marcus westbury

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 [...]

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 [...]

Wandering around 798 — the industrial scale arts and cultural district of Beijing — yesterday, my old friend Shannon Bufton asked whatever happened to the former BHP site in Newcastle. Then i happened across this video via facebook today courtesy of Bob Cook who worked at the BHP for many years and is now a [...]

The discussion just keeps coming…
The  HVRF talk i gave last week has garnered a lot of attention for its analysis and response to the problem of dysfunctional commercial property markets. In the contexts in which i find myself talking about Renew Newcastle the economic issues are rarely discussed or analysed. Given the interest i really [...]

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 [...]

Classic TINA program from 2002 – my last year in charge.
The 1st-5th of October is the time to be in Newcastle. Renew Newcastle is working up a series of events that will take place over the This Is Not Art Festival weekend. We’ll be running tours, talking about and showing off the project for the [...]

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 [...]

Renew Newcastle project map
I’m spending the weekend in Newcastle for another round of Renew Newcastle project launches. It’s my 21st trip since last April but so much has happened in that time. From a so-crazy-it-just-might-work scheme a year ago now Renew Newcastle is seriously working. We are up to 36 projects now in 24 separate [...]

A short video on the Renew Newcastle project by Sydney based film maker Jonathon Rodgers.
For information of the featured projects see the Renew Newcastle project page.

I am writing this on the train from Sydney to Newcastle on my phone as my laptop is dead and in need of charging…
Returning from Newcastle after a very successful launch weekend for the renew Newcastle project, I’ve started to reflect on some of the larger policy questions. In part this is inspired by a [...]