Background and aims
The City of Port Phillip, Melbourne, Victoria, engaged the public from December 2021 to February 2022 to gather information about opinions on the Draft Nature Strip Guidelines - a plan that outlines the ways in which nature strips may be planted and used in the area. Information from the public engagement was intended to inform the guidelines for providing clear direction on how the community can garden on nature strips within the municipality, while ensuring nature strips remain safe and functional and that street trees are protected.
The community engagement garnered significant interest, and Council decided to undertake a second engagement on a newly revised draft of the guidelines. The second stage of community engagement ran in June/July 2022.
Our role
The role of Global Research for Stages I & II was to present the feedback in such a way that the City of Port Phillip could gauge public sentiment; Stage I brought forth an intensity of feedback such that Council sought more detailed information. The community feedback was then formulated into a cohesive and useful report to inform the Draft Guidelines.
Summaries and quoted segments of submissions were presented by theme, and topic, and by question asked. This allowed the full depth and flavour of commentary to become apparent.
Design and method
The topics addressed in submissions were vast and sometimes very specific; by sorting submissions to such a detailed level, we were able to pull out the main issues of contention, as well as conveying the degree to which nature strips are valued by residents, locals, and businesses in the area. While analysing the hundreds of submissions, several topics outside of what had been anticipated arose from the dataset which were then added to the coding framework and were of interest to the City of Port Phillip.
Result
The report delivered to the City of Port Phillip was used to revise the Draft Nature Strip Guidelines to ensure that readers could better understand the intent and probable outcomes from attention to nature strips. The Council was shown the extent to which the public admire nature strips and the value they are seen to confer on neighbourhoods, and the public were reassured that their beloved nature strips would not be at risk.
Outcome
The engagement report produced, and the underlying feedback, were used by the project team and designers to inform the changes to the guidelines. Public sentiment was heard, and on 3 August 2022, Council adopted the Nature Strip Guidelines with amendments that provide clearer guidance to the community regarding planting on nature strips, and increase options for planting while considering safety and access requirements.
More can be read about the outcomes of this project here.