Brand Perth : A Design Brief, Not a Marketing Brief

Last Tuesday, around twenty people who think and care deeply about Perth gathered at the State Buildings for a conversation that has been a long time coming. The session was hosted by Sandy Anghie, co-founder of Perth Design Week, and organised by Nic Brunsdon of Brunsdon Studio, two people who have consistently put their energy and resources behind making this city better. Flying in from Seattle to facilitate was Charlie Quirk, a globally credentialed brand strategist, born and raised in Western Australia, and founder of Unclouded Strategy. He has spent the better part of two decades telling stories for some of the world's most recognisable brands, and he came armed with a provocation piece on Brand Perth. What followed was a fantastic, honest and generative conversation.

Charlie's thinking was sharp. His central observation, that Perth is a hidden gem chronically underselling itself to the world, is hard to argue with. He offered some compelling framings. "Perth: hard to get to, hard to leave." And the tongue-in-cheek "Keep Perth Dull", leaning into the label as a wink to the world, a city so deliberately unhurried and unspoiled that it almost doesn't want you to come. The room ran with these ideas. The conversation moved into territory around Perth as a Western frontier, ripe with opportunity and unapologetic about its edge. And what I think is the most powerful idea of all: Perth as a city of people who made a deliberate choice to be here, either by staying, or by leaving and coming back. I did my obligatory stint over east and came back. Most people in that room had made some version of the same choice. In the words of Lisa Simpson, we choo-choo-choose you… Perth. I think that is actually a remarkable thing to build a brand on.

Charlie's framing was excellent for the outward-facing question of how we tell Perth's story to the world. But as Mark Braddock of Block Branding astutely raised in the room, the more pressing question is inward-facing. (If you haven't seen their incredible and hilarious 80s-Style Instructional Video For West Aussies, check it out!) It's not about how we sell ourselves to visitors or investors. It's about how we see ourselves. Our own identity, the way we view our city, our decisions, and our future, is what needs the most urgent attention.

And that, for me, is where the conversation gets genuinely interesting. And genuinely uncomfortable.

Our Brand Is Forged by Our Collective Decisions

Here is what I keep coming back to: the brand of a city is not a logo. It's not a tagline. It's not a tourism campaign or a drone light show. The brand of a city is the accumulated weight of every decision made about it. What gets built, what gets preserved, what gets funded, what gets knocked back, and who gets to decide. Perth's brand problem is not a communications problem. It's a governance problem. A courage problem. A systemic problem.

As an architect, I approach almost everything as a design brief. And when I look at Perth, I don't see a marketing brief. I see a design brief. An enormous, complex, urgent, and largely unaddressed design brief.

We have an extraordinary community of passionate, creative people here. Our isolation, the thing Perth so often apologises for, is actually a fertile condition. It breeds self-reliance, invention, and a kind of freedom that most cities on earth can't offer. We are a genuine microcosm, ideas develop here in ways that are unmediated by the noise of larger, more crowded places. Our isolation is not our liability. It is our most distinctive and uncopied asset.

But here's the problem. The passionate acts of a few don't add up to a city. The gallery that opens, the laneway that activates, the design week that launches, each of these is meaningful and creates evidence of what's possible. But without a structural or physical framework to hold them together, they remain temporary, fragmented, and ultimately limited in their impact. A brand is not the individual acts of vision. It is what those acts accumulate into once you give them a name and a structure to live inside.

You Can't Brand a City That Is 20% Empty

My co-director at SPACEMRKT, Sarah Booth, recently completed a Churchill Fellowship in which she travelled to some of the world's most successfully activated cities to understand how they got there. Her research is rigorous, unsettling, and worth reading in full. Her conclusion is unambiguous: the time has well and truly passed for endless commissioning of reports, for cherry-picking the mildly popular ideas that satisfy the NIMBYs, and for governance that rewards caution over conviction.

Perth's CBD retail vacancy sits above 20%. Fremantle's is around 17.7%. This is not a market condition. It is a policy condition, the output of a system that makes vacancy financially rational for landlords and culturally catastrophic for cities. As Sarah's research argues, sustained physical vacancy doesn't just look bad. It erodes civic imagination. People stop being able to picture what a place could be. Possibility is denied, not just practically, but psychologically.

You cannot brand a city that is 20% empty. You cannot tell a story about a vibrant, culturally rich Perth while our streets signal defeat. So before we get to the marketing brief, we need to address the structural one. We need a genuine conviction about what kind of city we are, a measuring stick against which every decision can be assessed. Not a slogan. A belief system. Something with enough weight to give us a reason to say no to the things that contradict it.

Sarah's fellowship holds up a direct challenge to policy makers. Copenhagen in 1990 was car-dependent, near-bankrupt and haemorrhaging population. Its transformation over the following three decades wasn't luck or culture. It was political will. The only meaningful difference between them and us is that they didn't wait. Her question, and mine, is a simple one: do we wait until we are forced to change, or do we make system-changing decisions now that lead us to the place we actually want to be?

The Pattern

I want to give you a concrete example of what I'm talking about, because I lived it recently.

Through SPACEMRKT, I responded to an opportunity for the adaptive reuse of a remarkable former industrial building in the heart of the Western Suburbs, a genuinely rare chance to create a cultural and community anchor within a major new urban precinct. We took it seriously. We assembled a coalition of some of Perth's best cultural operators and hospitality partners, including Artrage, Linton and Kay Galleries, Alex Miller of Corner Gallery, and the team at Kith. We combined forces with our architecture practice Archive, and prepared a fully detailed response: floor plans, renders, activation schedules, financial modelling. A proposal thoroughly aligned with what the brief asked for, a community and cultural heart for a new neighbourhood. That document, and the process, cost us around $50,000 in hours.

We were shortlisted. We made it to the final three. And then we were passed over for being considered a little risky. The choice? A distillery. No doubt a great operator. Perhaps another booze house was what the precinct needed… But I'd invite you to weigh that against a brief that explicitly asked for cultural and community activation.

This is not an isolated incident. It is a pattern. Perth consistently plays it safe. We make the decision that offends no one, secures a reliable rent, and requires no one to stand behind anything particularly ambitious. Cities build identity by taking risks. Bilbao on the Guggenheim. Paris and their tower. Melbourne on Federation Square and Sydney with their iconic Opera House. These decisions were uncomfortable at the time but produced something irreversible, a physical commitment to a vision that became the foundation of an identity. Perth has, as a matter of habit, reached for the safer, more diluted version. The one that looks like ambition from a distance but up close reveals itself as the watered-down compromise that made it through the room without too many objections. The genuinely innovative idea, more often than not, gets quietly set aside in favour of the one that is easier to explain, easier to defend, and easier to forget.

What We Actually Need

So, what does a real brand for Perth look like? Not the outward-facing exercise. Charlie's work on that was excellent and that conversation needs to keep going. I'm talking about the inward-facing one. The identity we forge for ourselves through collective decision-making.

What I want is what you might call system branding. An identity so structurally embedded in how our city is planned, funded, approved and built that it becomes the architecture of decision-making itself. Not the logo on the letterhead. The conviction behind every planning approval, every development brief, every public space decision, every funding allocation.

Sarah argues for this clearly in her fellowship report: culture cannot be activated by passionate individuals alone. It requires structural support, systemic incentives, and policy settings that actively encourage cultural use rather than simply tolerating it. I agree completely. Where I'd add my own voice as an architect is this: the built environment is not the backdrop to culture. It is where culture is either produced or extinguished. Every planning decision, every adaptive reuse opportunity, every piece of public realm is either contributing to the story or contradicting it.

What I want to see is policy that does two things at once. On one side, genuine simplification of the illogical barriers and bureaucratic constipation that cause interesting ideas and creative uses to be suffocated before they ever reach the public. On the other, real restrictions on the profiteering of public space and the squandering of cultural potential for the sake of a reliable commercial return. These are not competing goals. They are two sides of the same coin.

I want a city that is generous in its public spaces, its programming, and its willingness to back unusual ideas. A city that fosters the kind of creativity and chance encounters that make urban life worth living.

A Decade to Get It Right

I'll be honest about why this matters to me personally, beyond the professional and civic arguments.

I have two young sons. I have roughly twelve years before they reach the age where they'll feel the same pull I did, toward the culturally richer waters of Melbourne, Sydney, or beyond. I left. Many of the people I most admire left. Perth's loss of talent to the east is not just a statistic. It's a lived pattern repeated generation after generation. Each departure is a quiet vote of no confidence, not in the landscape or the light or the lifestyle, but in the city's willingness to be genuinely ambitious about itself.

I have a decade to help change that. Through SPACEMRKT, Sarah and I are doing it project by project, fighting for the adaptive reuse over the safe tenancy, the cultural anchor over the reliable rent, the long-term community asset over the short-term commercial return. Sarah is doing it through her fellowship research and her direct calls to policy makers. If you haven't read her work, you should. Through my architecture practice, Archive Office, I'm doing it through every building we touch, every space we argue to preserve or transform with care.

But individual acts of conviction, however sustained, do not shift a city on their own. We need a critical mass of people who are unwilling to be complacent, who see the gap between what Perth is and what it could be, and are prepared to say so out loud and take some risks in service of that belief.

The brand conversation is a good start. Let's not mistake it for the work needed.

If you are already in this fight, or you just want to vent, I'd genuinely love to hear from you. What are you working on? How can you help? What decisions have you seen made well, or badly? Where do you see the opportunity?

Lets chat!