Art as Underground Infrastructure: Why Culture Is a City’s Real Power Grid

A collaboration with City Power and developers, Far East Consortium, transformed this power station into an iconic outdoor art gallery. Artist featured are Smug, Rone, and Adnate.

By Shaun Hossack, Founder, Juddy Roller

Cities love to brag about their infrastructure.
The bridges. The rail loops. The shiny new precincts built to “activate” something that probably wasn’t dead in the first place.

But strip back the concrete and the PR glamour campaigns and you’re left with one force that actually gives a city its personality :

Culture.

Specifically - public art - free to view and endlessly shareable.

Not the safe bronze statue outside a council building - that one’s already forgotten.
Nor the polite but uninspiring sculpture outside the corporate office - sorry, doesn’t speak to me.
I’m talking about authentic, subversive, underground street culture: murals, installations, and interventions that change the way you feel in a space.

Artwork that becomes an online beacon and cultural landmark before someone clamors over it to install a barely thought-out plaque on it.

Most cities treat art like decoration. Like a line item to consider, after the “important things” get funded.
But here’s the truth:

Art is infrastructure.

Not metaphorically, but functionally.

People Don’t Travel for Good Drainage…

They travel for energy.
They search for creativity.
And in that, they find identity and relatability and a reason to return.

The local Tumby Bay community gathers around their newly completed Silo Artwork, with a sense of pride, joy, and reassurance in knowing that hard work, determination, and an unwavering belief can make anything happen!

The atmosphere experiences in a new place, the moment you arrive, should grow even stronger as you begin to explore and become interwoven within the city or town’s streets and laneways. This is when you feel like you are a part of something, and that gives you a sense of home and comfort. Something we all carve out when we travel as tourists.

But it’s not just for tourism and economic uplift.

A mural can often shift a neighborhood, town, or suburb's identity, far more than a streetscape upgrade ever could.
A festival can revive a town faster than a major capital works program.
A single iconic artwork can outperform a multi-million-dollar tourism campaign.

If you’ve ever watched a forgotten street come alive after an artist worked their magic, you know exactly how powerful street art can be.

Culture has always done the heavy lifting.

It just rarely gets the credit.

The ROI Cities Never Budget For

Public art generates measurable outcomes.
Not just vibes, but actual numbers.

Local Kingston Artist Claudio Mantuano, painting in front of an eager crowd on a street art tour at Wall to Wall Mordi Village. This festival transformed the entire industrial precinct into an open-air street art gallery in the space of two weeks.

Tourism
The Silo Art Trail pulled international visitors into towns that people couldn’t even point to on a map.

Dwell time
People linger. They explore. They spend money. Businesses feel it.

Property value
Developments with cultural identity sell faster, lease faster, and age better.

Community cohesion
A neighbourhood with art feels organic, free-flowing, and cultured.

Art builds everything cities say they want:
Connection, momentum, value, identity.

Culture Is a Town or Cities Power Source

Beneath roads and power lines, every great city runs on something else:
It’s creative ecosystem.

Banksy’s iconic “Girl with the Red Balloon” in London. Like many cities around the world, street art plays a huge role in bringing international tourism. With these works so easily shareable online, the PR campaign is done for you.

Tokyo, New York, London, Paris, Melbourne.

Street art.
Design.
Music.
Architecture.

Spaces shaped by artists, not committees.

Ignore art, and your city becomes beige.
Invest in art, and you’re not just keeping up, you’re leading the way forward, and becoming the envy of other cities struggling to find their own identity.

Cities That “Get Culture” Are Winning the Future

When looking at global cities wth an enviable reputation for high-end art, fashion, food, and culture.
They’re not doing it through perfect planning or tidy streets.
They’re doing it through expression, risk, experimentation, and scale.

Another view of our public-private partnership with Powercorp / Far East Consortium in Melbourne, with artowrk by Melbourne legends Dvate, and International superstar Fintan Magee.

They know that creative infrastructure is social infrastructure. And the more freedom you give, the more creativity you get.

It’s economically intelligent.
Emotionally vibrant.
And promoted freedom to think, do, be.

It does something engineering alone never can:
It makes people feel.

And those feelings build legacy.