A review of the Melbourne Place Making Series Community Sector Conversation.
Monday the 16th August 2010 at BMW Edge, Federation Square.

Attendees at this week’s Melbourne Place Making Series Community Sector Conversation were asked to consider “What would it take to move from consultation to collaboration in the process of making places?” This set the scene for the beginning of a conversation facilitated by respected social commentator Robyn Archer which examined the relationship between place and community value from the perspective of community practitioners, developers and social researchers. With over 110 people in attendance from a broad range of professional backgrounds, the discussion was guaranteed to be stimulating.

Dr Janet Stanley, (Chief Research Officer, Monash Sustainability Institute) shared her research about the relationship between the physical structure of places and human connection. When a place promotes human contact, mobility and empowerment, lower rates of depression and exclusion follow. Critical to Janet’s thesis was the research finding that genuine collaboration with a whole community leads individual members to a greater sense of internal control, a sense that they are in charge of their own destiny. This makes the case that a genuine process of collaborative place making can maximise individual and community well-being and value – a good start to the evening!

Michael Drapac, (Managing Director – Drapac Group) drew on decades of property development expertise to ask the audience how the Melbourne we know came into being. From Michael’s reckoning, it was due to a vision and intention which reflected the wealth of the gold rush. That vision and intention was translated consistently into excellent buildings, parks and people places by the entire community to give Melbourne its unique physical identity. Of course, this commitment to excellence has made Melbourne a more highly valued place than it might otherwise have been. The warning though is that we must continue to honour this tradition and commitment to excellence in our place making today. Michael continues to advocate for long term shared vision with the objective of the common good elevated beyond individual interests as the focal point of the vision.

Emily Ballantyne-Brodie, (Director and Founder of Urban Reforestation>) has several years’ practical knowledge of grass-roots place making within Docklands. The Urban Re-Forestation Project, in Emily’s own words, has “created a platform for social enterprise” for the Docklands community. All-comers have been engaged by the initiative which has spun-off numerous other programs as community members use their own talents and passions. This has ranged from a food connect program run by a single parent, to the YMCA running a large skills training program for rehabilitated youth. The notion of co-creation, or designing place and program together, has built a sense of ownership and social glue that was lacking before. Emily left us with five thoughts on how to better realise the community value of a place – a project must be authentic and come from the community; it must allow people to engage with it and shape it, and therefore be resilient; it will require organisation and a willingness to act; and finally, a project should grow understanding, that is, it’s ok to learn through doing.

Our final speaker, Marcus Westbury (Founder of Renew Newcastle, broadcaster, writer, media maker and festival director) entertainingly described his place making journey as a series of accidents. He described his experiences in Newcastle where over 150 empty buildings were to be either redeveloped or remain the subject of restrictive heritage compliance. Since 2009, the Renew Newcastle program has seen over 60 empty store fronts in central Newcastle become home to a range of fashion, food, creative and co-operative industries – and all done on a shoe-string budget. A key learning has been that the city centre needed to work for people without capital, and thereby foster collaborative experimentation, or accident! Renew Newcastle has been a catalyst for transformation of the community’s capacity and understanding of what is possible for their city.

In conversation, participants discussed the opening question – What would it take to move from consultation to collaboration? Strong views included:

• Willingness to experiment
• Active participation and commitment to act
• Building of trust and a shared vision
• A move away from specialist jargon

Other emerging themes as the discussion progressed included:

• How place approaches benefit a community’s sustainability by creating an opportunity to increase resilience through localisation
• That sometimes place making might not include any built outcome at all, but simply create the opportunity for people to activate a place and unite around a common goal
• How social media, although sometimes problematic in content, can nonetheless help overcome problems in authentic communication between the stakeholders of a place
• That practitioners need to be careful that sense of belonging and ownership doesn’t become so great so as to exclude some parts of the community

Panel members argued strongly for a critical embracing of:

• Shared vision built around the best understanding of the common good
• Increased awareness of the enablers and impediments to connectivity, mobility, engagement and empowerment
• A spirit of experimentation around the structures and processes that are now available
• Ongoing exchange and planning between finance, development, governments and community agents.

The debate and discussion could have continued all evening.

The day after the conversation, 50 participants from local government, developers, private consultancies and creative industries participated in an active workshop exploring the skills required for genuine collaboration. This was facilitated by Village Well and The Group Work Institute of Australia’s, Glen Ochre.

To kick-start the process, the first 45 minutes of the workshop were spent discussing community café activity with participants being asked to reflect on what it feels like when they are disconnected and what the consequences of this disconnection are. Following on from this exercise, participants worked collaboratively to uncover ways in which we could do things differently both as individuals and as organisations. The remainder of the workshop was used to develop solutions to address the key community themes that emerged throughout the morning:

• Building trust
• The role of the leader
• When decision makers and experts know best
• When the answer is ‘no’
• Apathy

The outcomes of the workshop are currently being distilled and will further inform the Melbourne Place Making Series.

The Melbourne Place Making Series has been designed for just these kinds of conversations and experiences, to hear different perspectives from those whose decisions and actions ultimately shape our cities and to grow understanding and improve practice.

The online conversation continues and the Conference, scheduled for October 27-29, seeks to distil the lead up place making conversations into a statement of collaborative practice, or place making declaration to which conference attendees will have an opportunity to contribute and subscribe.

Get involved in the Melbourne Place Making Series by contributing your ideas through the discussion board, view the conference program and register your attendance.