marcus westbury

Dan Hill of the blog City of Sound fame (and much more besides) has written a piece for the current Architecture Review Australia about ‘bottom up planning’ or ‘emergent urbanism’ as he prefers to call it. In the article and the accompanying blog post he uses Renew Newcastle as a strong example and says some [...]

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 [...]

While i was off in Japan honeymooning in December there was a flurry of articles in the Newcastle press celebrating the 12 month anniversary of the Renew Newcastle scheme.
This one actually brought a little tear to my eye, from Amy Delore in the Newcastle Herald:
THIS is a column I was going to write this time [...]

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 [...]

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 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 [...]