Urban Dream Brokerage opens for business in Dunedin

For immediate release Monday October 5th 2015

Letting Space public art organisation has appointed well known designer Tamsin Cooper to become the broker for creative projects and empty commercial sites through the Urban Dream Brokerage, Dunedin from this week.

“It is a bit of a coup to be able to work with someone as experienced as Tamsin Cooper” says Letting Space co-director Sophie Jerram. “With her creative as well as business networks, Tamsin is a dream broker for getting rapid action in this terrific city.”

Cooper has run her own international fashion label, Tamsin Cooper, and is known to the arts community through being the Community Arts Advisor for Dunedin in the late 1990s. She will continue to keep her fashion interests alongside the part time broker role.

The Urban Dream Brokerage service has been running in Wellington for 3 years and brokered 36 projects in this time. In Dunedin the service is funded from Ara Toi Otepoti – Our Creative Future, Dunedin’s Arts and Culture Strategy. The service will be seeking engaging projects and willing landlords this month.

Dunedin City Council Group Manager Arts and Culture Bernie Hawke says “We’re really looking forward to the brokerage connecting landlords with local artists, writers, performers and members of Dunedin’s arts and culture community to enliven vacant spaces around the city.”

“Dunedin has a strong history of collaborative partnerships and urban revitalisation and it’s great to be able to speed up the connections through this pilot brokerage,” says Sophie Jerram.

People with ideas for projects should consider how their ideas open and enliven public space when proposing themes. Ideas are considered by a panel consisting of artistic, academic, and property interests.

See www.urbandreambrokerage.org.nz/dunedin

For more information or photographs please contact lettingspace@gmail.com, or Sophie Jerram on 029 934 9749 ENDS