Geelong's City Deal billions are reshaping a regional capital, but Glasgow and Bilbao did it first

The numbers are not small. The Geelong City Deal, signed between federal, state and local governments in 2022, committed $381.2 million toward transforming a city that spent most of the 2010s absorbing the shock of Ford's Norlane plant closing its gates. Four years on, cranes are visible along Malop Street, Deakin University's Waterfront campus has expanded its health sciences precinct, and the question urban planners are now asking is pointed: is this working any better than the last time a government threw money at a shrinking industrial city?

That question matters right now partly because the Deal's mid-point review is due this financial year, and partly because the national property market is cooling in ways that directly affect whether new residents actually move to regional capitals like Geelong or stay put in Melbourne. The federal government's regional investment logic only holds if population and economic activity follow the infrastructure. In Geelong's case, the evidence is mixed.

What the European playbook actually looked like

Glasgow is the comparison city that keeps surfacing in academic literature on Geelong's transition. Scotland's largest city lost roughly 60,000 manufacturing jobs between 1975 and 1995, a collapse proportionally more severe than anything Geelong experienced after the 2016 automotive closure. Glasgow's turnaround, anchored by the 1988 Garden Festival, followed by the European Capital of Culture designation in 1990, took about 15 years to register in employment data. Bilbao moved faster, using the 1997 Guggenheim Museum opening as a catalyst, but the Basque city had €4 billion in regional government funds behind it, not a single federal deal.

Geelong's City Deal is structurally closer to what happened in Newcastle, New South Wales, where a 2022 federal commitment channelled money through a similar tripartite arrangement. Newcastle's investment targeted the Hunter Street mall precinct and the former industrial waterfront at Honeysuckle. Five years after that program's first tranche, commercial vacancy rates in Newcastle's CBD had fallen from 18 percent to around 11 percent, according to Property Council data. Geelong's central city vacancy rate sat at approximately 14 percent as of late 2025, which suggests movement in the right direction but plenty of ground still to cover on Ryrie Street and the Little Malop Street dining precinct.

Geelong's specific bets, and where the pressure points are

The City Deal's funding is concentrated in three areas: the Geelong Convention and Exhibition Centre expansion on the waterfront, the Shipwrights Walk urban renewal corridor, and a $50 million injection into the Geelong Tech School network, which links secondary students with employers including Barwon Health and the Australian Industry Group's regional office on Myers Street. Deakin's Applied Research and Collaboration (ARC) hub in Waurn Ponds is separately funded but operationally tied to the deal's workforce ambitions.

Where Geelong diverges from the European models is in housing. Glasgow and Bilbao both had significant social housing pipelines running alongside their economic regeneration programs. Geelong's growth corridor, pushing south through Armstrong Creek and into the Surf Coast corridor toward Torquay, is almost entirely private development. Land in Armstrong Creek was selling for around $320,000 per 400-square-metre lot in mid-2025, up from roughly $240,000 three years earlier. That price point is shutting first-home buyers out of the very suburbs the City Deal's population growth projections depend on filling.

The mid-point review, expected before the end of 2026, will test whether Commonwealth investment is generating the multiplier effect the original business case projected, roughly $1.3 in private investment for every dollar of public money. Urban economists at Deakin's Alfred Deakin Institute flagged in a 2025 working paper that the ratio was tracking closer to 0.9:1 in the deal's first two years, though construction pipeline data suggests that figure has since improved.

For residents watching the transformation from the Eastern Beach foreshore or the redeveloped Steampacket Gardens, the practical question is simpler: when does the investment become visible in daily life, in jobs, in services, in a city centre that stays busy past 6pm? The Convention Centre's expanded calendar for 2027 will be an early indicator. The mid-point review's public summary, promised by the Department of Infrastructure before December, will be the document worth reading when it arrives.