Creative Quarter Footscray | The Living Footscray Partnership
Updated: Aug 31
Most careers contain a building that was never built, or one, or two or more idea's you thought were worth pursuing even though you knew the odds were stacked against you. My yard of such endeavours contains an entire quarter. In 2018, through the Living Footscray Partnership and FOS Developments, I spent the better part of two years on one stubborn question about one neglected patch of Melbourne's west: what would it actually take to make culture the engine of an entire suburb's renewal, rather than the ribbon tied around it afterwards?
The answer was called Creative Quarter, Footscray. It never opened a door. Yet, almost everything I've built since; Eclat coworking Melbourne most of all, stands on the foundation of the work I did on it.
The numbers that started it all...
Buried in my research way back in 2015 was a statistic I've never been able to shake. Melbourne had around 170 coworking locations at the time. Desk space across them ran at roughly 97 per cent capacity. And just five per cent of that supply sat in the western suburbs.
Beside it was a second number: 83.1 per cent of Footscray's residents headed over the bridge every day to go to work. Read those together and you don't have a property opportunity. You have a commercial oversight a km wide. An entire region was exporting its own workforce every morning because there was nowhere good enough to keep it. That is a problem Creative Quarter was built to answer: and in a different postcode, at a different scale, it is the problem I have been answering ever since.
What a quarter is, and why it isn't a building
We assembled 19,642 square metres of underused central Footscray, bounded by Barkly, Paisley, French and Pickett Streets, and refused to treat it as a single site. That distinction is the whole discipline. A single site is a development problem: yield, setbacks, feasibility. A quarter is an urban one: what happens in the walk between two buildings, who is on the street at 9pm, whether the theatre and the childcare centre make each other more viable or less. Stop drawing buildings, start drawing the space between them, and every question gets harder while every answer gets better.
The proposition turned that land into roughly 122,000 square metres of floor area, about 36,800 of it lettable, and modelled more than $700 million of investment into the local economy; $300 of it via the Living Footscray Partnership. Creating around 1,120 jobs across a four-year construction cycle, and more than 600 ongoing full-time positions once open.
The programme
It was mixed use taken seriously rather than decoratively:
A performing arts centre, around 10,600 sqm — a 1,000-seat auditorium flexible to 1,400 standing, a 400-seat three-quarter theatre, four 200-seat rehearsal halls built for permanent anchor tenants
An 800 sqm gallery, sited as the connective tissue between the arts centre and everything else
A Creative Industries Epicentre — 10,000+ sqm of private office, 3,000 sqm of dedicated ECLAT coworking, photography, video and digital studios, and 2,500 sqm of event space and rooftop gardens
Commercial Tenancies: New retail opportunities woven into the new laneways
A new Footscray Library, 3,600 sqm plus 2,400 for community and commercial tenancies
A Victoria University middle campus of 8,000+ sqm, deliberately interfaced with the library
A 1,400 sqm early learning centre for 110 children
Two residential towers of 16 and 18 storeys, and a boutique hotel of 70-plus rooms
340 metres of heritage frontage on Barkly Street — fine-grain retail, two cafés, a 1,000 sqm restaurant, a bar, activated laneways and a new town square
More than 1,000 parking spaces over seven levels, two of them below ground
That last one holds my favourite detail in the scheme. The car park would be designed so it could be converted into an office building, as car dependence fell away over the following three decades. We were designing for our own obsolescence; still the most honest thing I think a developer can do.
Targeting a 6-star NABERS rating on blended funding: private capital carrying residential, commercial and hospitality; government and philanthropic support underwriting the cultural and civic. Neither half stood up alone. The apartments and commercial floorspace paid for our viability; and the entire precinct as a whole, performing as it would, made for a very attractive investment case within any given election cycle. The library and the auditorium alone, keen opportunities for philanthopic funding.
3000sqm of ECLAT, many years earlier
Inside that programme sat the piece that turned out to matter most to me personally: 3,000 square metres of luxury coworking infrastructure, the kind that had never been seen before (you know all about this already), this was the first time I stress-tested my workspace thesis at genuinely urban scale.
I wrote it explicitly as a departure from the office-based coworking already operating across Melbourne. Not desks with better coffee, an environment where a filmmaker, a freelancer, an orchestra's administration team and a university student could occupy one block and feed each other work. Until Footscray, my question had been: what should a hospitality-grade workspace feel like to walk into? On that site it changed to: what does a workspace do to the street outside it? What does it hand over to at six o'clock, when the theatre doors open?
Designing workspace as civic infrastructure rather than as a tenancy changes what you put inside it, and it is why ECLAT was never conceived strictly as a leasing product, or as a service. The hospitality instinct, the design rigour, the belief that a workspace should hold a room the way a good hotel lobby does, all of it got its hardest early workout on a site that never broke ground. That thinking now runs through my property development work and my writing on vertical placemaking.
The conversations that rewired me
The most valuable part of those years was not the drawings. It was the rooms.
We opened up a conversation with Victoria University around its needs and desires for a new middle campus. Victorian Opera, Opera Victoria, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra Victoria and Music Victoria were all engaged in conversation, organisations that had collectively outgrown their premises and sat down with us ponder the wonder that would be having their own dedicated office and performance requirements. I wrote letters explaining why a quarter in Footscray should matter to an institution already housed in the city, and I ran with consultant teams spanning architecture, heritage, acoustics, planning, interiors, landscape, traffic, engineering, ESD and quantity surveying, a dozen specialist conversations that all had to point at one outcome.
I benchmarked obsessively against places that had already done it: the Toronto Carpet Factory, Carriageworks in Sydney, ROW DTLA, Kulturhaus Kosmos in Zurich. The fastest way to learn what makes a precinct live is to study the ones that already do.
You cannot do that for two years and think about property the way you did going in. I stopped seeing development as an arrangement of floor plates and started seeing it as choreography. Property, culture, hospitality, workplace, life: all moving at once, each able to ruin the others if any one is designed in isolation.
When it stopped
Creative Quarter did not proceed to construction. There is no elegant way to write that sentence and I've stopped looking for one. Ambitious propositions fail for ordinary reasons; timing, appetite, politics, personalities, the sheer number of parties who must all say yes without lobbying their own interests.
What I learned is that the failure of a project and the failure of the work inside it are two entirely different events, and we confuse them constantly. The precinct stopped. The research didn't. The financial modelling, the cultural-sector fluency, the feel for how a council reads a proposal, the understanding of what a mixed-use programme can and cannot carry: none of that evaporated when the drawings went into a drawer. It went looking for somewhere else to be useful.
One door closes, another opens
This might be one of the most under-taught ideas in any creative or commercial career.
We measure ourselves by outcomes, because outcomes are the part other people can see. But the outcome is only ever the last five per cent. The other ninety-five is capability, skills acquired, judgement earned, relationships formed, risks taken, mistakes catalogued and never repeated. Capability doesn't care whether the project completed. Capability transfers.
So the honest accounting of Creative Quarter is not "a pie in the sky endeavor that failed." It is two years that taught me how to hold a multi-party proposition together, how to speak to major institutions in their own language, how to structure funding so the commercial and the cultural need each other, and how to read a workspace as part of a street, or as a part of a lived experience, rather than a lease upon one.
There's a version of this story where a closed door is a wall. There's another where it's the pressure that pushes you through a different one: harder, and far better prepared. I got the second version, and the conviction it produced went straight into ECLAT with full force.
A note on Footscray today
Central Footscray is being renewed now, and Maribyrnong City Council's Creative West project is doing that work. I want to be precise, because precision is fair to everyone here. The two are unrelated: different decades, different teams, different processes, no lineage between them. One is not an earlier draft.
What I find compelling is how durable the underlying question has proved. Decades of planning in this suburb keep arriving at the same conclusion by different routes, that the arts, education and shared public space are not amenities bolted onto a renewing town centre, but the machinery that renews it. It was worth asking in 2018. It is worth answering now. The fuller record sits on my Creative Quarter page.
Where it actually went
Every hour of that Footscray work now sits somewhere inside ECLAT.
It's in the decision to treat coworking as hospitality first and real estate second. It's in the insistence that a workspace should improve the building it occupies and the street it sits on; the argument I make in Rethinking Coworking in Melbourne. It's in the design discipline behind ECLAT Hawthorn East and the Forme fit-out. It's in how I read and design a floor plate and a space: as a set of relationships, not a schedule of areas.
An old library and a carpark in Footscray taught me how to build a coworking business in Hawthorn East, and how to stick it to the challenge and see it through no matter how difficult or impossible it may seem. Not the path I'd have drawn for myself in 2018. A better one, perhaps; yet I'm still drawing every day.
Nothing you create carefully and passionately is ever wasted. Even if it doesn't come to fruition, you just carry everything you've learned forward, to build better next time, but always for the right reasons.
Jesse Hayes — Creative Quarter Development Manager, and Founder & Director of Eclat.
Frequently asked questions
What was the Creative Quarter in Footscray? Creative Quarter was a 2018 mixed-use urban proposition for approximately 19,642 square metres of central Footscray, developed by the Living Footscray Partnership. It proposed a performing arts centre with a 1,000-seat auditorium, a new Footscray Library, an 800-square-metre gallery, a Creative Industries Epicentre with over 10,000 square metres of office and 3,000 square metres of ECLAT coworking, a Victoria University middle campus, an early learning centre, two residential towers, a boutique hotel and a new town square. It did not proceed to construction.
Is Creative Quarter the same as Creative West? No. Creative Quarter (2018) and Maribyrnong City Council's current Creative West project are unrelated undertakings, developed in different decades by different teams through different processes. Neither is a version of the other.
How is Creative Quarter connected to Eclat coworking Melbourne? Creative Quarter proposed 3,000 square metres of dedicated coworking infrastructure, deliberately positioned as a departure from Melbourne's existing office-based coworking. The thinking developed for it, workspace as hospitality and as civic infrastructure rather than as leased floor space: carried directly into ECLAT coworking CBD Melbourne.
Who is Jesse Hayes? Jesse Hayes is the founder and a director of Eclat, the Melbourne coworking and workspace brand. He was Development Manager of Creative Quarter through the Living Footscray Partnership, and a director of FOS Developments.
