marcus westbury

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 [...]

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, [...]

Just when i thought that my short lived TV career had gone to the great archive in the sky the fairfax web site currently has both series of Not Quite Art available on live streaming I’m not exactly sure how or why, but i’m not complaining. Unfortunately there is no function to embed them and [...]

  JUST before Easter, Arts Minister Simon Crean announced that advertising guru and philanthropist Harold Mitchell (pictured) would undertake a major review of private sector support for the arts in Australia. The review will look at the range of existing government programs and incentives for philanthropic support for the arts in Australia and abroad, such [...]

This article was written for the latest edition of the Dutch architecture/ design journal Volume… Let me put a scenario to you. Say you live in an aging, fading industrial town. One that has been on receiving end of repeated shocks from earthquakes and natural disasters to the closure of its largest industries and mass [...]

On the off chance there are any Canadians reading this blog or following my twitter feed, just a quick heads up that i will be in Toronto between the 12th and 17th of June. My main reason is to be a keynote speaker on the 14th at Canada’s 3rd Transforming and Revitalizing Downtowns Summit. Obviously i will [...]

The Room Project, a Renew Newcastle installation I was recently asked to give a talk to the Victorian Association of Performing Arts Centres annual conference talking about how social media is changing the arts and i was specifically asked to use Renew Newcastle as an example. What follows is my notes from that talk – [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I have been absolutely useless with keeping things up to date around here. I put it down to a combination of events at Renew Newcastle (where events in the city have forced us to bring forward a few medium term plans), the embryonic development of a Renew Australia (a national scheme to seed local “renew” [...]