Maribyrnong’s Creative West – for $148 million,build something unmistakably Footscray

By Bryce Ives

Maribyrnong Council is proposing to spend $148 million on Creative West: a new library, public space and 500-plus-seat performing arts centre in central Footscray.

I am not opposed to that kind of investment. In fact, I think Footscray should be making a bigger cultural bet than it does now. But for $148 million, surely the question is not simply whether Creative West is better than the ageing library and car park it would replace. Of course it is. The real question is whether this is the best thing Footscray could possibly do with once-in-a-generation public money.

Council is making a much bigger case for Creative West than simply replacing the library. It says the project will help revitalise central Footscray, attract visitors and investment, and strengthen the day-and-night economy. If those benefits are central to justifying a $148 million investment, Council should be able to demonstrate why it believes this particular project will deliver them.

I would encourage councilors to spend an afternoon at the Clocktower Centre in Moonee Ponds, the Wyndham Cultural Centre in Werribee, and the Darebin Arts Centre in Preston. They are all useful civic assets. But then walk around the surrounding streets and ask whether those buildings transformed the neighborhoods around them, and importantly, talk to local artists and organisations and ask how important these facilities are in supporting their ambition and practice. 

For years, cities chased the so-called ‘Bilbao effect’, hoping a major cultural building might trigger tourism, investment and renewal. But Bilbao was never just the Guggenheim. The museum sat inside a much larger transformation involving transport, public space, economic restructuring, and sustained investment. A cultural building can be part of a regeneration project, but it is not, by itself, a regeneration strategy. The problem in Footscray is not an absence of culture. It is how to build on the extraordinary culture that is already here.

There is another reason to be cautious. Bent Flyvbjerg’s work on major infrastructure has documented how easily optimism bias takes hold: costs and risks are underestimated and benefits overstated. Once a large project develops momentum, the question can slowly change from ‘is this the best intervention?’ to ‘how do we get this built?’

I wonder if Creative West is getting close to that point.

Council says the purpose of its latest consultation was “not to start again, but to check that the project remains on the right track”. For a project expected to cost around $148 million, I think Council should be willing to go back to first principles. That doesn’t mean discarding the work already done. It means going back to the problem and asking whether the proposed solution is still the best answer.

Because Footscray is not starting from a cultural deficit. Quite the opposite. It is already here, in Footscray Community Arts, Snuff Puppets, Women’s Circus, 100 Story Building, L2R Dance, Trocadero Projects and Five Walls, alongside the musicians, artists, studios, galleries and creative businesses scattered through the suburb. An earlier Council public art strategy talked about Footscray’s “edge condition,” and I think that instinct was right.

Footscray has something so many places have spent decades trying to manufacture: a genuine cultural character and heartbeat.

So why spend generational money making it more like every other municipality or place?

There is a strong case for a new Footscray Library. There is a strong case for better public space and a town park. But neither automatically proves the case for a 500-plus-seat theatre, and that component should stand on its own.

Show the demand. How many nights a year will it operate? Who will use it? Where will audiences come from? What will they spend in Footscray? What will the annual operating subsidy be, and how much of that will actually go to artists? Which artists or producers are currently unable to present work because a venue of this size does not exist? Can local community groups afford to hire it?

And then show us the opportunity cost.

Take the $148 million capital cost and add what Council expects to spend operating, maintaining, and renewing the facility over the next 30 years. Give that financial envelope to another team and ask them to come up with the best possible cultural, social, and economic investment for central Footscray. No requirement for one big building. No assumption that a theatre and a library are part of the answer.

Maybe Creative West still wins, and if so, good. But make sure it is genuinely tested. 

Because maybe the alternative is a brilliant library and town park, with serious investment left for Nicholson Street, the Mall, and public space. Maybe the Council acquires strategic buildings and protects affordable space for artists and creative businesses. Maybe it makes Footscray Community Arts a genuine partner or the “custodian” of the precinct’s future, rather than building a parallel council-run cultural institution within a kilometre. Maybe it backs existing organisations, activates empty shopfronts, invests in music and nightlife, commissions ambitious public art, and makes it easier for people with good ideas to do interesting things here.

Or perhaps Footscray makes an entirely bolder cultural bet: an international centre for street art and urban culture, or a multicultural arts precinct built around the extraordinary communities of Melbourne’s west. Not a municipal theatre with a diverse program bolted onto it, but an institution conceived from the beginning around the actual cultural life of this place, with international ambition and aiming to be genuinely world-class. 

These are only ideas. There will be better ones. Whatever Council builds with $148 million should respond to what is already distinctive about Footscray, rather than importing a generic municipal model. 

It should have an edge. It should take some risks. It should build on the ecology already here rather than gathering culture up and putting it inside a council building.

Footscray should not come out of once-in-a-generation investment with a perfectly respectable municipal arts centre that could just as easily have been built in Werribee, Moonee Ponds, or Preston, programming the latest ABBA touring show.  

We should be more ambitious. 

In 20 years, we should be able to look back and say we created something unmistakably Footscray—something other cities or councils wish they had thought of first. 

Bryce Ives is the Principal of YoBou Pty Ltd and is currently a strategic advisor to Regional Arts Australia, The Push, Music Victoria, and the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia, and has been a Festival Director and Artistic Director in Australia and globally.