marcus westbury

Renew Australia has been working on a pilot project Docklands Spaces in Melbourne with partners including Places Victoria, The City of Melbourne, and MAB corporation. Docklands, unlike Newcastle or Adelaide, or some of the other places the Renew model has been obviously useful to date is not an old area that has fallen on hard times but [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

There is a palpable sense of decline, decay and even a little despair in Europe. I’ve spent the past few weeks passing through major centres such as Dublin, London and Cologne and made a few side trips. The recession is hitting, creative communities are suffering and yet they’re demonstrating initiative and resilience at a time [...]

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 [...]