Adelaide City Council has acknowledged it can’t be the one building the city’s cafes and restaurants, as it did in the last Rundle Mall redevelopment, and will shift toward pushing the private sector to rejuvenate the Mall’s underused and unloved spaces.

A large portion of the money that the council is investing in the Rundle Mall redevelopment – $5 million out of $30 million – will be set aside in a Rundle Mall Innovation Fund to support private investment in the city’s main shopping strip.

The council will seek private projects from Rundle Mall’s traders and then support them dollar-for-dollar.

The move represents an about-face from the last time the Mall was redeveloped. That development left the council owning two cafe sites and three kiosks in the middle of the mall, all of which have been demolished as part of the latest redevelopment.

“A big part of successful place-making in a vibrant city is ownership,” Rundle Mall redevelopment public realm executive program manager Tom McCready told InDaily via email.

“If governments simply built bars, cafes and cinemas down the laneways and told people to come, it would detract from what we are aiming to achieve – that is, giving ownership back to the people, allowing them to create the spaces they’d like to see in their precinct.

“The Innovation Fund is not about council telling the private-sector what to build. The scheme is an open book, and applications will be judged on their merit of meeting the key criteria and project goals of the overall Rundle Mall Masterplan.

“These are themes like ‘a place where things happen first’, ‘a unique point of view, SA style’, or ‘day and night, season to season, experience, the many moods of Adelaide City’.”

Earlier this year former Integrated Development Commissioner Tim Horton argued governments and councils needed to stop “picking winners” to try to activate the city.

“I’m with those who believe a city’s cultural and economic vibrancy means less chest-beating banners from Government,” Horton wrote.

“While I understand a department’s desire to lead the charge, the reality is it doesn’t work like that.”

Horton called on funding bodies to support private developments, rather than try to build their own “flagships”.

The council’s fund is aimed squarely at doing just that, with a focus on the Mall’s laneways and upper levels.

“Obviously one of the major factors behind this project is to revitalise the laneways, upper-stories and unused buildings that feed to one of South Australia’s most significant tourist attractions,” McCready said.

The funding may be used by shop owners to improve their own properties, according to council documents.

“The Innovation Fund will be used to entice owners not currently doing work, who either wish to upgrade or need to upgrade and/ or to achieve other Masterplan objectives not achieved through stage 1 Capital Works project.”

Projects co-funded by the council would be wholly owned by the private investor, according to a council spokesperson.

“However, it is expected that for a money-making venture their investment would be greater than the initial dollar-for-dollar collaboration outlined in the fund plan,” the spokesperson said.

The funded projects are expected to be endorsed by council early next year, and must be completed by mid-2015.

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