Pathways to Future Communities

Michael Rumbold

Movement Strategies Australia leader | GHD

Michael is the Australian leader of the Movement Strategies business in GHD.  He has eighteen years of experience in transport consulting stretching with a focus on pedestrian planning. He has a wide ranging portfolio of projects across transport, sports and events, education, arts and culture but is always focused on creating amazing places and experiences for the end user.  Michael is part of the APAC leadership for GHD's Future Communities program.  Place Pulse is a product of this program, developed to explore new and creative ways of dealing with emerging challenges.

Place Pulse: Getting to the Heart of Place Insights

Place Pulse is a GHD program building upon our successful Movement Insights service.  Place Pulse, a product of our evolving Future Communities initiative, has developed strategic partnerships with some of the country's most significant data providers, to provide a more complete understanding of human behaviour in any particular location - be it a high street, a stadium or a train station. Not only do we understand the movement patterns of people using these locations, but what they do with their time there.  Do certain postcodes spend more time and money there than others? What impact does the closure or opening of a particular anchor have upon usage, dwell and spend? Place Pulse is a powerful tool answering the "so what' question that so often comes to mind when new data insights are provided.

Governments require us to be much smarter with our use of data - there is so much of it out there, we need to get better at harnessing it for the public good.  Place Pulse can do this.  It can help our clients to provide for their customers in a way that they could not previously do.  If all your customers are coming from a few locations, this is powerful information to work with.  If people are bypassing your high street to use another one further way, then knowing this gives you the tools to respond.   Place Pulse takes the guess work out of the way people use a place.

Willem Snel

Technical Director Cities & Future Mobility | Mott MacDonald

Willem joined Mott MacDonald in 2021 as Technical Director Cities & Future Mobility, when he relocated from The Netherlands to Australia. He is a respected thought leader with over 20 year’s experience in the fields of mobility, masterplanning, urban planning and landscape architecture. He has worked on a variety of projects ranging from large scale masterplanning to detailed design and 2040-strategies to detailed MaaS-pilots, applied in projects in The Netherlands, Australia, Germany, UK, Taiwan, China, Chile. Willem argues that ‘business as usual’ is not an option, we have to re-invent our cities and the way we travel and design our infrastructure, we have to take a holistic view on the future of our cities, moving away from a siloed approach to an integrated approach.
 

Placemaking in the city of tomorrow

Placemaking and local identity are key to more people focussed cities and precincts. This presentation shows the historic development of how movement and place are connected and how more space efficient 'movement' can be the 'spacemaker' for not only great places, but also create space for other challenges in our cities, such as the energy transition, social inclusion, climate change (flooding/heat stress), biodiversity and densification.

The second half of the presentation is focussed around the topic of placemaking; outlining the importance of scale, identity and atmosphere, as the key to successful places. This is illustrated by a large breadth of best practice placemaking examples from around the world as well as application of placemaking and design in Willem's own projects.

This presentation aims to inspire and evoke out-of-the-box thinking, followed by enthusiasm for the future of our cities and the role of 'place' in our public realm.

Luke Homann

Director North Region | TfNSW

Luke has over 20 years of experience in strategic planning, project and program management, transport and operations. As Planning for Places Director, North Region, he leads multi-disciplinary teams to deliver multimodal place-based transport plans, integrating transport and land use planning and guiding ongoing investment decisions for short-, medium- and long-term horizons. He has led teams across numerous projects and programs within Transport. Most notably working across Government and industry to establish the Authorised Engineering Organisation Program and delivering a change program bringing together stakeholders from all levels of Government and the community to co-design planning in Regional NSW. Prior to Transport he worked within the public and private sectors nationally and internationally, in asset management, organisational capability development, project and program management, operations and change management. Luke holds a Masters in Management, and is a Member of the Australian Institute of Project Management.

Empowering Planners to Plan with Country

The NSW Government committed to better outcomes for Aboriginal people through its ‘Our Place on Country’ Strategy, which provides high-level principles to deliver outcomes for Aboriginal Communities. Asking Transport’s planning practitioners to apply these principles without more detailed guidance often resulted in inconsistent approaches and outcomes. Transport’s Strategic Transport Planning Branch commissioned a project to integrate Planning with Country. Focusing on outcomes, it takes a maturity-based approach to cultural competency and ways of working to better understand Country and engage with Aboriginal Communities.

Led by Senior Planners for Country, the early phase defined Planning with Country and developed baseline knowledge, and supporting tools, systems, and process. Many planning practitioners have limited awareness of Aboriginal culture so, we delivered a range of presentations, cultural training and dedicated Walking with Country events providing hands on experience of the challenges, opportunities, and history of engaging with Aboriginal Communities. Amongst several tools and supporting training we delivered was an interactive Aboriginal Nations Map and a Draft Guide for Planning with Country. The Aboriginal Nations Map makes it easier to obtain information on local Aboriginal communities, key contacts, statistics, and information on known places of Aboriginal significance. Drawing on data across agencies and community sources, it enables planners to understand the local community better and to enter into engagement processes with the benefit of this context.

The Draft Guide provides a pathway for Planning with Country on planning projects. Outlining steps for each phase, it enables better engagement with relevant stakeholders, improving co-design. A pilot is underway on two key projects in regional and metropolitan NSW, and it is being used to inform other project teams within Transport.

Tim Bryant

Deputy Director Forecasting and Evaluation | DTP

Tim is the Deputy Director, Forecasting and Evaluation at the Victorian Department of Transport and Planning. He leads a team of strategic transport modellers and economists responsible for long term transport forecasting and governance of modelling and economic evaluation practices in Victoria.

Hybrid working - boosting connectivity and public realm simultaneously

The Covid-19 pandemic forced behavioural changes in travel and activity on an unprecedented scale. As we move beyond the most severe impacts of the pandemic, many are speculating on which behaviour changes will endure and what this means for travel and activity in our cities, suburbs, regional centres and towns.

While forecasting is a notoriously uncertain business our research suggests that, for a segment of the workforce, working from home is a behaviour that will persist at materially higher levels than before the pandemic. Many uncertainties remain as to whether hybrid working will prove to be beneficial overall to workers’ productivity and workplace welfare. It can be expected that a new equilibrium in working arrangements will emerge over time somewhere between the pre-Covid-19 status quo and those of the height of the pandemic when all workers who could work from home were forced to.

Using an innovative application of the Victorian Integrated Transport Model, we explore some implications of hybrid working practices embraced by a significant segment of the Victorian workforce. While many things cannot be quantified, we find there are some significant welfare enhancing benefits to society that regular working from home can enable. Many of these, such as reductions in travel time, vehicle operating costs and emissions can be estimated using conventional transport economics approaches.

Additionally, we find the hybrid working model provides the opportunity to retain the benefits of connectivity to major centres, while simultaneously boosting demand and activity in suburbs, regional centres and towns. With hybrid workers travelling to major centres on fewer days of the week, capacity in the transport system is freed up and those travelling enjoy a less congested, more connected network. At the same time, hybrid workers spending some days in their local area builds demand to catalyse more local economic and social activity in suburbs, regional centres and towns.