Mid last year I was appointed to the role of Artistic Director of ISEA 2013 in Sydney. I haven’t said too much about around here in part because i’ve been busy doing it and in part because there hasn’t been much to say. Now that proposals are open i thought it might be a good idea to reflect a little on why and how i ended up doing it and what i hope to do with it… 

Considering that about 5 years ago I told anyone who listened that I would never do another festival again many have taken it upon themselves to remind me of the flat out hypocrisy of this. In the intervening years i’ve said no to several offers and enquiries to take on other festival type-gigs down but there was something in the opportunity of ISEA – the International Symposium on Electronic Arts – that made it an easy decision and an exciting opportunity.

From the late 90s when Newcastle’s This Is Not Art festival began through to the end of 2006 when I finished up as Director of Melbourne’s Next Wave Festival, I was never not working on a festival – sometimes juggling several other day jobs at the time. There is a particular insanity to devoting a year or two of your life to an event that comes and goes in a little over a week. There is a uniquely empty emptiness when you wake up when it’s all over partly exhausted, partly elated and often asking “was that it?” But there is also something enthralling and terrifying that draws you back.

Part of the reason I thought I wouldn’t be doing it again was the lack of something that actually fitted.  My skills aren’t really suited to the large-scale performing arts or major biennale and that’s what the majority of festivals are based around.  As the opportunity to take on ISEA came up it really caught my attention. ISEA is part conference and symposium and part festival – it is a format that particularly appeals to me. Its success will be measured less in box office numbers and more in the lasting legacies and connections it makes. It comes with a fantastic brief and a great history. It provides an opportunity to position electronic arts and creativity at the centre of Sydney and Australia’s cultural life for a while – a place where I think it increasingly belongs and yet is often under acknowledged. Also, the fact that in 2013 Sydney will become the first place in the world to host ISEA twice after 21 years is also a nice excuse to get electronic art out of its “perpetual tomorrow” and to acknowledge the contribution that artists have made as experimenters, explorers and questioners in creating the world we have today.

The other reason I jumped at the idea of doing ISEA is that I think I have something to bring to it. Both in Australia and internationally there is a sense that it may be time to play with the model and reinvent it. While the community gathers at ISEA is engaging in work and ideas that are fascinating, provocative and at times inspirational the context often doesn’t do them justice. There are so many adjacent communities of artists, experimenters, imagineers and media makers that are not yet part of ISEA that could be as audiences and participants.

We live in a world where creativity, culture and technology are deeply intermeshed and ISEA should sit near the centre and not at the margins of that. My experiences creating festivals and events that connect to some of these audiences will hopefully lead to better contexts, new audiences, and lasting connections between the core of what ISEA does with the possibilities around it. The fact that ISEA’s theme “resistance is futile” – provides a direct invitation – to acknowledges and embraces the idea that electronic arts are increasingly ubiquitous is a great platform from which to do this. It gives us both an excuse and an obligation to connect out to those forms of contemporary media-based creativity that are all around us.

A challenge, for better or for worse, is that I am not an electronic arts specialist. I don’t pretend to be and yet all my projects there is recurring obsession with the ways in which technology is changing creativity and artistic practice in all its forms. Indeed, making a TV series about that idea first took me to ISEA in Singapore back in 2008 and that interest has led to many of Australia’s ISEA those artists have already crossed my path through This Is Not Art, Electrofringe and Next Wave through to my writing and media work.

ISEA 2013 is fortunate to have Ross Harley as chair of the academic advisory committee and Kathy Cleland as chair of the curatorial advisory committee. Both bring a wealth of knowledge and their knowledge, and the teams weare assembling will bring even more. With their help I’m excited about the prospects for curating a compelling platform of ideas, artists and exhibitions and a context that brings a community together more effectively than before and that presents them to a new, excited and engaged audience.

Calls for proposals have now opened so check out the ISEA 2013 web site if you are interested to submit or find out more. 

Recently i had a chance to do a talk about Renew Newcastle and Renew Australia to some staff of the Department of Planning and Community Development in Victoria. They filmed it and it turns out they posted in on YouTube. It’s one of the better captures of a talk i’ve done recently.

[At this point it's worth pointing out that you too can have one of these talks: both I and Renew Australia are available for talks, workshops, training, consultancy, and general advising on these kinds of approaches for communities across Australia and around the world. Drop me a line if you're interested.]

Thanks, most unexpectedly, to the lovely folks at Virgin Australia who are giving me a Free Trip to New York (i won a competition, would you believe it?) i will be heading state-side again early in the new year. I’m keen to meet with and talk cities, urbanism and geekery with audiences of artists, architects, urbanists, city planners, students and anyone else.

I will be in New York and thereabouts from about the 3rd to the 8th of March then heading to Austin for SXSW interactive from the 9th to 13th of March and then off to San Francisco or thereabouts from the 14th to the 21st before heading back to Australia via LA. I’m really keen to meet people, do talks, generally hang out with interesting types in any of these places or anywhere a short hop from them. Paid gigs definitely encouraged but any all interesting offers will be considered! Will post in more details about plans later but if you’re interested in catching up or have any great suggestions of things to do people to meet then let me know.

Meanwhile i have posted my TEDxNewy talk above and there’s a bit more background on me from my last US trip here, a talk i gave at Project for Public Spaces in New York last year.

Suggestions of people to meet, things to do? Anyone? Contact me here with any suggestions.

Back in February, i headed over to the US and Canada for 3 weeks of meetings, touring and a small amount of tourism. One of the highlights was the opportunity to make my Broadway debut (that’s literally where the office is) at Project for Public Spaces in New York to talk about Renew Newcastle and more generally some of the philosophical and pragmatic approaches we’ve taken to trying to bring some life back there.

It was a full house and a great opportunity to meet some amazing people — i’m looking forward to finding an excuse to go back. If you have some issues with the embed code you can watch the talk here.

Tiny Revolutions

At more than 200 years since European settlement, Newcastle is an old city in Australian terms. It’s a fading but to my eyes beautiful seaside city of a bit under half a million people. Like many industrial cities in the developed world it has been battered by the loss of once formidable heavy industry. In a global economy that demands specialisation and scale, its steelworks—once the defining symbol of the town—has been a casualty. The BHP operation once dwarfed much of the city around it. A decade after its closure, the site is little more than a hole in the skyline, some rusting ruins and unfulfilled promises of new industries and opportunities. Where blast furnaces once stood nature slowly reasserts itself. Here the mighty works of the industrial era and its toxic legacies lie idle.

When the BHP Steelworks towered over the economy and geography of Newcastle—as it did when I was growing up there few would have suspected it would ever be too small to survive. Now there are newer, larger cities of steel thousands of kilometres to the north. They’re fuelled by global not national demand, by billions not millions of people, by cheap labour and economies of scale once impossible to imagine.

Today Newcastle digs up its exports. It is the largest coal port in the world. Coal is both a boom and a portent: a precious, finite and poisonous resource. Each ship sets sail on an ever-rising sea. Though the community is fiercely divided about whether the end should come by caution, consumption or calamity, few in Newcastle would argue that coal can last forever.

The riches being mined nearby are not reflected in the cityscape. Newcastle is no shining resource-rich boom town. The old city declines and decays. Well over a hundred empty buildings line the two main streets and the once vital commercial heart of the city has become an anachronism of forgotten trams and consumption patterns long past: designed for a local economy before the rise of suburban shopping centres, global brands and car culture made such things obsolete.

There are at least six billion perspectives on globalisation. There are stories of great opportunity (development, economic liberation and transformation) and of great destruction—social, environmental and personal—in every community, in every culture. Both sides of the globalisation story are reduced to simplifications, yet really they are stories of complexity and contradiction.

For this story of Newcastle it is necessary to reduce this complexity to a problem of scale. It is a story is about accepting contradiction and the opportunities offered by cultural globalisation to repair some of the damage wrought by economic change. It is tale of looking for the small solutions to giant problems: of rebirth and renewal through a series of tiny revolutions.

Read the rest at the Meanjin web site.

If you want to find out what happened next check the Renew Newcastle web site or see what the good folks at Lonely Planet have been saying.

Sometimes something so amazing happens that you pinch yourself.

As regular readers — and irregular ones, anyone who has known me or met me or had the misfortune to be stuck next to me in transit for an hour  – will know if i have one obsession in life it’s with my home town of Newcastle. I’ve somehow managed to work it into pretty much everything I’ve done since actually leaving there in search of work that paid me a decade and a half ago. I’ve found many excuses to return through starting projects such as the This Is Not Art festival and most recently Renew Newcastle.

I’ve also managed to work the state and plight of Newcastle into pretty much every platform i’ve been given from the first episode of Not Quite Art, through to essays i’ve written, and most recently even worked it in at the Sydney Opera House’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas.

I love Newcastle. I love its culture. I love its creativity. I love its natural environment. I love it’s old buildings. I love its fading beauty. I love its creative community. I love its unpretentious awesomeness.

I’ve always thought and often argued that it is underrated. That it gets a raw deal from governments, the media, and everywhere else who rates and evaluates the quality of places.

Even so, when Lonely Planet rang me and tipped me off that Newcastle had made a top ten destination list for 2011 I was still a little taken aback. As they pointed out it was likely to surprise a few people. Yes, i thought, i know it’s underrated but it shouldn’t be too hard to justify giving it a place among the top 10 places  to visit in Australia.  As i’ve been telling anyone who will listen Newcastle is a really interesting place right now.

Fast forward to last weekend and i managed to sneak a glimpse at the book they were talking about — It hadn’t actually clicked which list they were referring to until i finally found it via Amazon. But  Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel 2011 ranks “the top 10 countries, regions and cities to visit in 2011″ in the world.

Hang on. Back track. Double take.

Cities? In THE WORLD?

There it was, right there in black and white [actually they print in colour and i was actually only able to read it using the preview function on Amazon.com as I haven't got my hands on the book yet] Newcastle, Australia is right there listed as the number 9 ranked city in the world to visit in 2011.  Number one was New York City and number nine is Newcastle.

It’s an eclectic list New York, Tangier, Tel Aviv, Wellington, Valencia, Iquitos, Ghent, Delhi, Newcastle and Chiang Mai. Particular props to Wellington – which is a bit like Newcastle and a place i’m pretty partial to.

As someone who has long sung the unfashionable praises of a deeply unfashionable place it is beyond words to describe how pleasing it is to see Newcastle make such a list. But in an odd kind of way that wasn’t the most satisfying thing about it. The most satisfying thing was not just a number on the list but that someone else, someone “authoritative” has described the Newcastle that i see, that i know and i love. According to author Catherine Le Nevez (who has actually written Lonely Planet guides to Paris and much of France for the most part) “Today’s new Newcastle is a unique blend of imagination, sophistication and laid-back surf culture.”

In her words “Australia’s most underrated city” has transformed itself “from ‘steel city’ to creative hub.” She describes how post BHP Newcastle has seen “an explosion of artists” — the most artists and galleries per capita in Australia — “from acclaimed regional centres to independent, artist run spaces and dozens of disused city-centre buildings occupied by photographers, fashion designers, digital artists and more as part of the inner-city regeneration scheme, Renew Newcastle.” [Don't mind me if i just draw a little attention to the explicit props for Renew Newcastle there.]

She recognised too Newcastle’s great natural environment, it’s dynamic live music scene, it’s great cafes and restaurants and the great series of unique and interesting events that take place there during the year including, i’m pleased to point out, This Is Not Art. She recommended going to a Knight’s game [Go the Knights!], checking out the beaches, and strolling along Darby Street.

Obviously there are a lot of lists out there and they should probably be taken for the most part with a grain of salt. But I have to say that after a long hard slog on projects like Renew (and TINA), it feels a lot like a significant corner has been turned. There has been a sudden wave of recognition of late for projects like Renew Newcastle and the cultural life of Newcastle more generally recently that i have found deeply emotional and satisfying.

I will be fascinated with how – and if – people react to the suggestion that Newcastle is one of the ten most interesting places in the world right now. Apparently that makes it better than Sydney. Or Melbourne. Or Brisbane. I looked back over the corresponding lists for the last years and i can’t actually find the last time an Australian city made the LP global top 10 cities of the year list. I suspect that those in Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne – particularly those that have spent little if any time in Newcastle of late will be confused and confounded.

It will be interesting too to see how Newcastle locals react. I suspect the view will split somewhere between “you’ve got to be f**king kidding me?” to “it’s about time someone noticed” to “trust lonely planet to go and ruin our secret.” Either way, i’m looking forward to it.

Meanwhile, I’m off to New York city to take notes on how to bridge the gap to number one early in the new year. If you haven’t thought about heading to Newcastle before now might just be the time to consider it. You might want to get in quick before the tourists spoil it. Don’t forget to check out some of the “dozens of disused city-centre buildings occupied by photographers, fashion designers, digital artists” while you’re there.

I’ve been meaning to write a long essay about this for a while but stumbled at figuring out exactly who would publish it. So brain dump follows…

One of the things that my friend, collaborator, enabler, and founding Renew Newcastle board member Craig Allchin has pointed out to me many times is that is that i used to be a festival director. For the first few times he said it i thought it no more or less significant than the fact i made TV shows for a bit or that once worked midnight to dawn in a service station – it gave me some useful skills but it was not particularly or directly relevant to why or how i was going about doing a project like Renew Newcastle.

Eventually Craig had said it so often that it clicked with me that to him it implied something reasonably significant. Indeed to Craig the fact that both myself and Renew Newcastle’s General Manager Marni Jackson had cut our teeth on organising and facilitating festivals and events (we’ve both served a stint as the honcho of Newcastle’s This Is Not Art Festival) was a far more significant feature of the project – which is ostensibly about urban renewal and place revitalisation – than either of us thought it was.

I’m slow. It has only slowly sunk in for me that he was actually on to something. It only recently dawned on me (particularly as i think about Renew Australia and how we might replicate the Renew Newcastle project elsewhere) that our background – or more specifically the assumptions it meant we both started with – may well be as significant to the whole thing as all the legal work we’ve done, the clever financial and insurance tweaks we’ve developed , the processes we’ve created and the lessons that we have learned along the way.

Through the Renew Newcastle project I have intersected with people from different fields – academia, local government, urban planning, architecture, community development – and attempted to explain the conceptual framework behind Renew Newcastle, I’ve often walked away with a slight sense of frustration. They see it but they don’t entirely get it.

I’ve often found myself evoking what i now discover is Maslow’s Law of the instrument or as i had always more crudely understood it “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” to explain what we’ve been grappling with in those encounters. With a few notable exceptions each and every professional i crossed paths with saw the problem – Newcastle’s 150 empty buildings or the decline in their own towns or centres – as being exactly like the ones they have been trained to identify from their discipline and were attempting to apply the tools of their discipline to solving it.

Craig himself can see well beyond it but as an architect and urban planner, he is no doubt used to meeting with people who want to build things and plan where they will be built. His clients and the agencies they work with see things in very fixed terms. They see things in light of development, of capital, of height and planning restrictions, return on investment, design and umm…  whatever else it is that ambitious and entrepreneurial people with more money than me deal with when they are planning on building stuff.

I suspect that’s the way that many see the problem. From the Newcastle media it’s certainly a dominant paradigm within the city as it is in most cities when questions of development and why the city is falling apart arise. The failure of the city to attract jobs, investors, developers and capital is the one and only definition of the problem. In turn in Newcastle as in most towns the debate starts from that assumption then continues down the path of whose fault that is, what can be done about it, who to blame, who should do something about it and who to blame in some kind of continuously recurring feedback loop of negativity and recrimination.

In local government – and government at all levels – you encounter similar issues.

Councils are complex beasts and mindsets can often tend to be segregated by their internal divisions. At the engineering end plenty of people certainly reduce the issue to the definition above and reduce the question to attracting capital, development and jobs but then there are variations. Engineers who are tasked with the addressing the problem of Renewing the city will generally see a series of fixed infrastructure problems. The footpaths need resurfacing, roads need widening, traffic needs speeding up/ calming down, ways to encourage/discourage more cars and/or cycling and/or pedestrian circulation.

In Newcastle i dread to think how many millions have been spent on schemes to change the footpaths, the pavers, the bunting, the street signs, the street furniture and the public toilets in the hope and or expectation that improving the physical appearance of the public realm will make 150 empty shops and buildings suddenly active again or bring an influx of new capital. It might help but that’s not the core issue.

The arts for their part is often no better. To a museum or gallery director there are many examples both real and perceived where gleaming galleries and museums have been catalysts for transformation of precincts, cities and towns. Plans are drawn up for grand infrastructure that may (or may not) spur cultural tourism led revivals or attract the right demographic to a particular part of town. Inevitably it follows that they devise ambitious plans and make a passionate case for the investment in state of the art facilities and iconic imagineering. Again, it might help and sometimes does.

At the warm fuzzy community end more grass roots cultural planners see nails too when they reduce the problem to a lack of public art, interesting community programs, live events, or anything else that might be their role. They seek to devise and initiate such programs and projects and seek funding to hire the artists and artsworkers to implement them. Obviously i’m not going to criticise the value of that – but it comes with limitations – short term projects are costly and starting from the top down in deciding what needs to be done is not the most efficient or effective way to go about it a lot of the time.

There’s actually nothing wrong with any of the above approaches. Each has its place. Executed well, each of them has the potential to contribute significantly to a process of rejuvenation. It is exciting to imagine a city – in this case Newcastle – with the new widened footpaths, the beautiful public art, the gleaming museums and the clever integrated transport plans and to think of the quality designed sympathetic investment such a mix could and should attract. Such visions have the power to animate and inspire.

They are beautiful and simple but all too often deceptively and seductively so. They fail, or simply evaporate into process more than they succeed. Often they are fiercely contested and debated. They struggle to survive the pendulum shifts of political fortune or simply peter out once their champions and advocates move elsewhere. They also often fail and they are often expensive to fail at – a lot of money can be spent on them never happening.

That’s what it’s like when you’ve got a hammer – all you can do is attack the problem by buildings and belting shinier newer louder nails and often we simply hit our own thumbs.

So what’s different about looking at the city as festival directors? Certainly not that we’re imune to the hammer/nail problem. We too see nails and we too have hammers but the ones we see are very different. The city we live in is full of people who want to make things happen – who are enthusiastic and keen and not waiting around to paid or cajoled into doing something. They are desperate and keen and simply want someone to remove the barriers that thwart or discourage them. When you’ve spent your life time dealing with passionate creative people busting for the slightest possibility the idea that you need to build anything much or even spend very much to encourage them seems self evidently absurd.

Every project i’ve ever worked on has had a surplus of talented motivated people looking for opportunities and a deficit of opportunities, spaces, places in which to do them. It’s not about money. It’s not about certainty. It’s about opportunity for experimentation – a shot at success that simply lowers the price of failure to one they can afford. They too may fail, but they fail cheap and often and quickly learn enough to try again.

To put it simply, the world I live in is full of “initiativists” – yes i made that word up but i’m going to keep using it for about as long as it takes for others to start using it too. From where i sit empty spaces look like wasted opportunities. They look like opportunities to experiment and incubate because I know or know how to find people that would and could use each and every one of them. We’ve found more than 60 of them in Newcastle and are still sitting on proposals from hundreds more. Such people won’t arrive with fully formed solutions but they will, if there are enough of them keep trying things until they stumble upon things that work.

Nothing from my world requires much in the way of permanent infrastructure – you build and unbuild it as needed. You adapt what’s available to your needs. The fact that everything is short term and lacks security doesn’t seem like a problem when everything you’ve ever done has been shorter and even less secure.

Nor are any of the obvious hard infrastructure complaints really all that big a deal. Most festivals don’t place things on street corners hoping for passing trade, they seed interesting things everywhere entirely confident that if you do so and the work is good enough that people will seek it out. You don’t look at a park as site for a gig and judge its suitability by how many people are there – you bring the people to the place with the activity. You curate, select, and connect. You do not expect everything to succeed or everything to appeal to everyone – you aim to create a critical mass of cross-pollination and to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. You see the value in the careful selection of co-located things, of mixing the commercial with the irrational, or cross polinating demographics and audiences by arranging interesting things in time and space.

Over the next six or so month i will be attempting to scale up from Renew Newcastle and trying to create Renew Australia. I’ll also be comparing notes with people with similar interests and problems in the USA and other parts of the world. As i think about how to seed these ideas elsewhere the hard part isn’t the legal agreements, the technicalities or even the convincing people to give us their properties or to take up the uncertain opportunities that the Renew Newcastle model inherently provides.

The hard part is actually the mindset. For the many communities, councils and others it’s going to be the challenge of seeing the city like a festival. For us – and me in particular – it’s also going to be the challenge of stepping back enough from my own ideas and obsessions to recognise when the the problem is and isn’t a nail.

This is published under Creative Commons. You can reprint some or all of it if you want providing you read the license bit. Alternately, feel free to contact me if you want me to elaborate on these themes elsewhere.

DIY transforming a dying city from Marcus Westbury on Vimeo.

A big announcement today. Following on from the success of Renew Newcastle, the Victorian social enterprise seeding initiative Social Traders program “The Crunch” has just announced that over the next four or so months they will invest $10,000 and serious mentorship, Melbourne University Business School support and other assistance towards the establishment of Renew Australia.

At the end of that first stage of support Renew Australia will be one of 9 organisations with an opportunity to put in a bid for a share of ONE MILLION DOLLARS (that deserves all caps) in seed funding early in 2011. Renew Australia is aimed to be a national scheme based on the Renew Newcastle model – making the best possible uses of otherwise empty spaces by making them available to artists, creative projects and community groups.

I think it’s a great model and there’s much to figure out but it think the support over the coming months will go a long way towards doing that.

Unusually for projects of this type our application was allowed to come in pretty much any form so the video above was more or less our initial application – with a little section about finances and business models cut out. I think it shows something of what we’ve been doing and what we’re aiming to do from here.

You can read more about The Crunch at the project’s web site.

Even before it officially exists Renew Australia is already working with Renew Newcastle, Renew Townsville, Renew Adelaide and other groups in Lismore, Parramatta, Geelong and elsewhere. Frankly even before starting we’re snowed under with people wanting to work with us! We have had expressions of interest from places including Kettering, Nambour, Arilie Beach, the South Australian Riverland, Ispwich, Sawn Hill, Marysville, Launceston, The Gascoyne, Whyalla, Ceduna, the Latrobe Valley, Wagga Wagga, Port Pirie, Darwin, Geraldton, Canberra, Coffs Harbour, Gosford, Monbulk, Queenstown, Bathurst, Denmark (WA). Albany, Waaragul, Barcaldine, Redlands, Penrith, Griffith, Mildura, Bunbury, Batesman Bay, Nowa Nowa, Bermagui, Kalgoorlie, Biloela and Banana (which is apparently a place in Qld).

With any luck and with the support of The Crunch we will be in a position to start seriously supporting some of these places, projects and groups some time in 2011. Fingers crossed.

No dedicated web site yet but if you like the idea please Become a fan on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.

I’ve booked a trip to the USA next year between the 22nd of January and the 13th of February 2011. For the last two years i have been working on Renew Newcastle and i’m keen to touch base with other projects involved in of revitalising cities, urbanism, culture and low cost/ low budget revitalisation of urban areas. I think we have an interesting story to tell from Newcastle and i suspect there are quite a few people with over there with stories i’d be interested in. [Oh, In my other life i'm sometimes a festival director, newspaper columnist and television presenter in Australia.]

I’m keen to find people to meet, share ideas with, projects to check out and places to visit. I do a pretty mean talk with some pretty neat before and after slides and photos – although i have a funny Australian accent.

DIY transforming a dying city from Marcus Westbury on Vimeo. (This video was actually part of a funding application – hence the pitch at the end there

So what is out our story?

In late 2008 we established a low cost, low budget DIY urban renewal scheme called Renew Newcastle. Newcastle, Australia is a city of about half a million people about 2 hours drive north of Sydney. It’s probably reasonably typical of a lot of working class, industrial towns in much of the developed world where fading industries have set the city backwards. Newcastle was once home to Australia’s largest steelworks (see here for a awesome but sad video of it being blown  up) and industries like shipbuilding that there isn’t a lot of left in Australia anymore. Its has old central business district had hollowed out leaving behind more than 150 empty buildings along the main streets of the city. Much of the inner city had been in a long slow spiral of decline since the 1980s.

Renew Newcastle wasn’t (and isn’t) a big budget scheme. Indeed, that’s the point of it. Rather than attract capital to the city we started from the other end – trying to make the city work for those without it. In the early stages Renew Newcastle was cheap enough that we were able to start it on a credit card and the plan was deceptively simple. We made extensive use of Facebook and social media because that’s all we could afford. We created a not for profit company that effectively borrows as many of those empty buildings from their owners that we can get our hands on and use them as incubators for experimentation. You can read our full FAQ here. The Renew Newcastle company takes on costs like basic maintenance and insurance, we set up free wifi so temporary projects could have decent connectivity, we came up with some very smart solutions to what might otherwise be legal and accounting complexities and then in turn we make those spaces available to folks i like to call initiativists– creative people who want to roll up their sleeves and try something.

There are a lot of things that are interesting about the Renew Newcastle model but over and above all of them is one obvious stand out one: it works.

We have taken parts of a city that were previously verging on a ghost town — the liabilities of a fading city — and turned into the seeds of the new. We have used it to launch spaces for more than 60 new projects and initiatives from artist run galleries and studios, to designers and more designers, record labels, to publishers and fashion labels, craftspeople, artisans, one of Australia’s few dedicated zine stores and even a food co-op. We’ve opened up more than 30 once empty buildings. We’ve launched several businesses that have gone on to have a life of their own (and more than a few noble failed experiments). Most importantly from the Newcastle’s point of view we have succeeded in bringing commerce back to what was once a dead four block strip in the city centre. We’ve  filled it not only with our projects but with new commercial tenants and we’ve seeded many pockets of new activity. These before and after maps are a pretty good indicator of just what we’ve managed to achieve.

If you don’t believe us have a look at the press coverage. The local paper, The Newcastle Herald has described Renew Newcastle simply as “the miracle on Hunter Street“, the transformation of the dead centre of town as “nothing short of outstanding“, and as the city’s biggest news story of 2009, “AFTER years of depression and desperation about Newcastle’s decay, … Young and creative people have helped make the Renew Newcastle project the signature move to get the city thinking positive again.” ABC Television in Australia said simply that Renew Newcastle had “recycled, reinvigorated, revived, revitalised, recreated and reimagnied the city.”

Beyond Australia Renew Newcastle has attracted much attention for the innovation of the model and the quality of the execution. Blogger and internationally renowned urbanist Dan Hill wrote in City of Sound “I can think of few more positive examples of how to quickly make a genuine difference in cities I.e. not just at the surface layers of urban design, as important as that is, or festivals, or marketing, but at the very core of economic, cultural and social sustainability, with all the ensuring knock-on effects for repairing urban fabric and civic confidence. This is why cities exist, after all, and for Marcus and his colleagues to have addressed this aspect directly, with literally no funding, is thoroughly inspirational.”

Justin Fox, editorial director of the Harvard Business Review Group and formerly of Time magazine described the Renew Newcastle model as a “clever partial solution” for the failures of dysfunctional commercial real estate markets while  Felix Salmon of Reuters – also reflecting on the failure of commercial real estate markets described the Renew Newcastle model as “the obvious solution to this problem: short-dated leases, often just 30 days long, which roll over so long as the landlord hasn’t found a permanent tenant. That’s good for the neighborhood, and helps drive up prevailing rents, so everybody wins.” The ever enthusiastic Bruce Sterling of Wired.com described Renew Newcastle as “Australian favela chic” and pointed out simply “There is genius in this.”

In 2010 Renew Newcastle and GPT group were honoured with Australia’s leading award for partnerships between business and the arts the AbaF Partnership of the Year award and to top it all off in November 2010 the travel bible Lonely Planet decalred Newcastle, Australia one of the top 10 cities in the world to visit in 2011 citing the “dozens of disused city-centre buildings occupied by photographers, fashion designers, digital artists and more as part of the inner-city regeneration scheme, Renew Newcastle” as a major factor.

So America, can you help me meet with like minded folks?

I’ve been through (to Canada and Belize – long story) but not to your country before. I’m going to be in the States from late January to early February. I’ll be travelling via LA and possibly San Francisco but mostly hanging in and around New York. I’m keen to make a side trip to pretty much anywhere there are folks to meet who might be interested in what we are up to. If you can pay me (or even if you cant) to talk to a class, a community or a conference that would be particularly great. If you work in the field and want to meet somewhere near where i’ll be or can get to that would be great too. If you’re broke but doing something interesting enough in your own place to make me curious i’d love to come and check out what you’re up to and see what we can learn from you.

I’m happy to talk formally or informally. I can muse about the legalities and technicalities, the ideas and inspiration, the legal and tax tricks of how we’ve executed it all, how we did much of it online via Facebook and etsy.com (i have a theory about making cities have low barriers to entry as online communities and business do), how we fail to think about how things work at the micro scale or pretty much any angle to the whole thing you might be interested in. Even better and most simply I can just drink beer with people who do similar things and/or who like to think about this stuff.

So if you’re interested in meeting up drop me a line!  Leave a comment below or email me at marcus at marcuswestbury dot net. I’d love to chat.

In less than 18 months Renew Newcastle has initiated 51 new projects in what was once a dead zone in the Newcastle CBD. Some have been and gone but Renew Newcastle currently has more than 30 projects that we are supporting. They includes galleries, studios, arts and crafts stores, fashion designers, a food co-op, designers, publishers, photographers and much much more. We’ve also managed to put free wifi in the mall, galvanise the Newcastle creative community and spawned similar initiatives in Adelaide, Townsville, Lismore, and interest from many other parts of the country.

The more exciting thing is the bigger picture. Renew Newcastle has been a catalyst for a pretty major transformation around the Hunter Street Mall area. It’s easy to forget that there were more than 20 empty shops in this one strip less than a year ago now. It’s certainly changed:

Hunter Street Mall pre-Renew Newcastle. December 2008.

Same area post Renew Newcastle, late 2009. Blue arrows are RN projects, yellow arrows are new commercial tenants — this is actually a few months old and things have improved since.

Of course, it’s only the beginning. A lot of Newcastle still needs a lot of work. We’ve started to move out to sites in Hunter Street West and soon over in Honeysuckle and we are always on the look out for new property owners who might be interested to participate.

If you are interested in reading more about our projects and people’s reactions, check out the media section of the Renew Newcastle web site for more about the projects and the discussions that the project has been generating.