Event and Ticketing Details
Dates & Times
Tuesday 03 May
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
Where do we want to live? Who else do we want to live there? And what makes a city more than just habitable – but also exhilarating and inspiring – for its citizens?
Marcus Westbury has some answers to these questions. He’s the man behind Renew Newcastle, the urban renewal project that saw Westbury transform his lagging NSW hometown into a hive of creativity and enterprise in a few short years. Now he’s CEO of the Collingwood Arts Precinct redevelopment, an undertaking designed to bolster the inner-city presence of small arts organisations, in an era when rising rents are driving creative people out of the areas they helped make great in the first place.
Bureaucracy, over-regulation, gentrification and good old-fashioned failures of imagination – these are among the factors that can stem the vitality of urban spaces. Just because we’ve always done things one way doesn’t mean we have to keep doing them that way.
In conversation with architect Stuart Harrison, Westbury will share his ideas on renewal, regeneration and the potential of our great city.
Featuring
Marcus Westbury
Marcus Westbury is the inaugural CEO of Contemporary Arts Precincts Ltd that is leading the development of the Collingwood Arts Precinct in Melbourne. He is also the founder of the multi award-winning Renew Newcastle and Renew Australia projects that have reopened more than a hundred vacant properties to creative and community uses across Australia.
Marcus has been a writer, media maker, festival director and the founder and manager of multiple arts events, community projects and social enterprises across Australia. He is the author of Creating Cities (Niche Press, 2015) and has been the writer and presenter of the ABC TV series Bespoke and Not Quite Art.
Stuart Harrison
Stuart Harrison is a practicing architect, lecturer, broadcaster and architectural advocate.
He founded and co-hosts The Architects on Melbourne radio RRR, the weekly radio programme dedicated to the promotion of architecture in the community.
Harrison formed Harrison and White (HAW ) with Marcus White in 2005. The work of HAW has received awards and been exhibited at the 2008 Venice Biennale of Architecture, and in Australia in 2009 at the State of Design Festival as part of the Advertisements for Architecture exhibition.
HAW is one of several firms been exhibited in the Australian pavilion at the 2010 Venice Biennale.
Harrison is also a lecturer at RMIT University, teaching in architectural design, technology, history and communications.
His projects have been featured in local and national media.
He studied at both UWA and RMIT, and won student graduate prizes at both.