Wyndham Housing and Neighbourhood Character Study Engagement
Building community understanding of housing change in Wyndham
The Challenge
Wyndham remains amongst the fastest growing municipalities in Australia and since Council developed its initial Housing Strategy in 2018, Wyndham’s residential areas have continued to grow and change at pace. With an evolving planning policy context, changing demographic needs, and a sharpened focus on housing diversity and affordability, Council needs to refresh its housing and neighbourhood character strategy. Wyndham City Council is currently preparing a Housing and Neighbourhood Character Strategy in order to respond to this growth, and help guide the location of future dwellings. The Housing and Neighbourhood Character Strategy builds upon the work done in previous iterations of the strategy, responding to and meeting State government amendment requirements.
CoFutures was engaged by Council to design, develop and lead the community engagement program on the Draft Housing and Neighbourhood Character Study. The purpose of the engagement was to help build greater understanding around the need to plan for housing amongst the community.
What We Did
- Prepared a detailed engagement strategy and communications plan.
- Designed and delivered a range of engagement activities, including a community survey, management of online platform content.
- Facilitated an interactive online workshop with the Wyndham People’s Panel to ‘deep dive’ into key topics around housing.
- Facilitated a program of community drop-in information sessions.
- Curated and implemented the online PolicyScape tool, allowing the community to see the planning proposals, relevant to their own properties.
- Designed and drafted engaging collateral, including a summary document and supporting brochures which translated planning jargon into Plain English and easy to understand information, relevant to the community.
Outcomes
The findings from the engagement process identified opportunities to refine the housing principles and neighbourhood character concepts and also provided insights into key community priorities. The feedback was reviewed, coded and summarised in an engagement findings report and was used to inform the finalisation of the Housing and Neighbourhood Character Strategy.
