The City of Port Adelaide Enfield consists of a range of post war and earlier settlement, falling into the ‘middle ring’ suburbs of Adelaide. Within this ‘stable’ urban environment, major residential developments were initiated by the State Government during the 90s. All have involved private sector developers in joint venture arrangements.
As a key stakeholder in these projects, Council established interdisciplinary staff teams to ensure coordination between all parties. While this strategy provided early success in physical planning areas, social planning components of the projects remained a challenge.
Through early consultations undertaken by the Government, local people were mobilised and wished to be involved. While the joint venture developers had particular interests in marketing the properties, Council needed to consider the needs of a much wider constituency.
In 1995, this led to Council creating a social planning position within its Community Development. The result is an innovative approach to Council’s involvement with both the public and private sectors in the Parks Urban Renewal Project.
A comprehensive renewal of five suburbs, this will result in 2,900 new homes over a 15 year timeframe. Rather than follow the practice of contributing towards the cost of a community plan, the Director of Community Development, Mark Withers, negotiated with the joint venture partners to ‘second’ Council’s social planner, Diane Donnon, to the project for four months.
She jointly prepared the Community Planning Strategy and contributed towards the editing of the final local area plan. Diane also prepared a Community Issues Paper, conducted consultations and made presentations to a range of audiences.
Diane believes that her involvement in the preparation of the Parks plan was a very rewarding experience which added value to both the organisation and the Project.
“Most importantly, it has challenged us to look more laterally at the way we do business,” she said. “This hands on approach to social planning has reaped many benefits for Council and other stakeholders.”
For further information contact Diane Donnon, telephone (08) 8405 6788.
