marcus westbury

This essay was commissioned for the May edition of Desktop Magazine. Illustration by Andrew Fairclough. Over the last few years, I’ve been involved in launching more than a hundred creative projects from artisans, makers, designers, photographers, filmmakers, artists, musicians, publishers and creative entrepreneurs in empty buildings in Newcastle, through the scheme Renew Newcastle. Renew has worked with, inspired [...]

A strange obsession of mine of late is the fate of old suburban shopping arcades. I am, as far as i can tell, pretty much alone in believing they’re a rich vein of untapped urban and suburban gold. Or, to put it in language that hipsters, planners and local politicians can reflexively and instinctively respond to [...]

It’s a quirk of fate and geography that our family home and my work at the Renew Australia office in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick are both smack bang in the middle of one of the first mainland rollout zones for the Australia’s fibre-to-the-home National Broadband Network. We’ve now been on it for more than a [...]

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 [...]

  I was asked to give a commencement address at Deakin University today. For various reasons (mainly because i’ve never actually finished Uni myself) it felt like kind of a big deal to me. What follows below is my notes of more or less what i said. I kind of winged it in person… Deputy [...]

I’m really posting this here mainly because i just realised that i never have. This video is a pitch from Renew Newcastle to local property owners that was released a few months ago. It does a great job of capturing the energy and vitality of what we’ve been doing there. On current count we are [...]

 Studio Melt — A Renew Newcastle project Help! I’m looking for interesting examples of Maker Places from around the world. Over the last few months, i’ve been doing some extensive research and note taking for a book that explores the idea of what i’m calling Maker Places. The book builds on the work of Renew [...]

Of late much my work has been with cities, towns and communities independently and latterly through Renew Australia. A lot of it involves taking the lessons learnt through Renew Newcastle and attempting to apply them in other communities and contexts. It also involves a lot of training up, talking to, working with and simply observing [...]

This is the video of a recent talk i gave as part of TEDx Moreton Bay. It’s really a balloon floating exercise as part of a larger argument than i will be running a bit in the not too distant future: that we are witnessing something of a cyclical turn from places largely of consumption [...]

  Melbourne based design blog The Design Files recently spent a week in Newcastle enabled by the outstandingly awesome Siobhan Curran… NEWCASTLE.  It is AWESOME.  I won’t hear a bad word said about it.  Totally and truly I am 100% cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die in love with the place. Originally settled as an industrious coal mining town, Newcastle [...]