Summary
In 2008, Marcus Westbury returned to his hometown of Newcastle, Australia, and found more than 150 empty buildings lining its two main streets. Three years later, the world's largest travel publisher named Newcastle one of the top ten cities in the world to visit. Creating Cities is about the unlikely events in between: of how a failed idea to start a bar morphed into a scheme that has helped transform Newcastle, launched more than two hundred creative and community projects across Australia, and is fast becoming a model for cities and towns around the world. In an engaging, thoughtful, and observational style, Westbury argues that most towns and cities are wasting their most obvious assets: the talent, imagination, and passion of the people that live there. In a globalised age, local creativity has access to new possibilities that most places have barely begun to grasp. In this book, Westbury explains how small-scale failures in Newcastle inspired a larger set of ideas and a 'why-to' strategy with potential applications around the globe.
Marcus Westbury is a broadcaster, writer, media maker and festival director who has started some of Australia¿s more unconventional and successful cultural projects and events. He has also worked across a range of media as a writer, producer, director and presenter covering fields as diverse as culture, media, urban planning, and politics. In 2008 Marcus founded Renew Newcastle. It¿s a low budget, not for profit, DIY urban renewal project that has forged access to over 30 empty buildings for creative enterprises, artists and cultural projects in his home town of Newcastle, NSW.
Renew Newcastle is unique scheme that has attracted global interest. It has been called a clever partial solution and a smart way to deal with unused spaces that would have otherwise be left to ruin. Marcus has also begun his writing career. His book entitled, Creating Cities, was the winner of the Most Underrated Book Award 2016.
(Bowker Author Biography)
