Background and aims
In 2021 and 2022, Global Research was contracted by the City of Melbourne to undertake analysis and reporting for ten neighbourhood community engagement projects.
CBD
Kensington
Southbank
West Melbourne
South Yarra
Parkville
Carlton
East Melbourne
North Melbourne
Docklands
In 2021, City of Melbourne commenced work on a Neighbourhood Model to strengthen understanding and work with different communities across the city as it emerges from the impacts of COVID-19. Using a place-based approach, the city is seeking to better understand the strengths, needs and priorities of residents, students, businesses, workers and visitors across the municipality, and to use this knowledge to guide its work. Ensuring opportunity of access and participation of diverse voices, views and people is key to embedding this work through neighbourhood planning processes and projects, developed in partnership with its communities.
Each neighbourhood, with its specific demographic makeup, physical infrastructure, land use patterns, and residential, commercial, and transport particulars, was consulted by CoM to find out what people think about their neighbourhood; their priorities, what they like, what they want changed, how safe they feel, how resilient they feel their neighbourhood is or would be in the event of a disaster, and their aspirations for their area.
Our role
Hundreds of people contributed to each of the 10 consultations, with Global Research receiving screeds of qualitative and quantitative data to analyse and formulate into a cohesive set of ten comparable and informative reports.
The range of consultation methods meant we were tasked with cleaning and sometimes restructuring the data into useable formats, suitable for comparison and analysis – this ranged from survey data to pithy online postcard comments and longer transcribed workshop conversations. Making the different data forms as consistent as possible meant we could thematically code each and every comment into the same analysis framework.
In addition to analysing all the qualitative and quantitative data as whole datasets, Global Research queried the data for insights from the perspective of specific demographic segments, such as gender. This enabled deeper insights to be uncovered for each neighbourhood.
Design and method
Data was gathered by the City of Melbourne primarily using an online survey tool, supported by pop-up events, focus groups, phone interviews, online comment forums, and an interactive mapping tool that allowed respondents to geotag location and leave a comment or suggestion specific to that place.
Because the City of Melbourne recognised the distinctive needs and situations of each neighbourhood, questioning targeted slightly differing aspects of life in each suburb. Those with connections to Docklands, for example, were asked about work, while in the CBD, safety questions were emphasised. This enabled CoM to quickly get to the heart of matters pertinent to future planning, and meant, for Global Research, a slightly different coding framework was required for each project.
Result
The engagement was designed to inform the development of ten neighbourhood plans that show a shared vision for each area, that allow each area to showcase its strengths and assets, and to identify priorities to improve outcomes for the area.
In order to best represent the ideas and visions expressed by the community a variety of different reporting styles were used including detailed and summary reports as well as visually appealing infographics.
The City of Melbourne has uploaded content from the Global Research reports to its neighbourhood portal; for exampling findings for the CBD are available here.
Outcome
At the conclusion of this project, an epic suite of ten reports, infographic summary sheets, and summary reports were provided to the City of Melbourne who are using these to inform decision making and planning for each neighbourhood.
Key overarching priorities were identified across the neighbourhoods with respondents consistently valuing:
The proximity of their suburb to the CBD alongside the residential feel of their area;
The unique ‘personalities’ of their areas;
The availability of ‘day to day’ business there (such as shopping for food and grocery items, and having local banks, hairdressers, and cafés available);
Public transport and road connectivity;
Parks and open spaces, and places for the community to get together.
People from all neighbourhoods believed that it is important to be connected to their local community, with many comments calling for more community and open spaces reiterating this.
See the Melbourne neighbourhood portal here: Neighbourhoods | Participate Melbourne