marcus westbury

Dan Hill of the blog City of Sound fame (and much more besides) has written a piece for the current Architecture Review Australia about ‘bottom up planning’ or ‘emergent urbanism’ as he prefers to call it. In the article and the accompanying blog post he uses Renew Newcastle as a strong example and says some [...]

In my spare time I’ve been working with Arts NSW to try and turn the Renew Newcastle project into a template for other organisations and areas to follow. I’ve started by writing up a “how-to” guide based on the Renew Newcastle experience. It’s both a how-to and also a pretty good overview of the logic [...]

While i was off in Japan honeymooning in December there was a flurry of articles in the Newcastle press celebrating the 12 month anniversary of the Renew Newcastle scheme.
This one actually brought a little tear to my eye, from Amy Delore in the Newcastle Herald:
THIS is a column I was going to write this time [...]

The Crew from Firstdraft
From The Sydney Morning Herald, apparently The City of Sydney is responding to the Newcastle threat:
Look out, Clover Moore. Newcastle is beckoning your artists. To shore-up talent in her domain, the Lord Mayor has arranged for buildings disused by the City of Sydney council to be leased as studio space.
Apparently some artists [...]

The ABC have revamped their online Arts gateway and have asked me to write and/or film a regular weekly blog over there.
According to the author (me):
The aim here is to seek out, talk to, interview and profile some of the many interesting creative people that are doing their own thing or making interesting things happen [...]

Renew Newcastle as featured on last night’s edition of Stateline, NSW. According to host Quentin Dempster’s intro, Renew Newcastle has “recycled, reinvigorated, revived, revitalised, recreated and reimagnied the city.” I’ll take that!
Frankly this was the last thing i did before i got home from my epic adventures in Ireland, UK, Germany, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and [...]

OK, “on my side” is something of an exageration. But Justin Fox, the business and economics columnist for TIME magazine has written a little piece about Renew Newcastle in TIME’s The Curious Capitalist economics blog. I like Justin’s work and have been known to leave the odd comment on his blog at times.
His article has [...]

A picture is worth a thousand words. Following on from The Hunter Valley Research Foundation lecture, i showed some slides of the before and after results in some of the Renew Newcastle spaces.
I couldn’t get the software to order them properly, so you’ll have to figure out the before and after’s yourself. It should be [...]

Last night i had the honour and the opportunity to deliver one of this year’s Hunter Valley Research Foundation lectures at Newcastle’s City Hall. It’s quite an honour given some of the impressive people who have done it before.
Anyhow, in case you missed it (and although there were a few hundred people there most [...]

Shows the value of twitter. Tom Tilley from JJJ’s Hack program turned up towards the end of the Renew Newcastle launch on Saturday afternoon because he was in town and saw a tweet about it. As i explained to him, it was actually on Hack about a year ago that i first committed to actually [...]