Peer Review: Housing and Neighbourhood Character in Wyndham
Reviewing the blueprint for residential growth in Australia’s fastest growing LGA
The Challenge
For more than a decade, Wyndham City Council has been fine tuning its approach to planning for housing. As Australia’s fastest growing municipality with a unique set of growth challenges, Council set out to developThe Wyndham Plan, a transformative and bold spatial vision with six ‘big moves’to reimagine the future of Wyndham. The development of this plan alongside ongoing reforms to state-wide planning policy meant that Council needed to undertake a critical review of its approach to planning for future housing change and growth.
CoFutures and Praxis Planning were engaged to undertake a critical peer review of the 2018 Housing and Neighbourhood Character Strategy and to make recommendations to improve alignment between housing policy, The Wyndham Plan and new state-wide planning policies.
What We Did
- A critical review of Wyndham’s residential developmentframework.
- Assessment of feedback on the 2018 Strategy from the Department of Transport and Planning.
- Using GIS, analysed the spatial criteria informing the housing change areas.
- A street-by-street site visit and character assessments of new residential growth areas
- Assessed new neighbourhood character precincts and developed a new contemporary residential typology.
- Advised on the areas of alignment needed with new local, regional and state-wide planning strategies and policies.
- Benchmarked the application of the housing change areas against other growth area Councils across metropolitan Melbourne.
Outcomes
The Peer Review provided 28 recommendations to refine the proposed housing change areas, neighbourhood character typologies and general updates to the 2018 Strategy. It also provided the evidence base needed to enable Council to advocate for the further strengthening of actions to increase housing diversity and density around key activity nodes across Wyndham.
