It was the harbour city collected en masse last night to open the Sydney Festival. A huge public affair with much less of the usual VIP business.

When you talk about getting cities working better, this kind of event has to play a crucial role in getting people out of their usual head (and physical) spaces, thinking about the city differently, and meeting, listening, dancing and celebrating.

There must have been at least 50,000 people squashed into the city’s mesh of interconnecting streets, although the SMH says “tens of thousands” (the Telegraph has since reported 150,000). Three couples got hitched on Macquarie St, Brian Wilson and Paul Kelly played in the Domain, Fuzzy threw a nu-rave/Baltimore/beats party in Martin Place, Spankrock played around the corner; and even further around the corner, in Angel Place, the Uber Lingua crew had their own thing going on.

I’ll start with the biggest. Brian Wilson was as banal and Bernie-esque (as in Weekend At Bernie’s) as he was at Byron Bay’s Splendour in the Grass festival, 2006. As he sang from his LCD autocue, and told the crowd to put out their (”god damn”) cigarettes, I wondered if those amazing albums (Pet Sounds, Smile) happened by accident rather than talent. Probably not, but these tours are diluting his legacy.

The dancing, singing-along and beaming Boomers loved it.

Spankrock and the Fuzzy party with Kato et al sounded hot, but the respective spaces were crammed with kids in bright clothes, and I couldn’t be bothered fighting my way through. Instead, I went to Angel Place to check out the Uber Lingua crew.

Bemused middle agers, Shire blondies, music geeks, hip kids, Japanese and Indian Australians, loads of Brazilians, actually people from right around Sydney and the world were squashed into this Melbourne-esque laneway. I’ve loved the space since the mid-90s when I organised parties at the former Angel Place Brasserie (as Obvious), so these days even a classical piece at the Recital Hall has a nostalgic charge, let alone a no-holds-barred street party.

The light sprinkling of rain did nothing to dampen spirits.

Instead of performers on one central stage, different performers were based at each corner in the weaving laneway between Pitt and George streets. It was kinda sound system style, though they never battled, they simply took it in turns, with the focus of the music shifting from time to time.

Stu Buchanan (who the Guardian just voted best blogger for world music) selected music between performances that spread the gamut from indigenous and Asian hip-hop, to Gypsy beats, reggae and soca to techno, baile funk and a world’s worth of other music. It was an obvious thrill for everyone involved (on the performance and audience sides of the equation).

When you’re cooking a spaghetti bolognaise, there’s a point where all the ingredients coalesce into a flavour that’s more than the sum of the parts. You get the peaks of individual ingredients, but there’s something more too. It was like that tonight. Fabulously inclusive, welcoming and cooperative, an event that uses space in the city in a different and innovative way, that gets people interacting with the city spaces in a way that town planners would spend millions and still fail to do.

And that’s just the first night.