May 2, 2013, 4:08 a.m.
The idea helped revitalise Newcastle's CBD and there's a chance it could do the same for Wollongong.
Renew Newcastle was established just over four years ago by Marcus Westbury. Its aim was simple: to allow people to use vacant CBD shops to run small businesses, show art or indulge their passion.
The stores were licensed on a rolling three-day lease so that the owners could still look for a paying tenant.
MORE: Say hello to Wollongong's CBD of the future
"After four and a bit years we have 110 projects and nearly 60 buildings that have been cleaned up and fixed up and activated by us at some point," Mr Westbury said.
"If you told me we could have done 12 in four years I would have thought that was a pretty good number, so 110 is incredible."
Mr Westbury was invited to Wollongong by GPT and the Illawarra branch of the Property Council of Australia ahead of May 10's "ideas-a-thon", an event aimed at coming up with ideas to improve the city centre.
Renew Wollongong is one of those ideas, and Mr Westbury said it wasn't the first time someone in the city had shown an interest in replicating the Newcastle exercise.
"I can't think of anywhere in Australia where I've had more unsolicited inquiries than from Wollongong," he said.
"We get artists, architects, council people and all sorts of people from this community email or contact Renew Newcastle and say 'we're interested in doing something similar here'."
Mark Jones from Edmiston Jones Architects in Wollongong is a fan of what happened in Newcastle - and elsewhere.
He said the idea appealed to him because he had an interest in working out how to reuse buildings rather than "the current methodology of "knock down, rebuild".
"It's not only successful in Newcastle, but [places like] Adelaide and Townsville," Mr Jones said.
"Newcastle is an obvious analogy to Wollongong, but I think an even better analogy is places like Townsville, with similar populations. So it's happening in similar-sized towns; there's no reason it can't happen here."
Mr Westbury agreed that the city was in better shape than Newcastle was four years ago.
"I think there's a lot of potential. The ingredients are here to do something similar to what we've done in Newcastle. There's obviously a strong, vibrant community of people who want to do interesting things.
"There are a significant amount of empty shops and offices in the city. If you can start matching them up, interesting things will happen."
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