In his new book, Creating Cities, Newcastle native Marcus Westbury describes the scene he found in his hometown in 2007:

Newcastle was dying. I thought I had no illusions, but everywhere I looked the rot was worse than I remembered. Streets that in my memories were vibrant, active, and filled with family and friends had fallen into disrepair and despair. Entire blocks were dominated by buildings that had been boarded up, gutted, and destroyed.

Now, eight years later, Newcastle has come alive again. In his book, Westbury describes how he and a group of like-minded people helped to turn the city around—not with grand-scale policy changes or multimillion-dollar building projects, not by attracting huge employers through tax breaks and economic incentives, but through fostering small-scale enterprise in the city’s vacant core. ... Westbury details the numbers behind Renew Newcastle’s success: 170 businesses and community projects launched, 70 vacant properties reopened, and a 60 to 90 percent drop in vacancy rates.

Westbury acknowledges Renew Newcastle’s critics, who charge that the approach encourages gentrification, that it hasn’t produced change fast enough, that the successes are too small and the failures too many. But he argues that the initiative has transformed the way that Newcastle sees itself as well as the way outsiders see it, making it a model for similar cities around Australia and beyond. It is part of an international movement toward lightweight, self-determined urban renewal projects that doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.