Hacking the City: A New Model for Urban Renewal
How do you turn a place around without money or resources, and by empowering residents rather than displacing them? “What we’ve done is change the software of the city,” Westbury told me. “We’ve changed how it behaves. We’ve changed how it responds to people who want to try things, do things, and run their own experiments.”Renew Newcastle aims to find artists, cultural projects and community groups to use and maintain these buildings until they become commercially viable or are redeveloped. Renew Newcastle is not set up to manage long term uses, own properties or permanently develop sites but to generate activity in buildings until that future long term activity happens…[This vision] has the potential to transform how we think about conventional urban development, how cities are used, and who they are for.
{Read article in the New Republic site]
[Link to Renew Newcastle project]
Reading Development 