Common patterns: narratives of 'mere coincidence' and the production of regions

In this account of place-making in Central Australia, a contrast is made between creative community and regulatory authority. A creative community resembles a revolutionary council of the kind influentially discussed by Hannah Arendt (2000); it is convened to manage change. In contrast, a regulatory authority (represented in Central Australia, and elsewhere, by local councils and regional governments) is constitutionally opposed to innovation. At issue are different models of democratic governance. Associated with these differing models are different conceptions of place and place stewardship. In Alice Springs, which furnishes the case study of this article, those actively engaged in nurturing a new space of sociability, or meeting place, understood place discursively (as a talking place). In contrast, the planning culture sought to eliminate storytelling mechanisms for social innovation, associating a plurality of voices and histories with the undermining of administrative authority and the ideological status quo. My argument is that the discourse of creative place-making is mythopoetic in its purpose: by way of identifying cross-cultural narratives of place-making that display analogies, it seeks common ground between different cultural patternings of place. Mythopoetic, story-based strategies of this kind can overthrow fixed and often divisionist myths of origin, replacing them with co-devised narratives. The chapter concludes with an acknowledgement that the creative place-making process outlined here redefines what is meant by place, which ceases to be an administrative convenience (static and void) and becomes an analogue of the performative techniques that conjure it into being. Place may be reconfigured as a network of passages or creative regions, comparable to a string figure or network, whose governance, it is suggested, is vested in the creative communities that bring it alive and maintain it.