The Melbourne Place Making series highlighted principles to guide our practice and support effective development of this field. They are:

• Put people at the heart of place making – prioritise walkable urban places.
• Forward thinking about place will require an understanding of adaptability and flexibility – places which can respond to changing user needs and choices without extensive restructuring.

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Graphic illustration of the draft action statements

• Meet and authentically engage the community in a dialogue about the benefits of place – successful places require community buy-in and maintenance and a commitment to collective responsibility and collaborative process.
• Achieve financial, social and environmental return on investment in place making by incentivising the market and prioritising public sector resource allocation.
• Develop the measures and tools for research and evaluation in place making.
• Create a forum for interdisciplinary professional dialogue about place – to progress understanding and continue to develop skill sets across disciplines.
• Create governance mechanisms for place which are relevant, explicit and open, to enable a culture of place making.
• Demonstrate a wide variety of place making projects –
  • Real examples that simultaneously achieve social and economic benefits.
  • Experiments that may be of limited success, but which challenge the orthodox.
  • Cases highlighting the empowerment of a local community through place making.