Creating Cities by Marcus Westbury

Book Description

Secondhand. Good condition. Ex library copy with all external stickers removed. Wear to book corners and edges. Small scratch to spine tail. Partial date due slip on inside page now covered with blank ex libris bookplate sticker.

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: 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 who 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 broader set of ideas and a 'why-to' strategy with potential applications worldwide. Creating Cities is a provocative and inspiring must-read for creative people, civic and business leaders, town planners, citizens, and anyone who cares about the communities that they live in. (back cover)