor from Ngarrindjeri
country living in France. Her bylines can be found in Artshub, Astray,
Australian Book Review, Beat Magazine, Betches, Metro Magazine, Little White
Lies, Plinth, Zee Feed, Mamamia, and Archer Magazine, among others.
She currently holds the title of Art Editor at the Suburban Review and works as
a pigiste for Radio France Internationale.
Otherwise, she’s supporting creative individual and cultural
organisations as a freelance content specialist while also curating arts
reading lists in her newsletter Sticky Teeth.
www.tahney.com
Collingwood Yards is a Melbourne arts centre focused on the
contemporary arts as a vehicle for community and cultural development. They believe
that bold, visible creativity defines a city, and a strong and independent
culture of creativity defines a great city. Collingwood Yards is managed by
not-for-profit organisation, Contemporary Arts Precincts Ltd. and has invested
more than $15m from philanthropy, government & commercial partners into the
redevelopment of its site.
www.collingwoodyards.org
Emily Floyd was born in Melbourne & works in sculpture,
printmaking & public installation. Floyd is renowned for her text-based
sculptures & pedagogically inspired works that combine a strong focus on
visual qualities with an interest in the legacies of modernism. Her work
engages a wide range of disciplines including social activism, design &
typography, literature & cultural studies, community participation &
public education. Intersecting public space with a carefully considered
aesthetic approach, the artist creates bold spaces for public engagement &
interaction.
Recent projects include the 2018 International Curatorial
and Studio Program Residency & exhibition, A Working Model of the World at Parsons School of Design, New York
City (2017); All the World’s Futures,
56th Venice Biennale curated by Okwui Enwezor (2015) & Below Another Sky, curated by Alexia Holt at the British Council
London (2015).
Floyd’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum
of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria,
Melbourne; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Queensland Art Gallery
& Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Victoria & Albert Museum, London;
The British Museum, London; amongst others.
www.annaschwartzgallery.com/artist/emily-floyd
Fieldwork is a Melbourne-based architecture & interior
design studio founded in 2013. They have grown into a team of more than 25
practitioners from diverse cultures spanning expertise in the fields of
architecture, commerce, design, urbanism, publishing & art. Through their
research & design studio Fieldstudies, they deepen an understanding of the
areas where design-thinking & architecture can push for greater civic
equity, sharing this knowledge & research through studios at Melbourne
School of Design.
www.fieldworkprojects.com.au
Emily Floyd was born in Melbourne & works in sculpture, printmaking & public installation. Floyd is renowned for her text-based sculptures & pedagogically inspired works that combine a strong focus on visual qualities with an interest in the legacies of modernism. Her work engages a wide range of disciplines including social activism, design & typography, literature & cultural studies, community participation & public education. Intersecting public space with a carefully considered aesthetic approach, the artist creates bold spaces for public engagement & interaction.
Recent projects include the 2018 International Curatorial and Studio Program Residency & exhibition, A Working Model of the World at Parsons School of Design, New York City (2017); All the World’s Futures, 56th Venice Biennale curated by Okwui Enwezor (2015) & Below Another Sky, curated by Alexia Holt at the British Council London (2015).
Floyd’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The British Museum, London; amongst others.
www.annaschwartzgallery.com/artist/emily-floyd
