Gritty street gets green treatment

By CLAY LUCAS

Gilbert Rochecouste is sitting outside a cafe on a sunny afternoon explaining how, 12 years ago, a spontaneous swim with a pod of dolphins led him to quit his job managing Chadstone shopping centre and throw himself into 'place-making'.

Theatrically decked out in an over-the-top tartan wool suit and ruffled sunflower yellow shirt, Rochecouste, of Brunswick, looks more like an act from the Melbourne International Comedy Festival than a man trying to bring about some profound changes in our community.

Back in 1992, Rochecouste was paddling a dinghy in Port Phillip Bay with friends when they saw a lone dolphin. "Then a whole pod of them arrived," recalls Rochecouste.

The two-hour swim that followed convinced him there had to be more to life. "I had a reconnection with something bigger than myself," he says.

Rochecouste sat down and pondered how he could use his years of experience in retailing for the forces of good. The first step was to get away from shopping centres, which were all about restricting shoppers' freedom: "They are highly controlled environments. That's why they're so successful at making money. But they don't have the organic nature of the street, which allows spontaneity, and food for the soul."

Rochecouste quit Chadstone and formed Village Green, a company that attempts to bring environmentally sound solutions to troubled shopping areas, and inject some cultural inspiration into the mix.

Running alongside this environmental agenda is Rochecouste's 'place-making' - the process of helping a shopping strip decide just what its identity is, and creating a sense of community that will draw the opinion leaders to spend time there. Behind them, the crowds will follow and business will flourish.

Village Green has worked with dozens of Australian councils on rejuvenating their strip shopping centres. Rochecouste himself is best known for his work with Melbourne City Council on its laneways, such as Degraves Street and Centre Place, and on the Queen Victoria Market, where he oversaw the introduction of the night market and the organic section.

Village Green is also working with Lend Lease on its Melbourne Central redevelopment, touted as one of the country's first sustainable shopping centres, complete with its own rooftop wind generator.

Six months ago, Yarra Council and City West Water contracted Village Green to run Green Streets, a 12-month program designed to help the 350 businesses on Smith Street's troubled strip - best known around Melbourne for its heroin problem - forge a healthier sense of community. The program simultaneously focuses traders on reducing their environmental impacts.

Initially, the program is working with 20 traders, to help them run their businesses more efficiently, using less energy and resources - and therefore less money. A wide range of traders are taking part, including Monties Bar, Siyia juice bar, Gallery Zygote and Monkey Studios.

This group will then help come up with what they believe other traders on the strip would like to see happen. Not an easy task when businesses range from health food stores and $2 shops to Nike and an army of hairdressers.

Village Green hopes a rejuvenation of environmental and community spirit will spring up in the strip, as more traders learn to work together on projects.

Yarra Council and City West Water have put in $80,000 to fund the program. Initially, businesses are audited to see how much waste they produce, and how much energy and water they use. The Green Streets team then sits down and attempts to help traders figure out ways of minimising the costs of all three, while at the same time minimising environmental impacts.

The best example of how this could be done is waste collection. Council does not provide rubbish collections for business, which means all 350 Smith Street traders have to organise their own collection. At least seven rubbish collectors service Smith Street, through arrangements made individually by each trader. The Green Streets team looks at ways traders might be able to bargain as a group with just one or two collectors - thereby saving traders money, and minimising the amount of fuel-sucking trucks thumping up and down the strip.

Other aspects of the program look at minimising environmentally damaging practices, such as disposal of dirty water. The Tasty Chicken store, for instance, is having the amount of grease going down its drains audited via a video camera placed in the sewers below its store. Other stores are looking at using energy-efficient lights.

Green Streets aims to help traders focus on what social researcher Hugh Mackay calls "a more tribal approach to communing, relating, shopping and living"; our desire to reconnect with 'the herd', so that people get a stronger sense of emotional security by re-creating a 'village life'.

Many regard Smith Street's lack of slickness as the last refuge of the real in the inner city. It can feel a bit of a wasteland, but is that such a bad thing in an inner city that increasingly seems to exist only for the cashed-up latte set?

Rochecouste and his team are aware of this, and he asserts that culture must not be gutted so profits can be increased. "When things get hip and trendy, money comes in and it all gets packaged. We don't want that."

He sees the challenge as keeping the strip's grunge feel while simultaneously adding the sense of village now missing. "Can we keep all of the good things there - the quirky traders - without ruining the street by cleaning it up?"

The Sydney Road Brunswick Association, which represents traders on Sydney Road as far north as Moreland Road, is also looking at starting a Green Streets program.

Association spokeswoman Claire Perry says: "Sydney Road needs to have a common vision for the whole of the trip. And at the same time, we need to keep the street's authenticity."

Rochecouste believes Sydney Road has many similarities to Smith Street: "Sydney Road is much more culturally specific with the Middle East. But it has the same gritty feel."

Smith Street today doesn't have a strong sense of identity, and to create that, traders in the strip need to work together, says Rochecouste.

In Bridge Road, a strong traders' group has banded together to lobby successfully for money to beautify the street. And they have also agreed to each pay a yearly levy of around $150 per shop, which goes toward marketing the street as the place to come for fashion.

A traders' group once operated in Smith Street, but it ended a few years ago, with many old-time traders bitter about how a large council grant was spent. According to many of these traders, Green Streets is just another bit of hype that is bound to fail.

Brian Hogan, owner of Hogan Gallery, derides Green Streets as nothing more than "banner politics", and a waste of money. "It's a puzzle to me - what does (a Green Street) mean? It's just window dressing. We just want a little bit of decorum out there," Hogan says, pointing an accusing finger out at the street. "A few banners, that's all this bloody thing is - and they didn't even ask us if we wanted the banners strung up!"

But Julie Collins from Monties Bar is right behind the program. She is the head of the traders' committee set up by Village Green, and she thinks the program could achieve great things.

"People are always saying, 'Smith Street is the new Brunswick Street'. But unless Smith Street has a unique identity, business will never flourish here like it has there."

One of the goals of the program is to actually plant trees in Smith Street. Monties has taken the initiative and put out half a dozen planter boxes. "If everyone in the strip does one little bit of greening like that, it'd make a big difference," she says. Yarra Council has said a street tree-planting program should be possible within 12 months.

However, the street needs to decide collectively what sort of place it wants to be. "We all love Smith Street's grunginess, but it's the type of street that could still have that but also have a sense of unity and identity," Collins says.