Community Led Place Strategy

The Challenge

Nambour was a town that was suffering from its decline as a regional centre. The community had a perception that “nothing was being done” in the town and there was “too much talk and not enough action”.
This was in part due to the presence of a number of planning initiatives that sought to address the urban environment and the economic environment, some funded by council others funded by the Federal Government.

A town in visible decline, high business turnover, social issues, multiple planning strategies and documents but no cohesive plan for action, no unified vision, fractured community groups and competing interests, perception of little government action.

The Response

Local community members led by POMO, with urban design, economic development and planning skills stand up and assemble a group of local residents stakeholders to address Nambour’s urban challenges.

Connections with University of the Sunshine Coast were made which created opportunities for planning student involvement with the project. This acted as a final year placement. Students provided fresh eyes on old problems.

The Method

Step 1. The leadership team and students run a series of community stakeholder meetings where problems are identified and broken into themes; built
environment, transport, social justice, natural environment, economic. A community leader is appointed for each and groups are formed to create actionable solutions for each. 
Solutions are documented.

Step 2. PIA work placement criteria are met with guidance from project leaders who are registered planners and other urban professionals who mentor the students through the engagement and strategic response writing process. USC provides oversight.

Step 3. Students and leadership mentors engage with local experts in each of the fields identified as being problems - built environment, social justice etc. Local experts propose solutions to each set of problems.  Expert advice is married with solutions proposed by community members. 

‘The best solutions are created by those who experience the problems everyday’ - both local experts and local people who no professional expertise in the field.

The Place Strategy

Working under the guidance of the leadership team the students and the leaders were able to collaboratively pull together the final outcome of this process into a report that represented:
• Community stakeholder input - identify a range of problems, categorise them and devise solutions to them as people who are closest to the problems themselves
• Community expert input - test the solutions against the advice of experts who work in the field and who want to also solve these same problems in their communities
• Compile and test - collaborate with local leaders and pull together the findings and information into a report that can be shared with policy makers to encourage change
• Return to the community - close the loop by showing how the work has brought the otherwise fractured community together to work on solving a series of problems

Outcome and Results

The project and profess was a finalist in the 2023 Qld Planning Institute of Australia Awards

The outcome of the process was the handing over of the document in 2022 to local Councillor David Law. The document was distributed to teams inside council and to state government. This was 2 years after the commencement of the project and during Covid lockdowns. 

This process has applicability to any community with passionate people, a few experts and some committed professionals. The methodology is simple and easily replicated. The benefits included:
• Bringing diverse stakeholders together and quelling fractures in the community
• Providing a high quality student mentoring process which was unique and extremely hands on for graduating planning students
• Showing how local communities can solve local problems and breaking down the barriers between consultants and residents by acting as one and fighting for a series of common goals
• Taking a community engagement process and returning it to the people and showing how it can be done for zero $ with zero government involvement
• Showing how meaningful collaboration and engagement driven by locals can lead to outcomes that feed into real policy decisions by government

The report has influenced the recent thinking in relation to council involvement in Nambour in particular their economic development activities and their downtown revitalisation program. The initiatives outlined in the report have the influenced strategic planning direction for the town and brought focus to issues in a single source rather than multiple sources from multiple perspectives. 
This process demonstrated that quality outcomes can be achieved through community participation and through the generation of solutions by those people who are most closely affected by the problems.