It needs to continue! Maybe as a summer long event and venue each year. For tenants and neighbouring communities to keep connecting you need a physical space which is what Live House provides.

It seems strange to see it gone!. I thought the process and outcomes were good for the estate community. The programs seemed to be growing in popularity and a sense of community was established among those involved.
I think the location was a problem and would be better sited about 50 metres to the north (on the bit of grass NNW of the site) close to the basis of the 510 building.
I hope it returns or something similar as a site for tenant art/theatre/music is badly needed on the estate

ohh it yesterday around 6pm while i was walking through the flats i felt something was missing….. and u know what it is, and now carlton looks so ugly with out the live house, i already miss it!!

The Live House project changed the sense of what is possible here on the Carlton housing estate. It also brought together a great bunch of people, who live on (and around) the estate, but had never had a chance to meet.

I was a host from the beginning and we began with wildly over ambitious plans about what we could use the space for – as when you over eat after getting overly hungry. I’ve lived here for over 10 years, and I’d never seen anything like this on the estate before.

We wanted to run a café, to hold catered dinners that would bring together people from within and outside the housing estate, and to show outdoor movies over the summer school holidays. Even though these events never happened, Live House inspired them and they may happen in the future.

In the end we settled into a regular Friday event – which morphed as it went along – and sundry events on other days. The regularity of the Friday gathering served us well. It is difficult to get people to come to any one-off event you organise on the estate, but by holding an event at the same time every week, residents would come when they were able, knowing we would be there. And attendance is very weather-dependent–on warm nights our numbers swelled, and we could have gone all night.

But regulations forbade us this flexibility, and this is also one reason why many imagined events didn’t materialize – each idea necessitated a whole raft of regulatory issues, over and above the work needed for the events themselves. There is a great deal of certification involved with doing anything formally these days – it’ll drive you to despair – and we have a highly skilled but under certified community.

Around the time we cancelled our plans to show a film, I attended a guerrilla film screening in a park in Brunswick. If you break the law with a little nouse – screening a film away from houses so as not to disturb local residents – no one really minds. But everything creative on the housing estate is funded and supported by an external agency; in return for funding we are very tightly regulated, and this either limits what we can do, or means a lot more work (and $$) to achieve any one event.

So half our battle was simply negotiating the regulatory obstacles – it’s something we have to get skilled up on. The Live House project got us to first base, and I think that’s a major achievement. From here, second base should be a steal. Live House may return, or an amphitheatre may fill its role. Whatever happens, the sense of creative possibility Live House fostered will be feeding future projects for a long while yet, like a pelican regurgitating to its chicks (!).