Conference Agenda | Australian Placemaking Summit

Speed Networking

This speed networking session will allow delegates to introduce themselves and swap business cards with other conference attendees.

Managing Disruption through Placemaking 

In an age of never-ending, and seemingly increasing, disruption this presentation will discuss how placemaking can stay true to purpose - delivering better environments for the people we serve. Placemaking was once a disruptive process in its own right but has quickly become an embedded process in both government and the private sector - primarily as a driver of economic benefit. We will consider what is needed to address the imbalance between economic and social outcomes and how human-centric data can get the voice of the community into the spreadsheets where decisions are being made.

Kylie Legge, Founder & CEO, Place Score/Place Partners

Embedded in place: experience, memory and identity in the built environment

Now more than ever we understand the value of in-person experiences of place. But what are the factors which separate a rich, textured experience of place with a generic one? How can architects and other built environment professionals inject urban spaces with the cultures, ecologies and collective experiences that make a place unique? Nick Bourns, Director at NH Architecture will explore some of the urban places created in recent built and unbuilt projects of varying scale and typology: a much-loved public market, a sporting precinct, a university campus and a suburban shopping centre.

Nick Bourns, Director, NH Architecture

Illustrating San Francisco’s Unique Expressions of Placemaking

• Imagining, Redesigning and Reclaiming Public Spaces – the story from San Francisco 
• How the city’s varied constituencies are working together to transform public spaces
• Expanding Placemaking through Tactical Urbanism

Robin Abad Ocubillo, Director, San Francisco Shared Spaces Program, City and County of San Francisco

Bridging the gap between engineering design and the community

Rail, roads and power supply infrastructure is a vital set of services that both connect and sustain our cities. Shaping how we travel, live and engage with community, the infrastructure that surrounds us is traditionally delivered as a purist engineered solution. Seeing the opportunity to disrupt the norm and impact how infrastructure curates the world we live in, Daniel brings the end user to the forefront of project outcomes, challenging multidisciplinary design teams to think beyond the brief and the process to realise future focused, connected people centric solutions which create elements of play, elegance and ergonomics in our urban realms, leaving a lasting legacy.

Daniel Bennett, Principal Design Integrator, Aurecon

PANEL DISCUSSION

Landscape Design and its key Role in Urban Placemaking

• What makes a great place?
• The role of landscaping in the placemaking process
• Designing for the public realm
• Creating meaningful experiences for people in public spaces

Claire Martin, Associate Director, Oculus
Deborah Kuh, Place Ecologist, Landscape Urbanist, All is Design
Dr Beau Beza, Deputy Associate Dean, Teaching and Learning, Deakin University
Kirsten Bauer, Director - Melbourne, ASPECT Studios

The Importance of Place and Economics

Louise Ford (Senior Place Strategist) will draw on a range of successful examples demonstrating how a combination of Place and Economics can inspire the broader industry to think differently about how we plan and build our communities, neighbourhoods and future cities. Using evidence-based placemaking, we are able to measure and monitor the performance of places, along with developing strategic recommendations to unlock placemaking actions and investment opportunity to allow our communities to reach their true economic potential.

Hatch RobertsDay brings together thought leaders in urban design, planning, and placemaking with global experts in infrastructure, engineering and construction. Through adopting a place focus at the outset has embedded a transformative approach in the way we approach our work, and is challenging the way our clients have traditionally operated – within the context of both infill and greenfield developments. The premise of our focus is that places strategically positioned as destinations with a competitive, commercial edge at the outset will realise stronger financial returns. Communities with a well-considered vision up front are more likely to feel real. They will have a richer sense of personality and offer a more fulfilling lifestyle. This approach also provides a more detailed brief for our urban designers to better customise planning to place, and a framework that de-risks early investment decisions and builds confidence for investors.

Louise Ford, Senior Place Strategist, Urban Solution, Hatch RobertsDay

Exploring Movement and Place: Making Human-Centred Transport Planning a Reality

• How the concept of Movement and Place is gaining momentum cross Australian Cities
• Recognising the dual function of streets as both through corridors and destinations in their own right
• Case Studies

Will Fooks, Market Leader, Urban Places, Stantec

PANEL DISCUSSION

Placemaking for Everyone

• Indigenous Placemaking and the Built Environment
• Urban design, public art and architecture by, for and in collaboration with Aboriginal people
• Contribution of aboriginal artists to cities' urban fabric
• Encouraging architects and designers to be more engaged with Indigenous culture

Dr. Meghan Kelly, Associate Professor, Deakin University
Jefa Greenaway, Director, Greenaway Architects
Mark McClelland, Creative Director, Cultural Capital

Creating place value in our city centres

City centres are intense clusters of knowledge and play a significant role in national economies. But they are also facing significant challenges: online shopping is negatively impacting retail and flexible working means fewer people are making the daily commute. These challenges, however, are new opportunities to rethink the city: how can we make our centres more vibrant, interesting, and dynamic? Sharing insights from Hoyne’s Place Visioning® process and Volume 3 of The Place Economy series, Tom Payne will consider how we can bring new value to the city centre by reconsidering uses, reimagining spaces, and ultimately, creating more magnetic destinations.

Tom Oliver Payne, Place Strategy Director, Hoyne

How can Placemaking Change the Status Quo?

We know that placemaking is a powerful tool in bringing about positive change in the short term. Despite this many capital works projects are rolled out in conventional ways, without any thought to how to make the ‘place’ work. We are now in a post-covid world where human connection and civic projects are more important than ever. So, how can placemakers disrupt traditional citymaking processes to reconnect local people with local places and deliver outcomes that are permanent? 

This presentation will explore exemplar placemaking projects from across regional Queensland and New South Wales that use placemaking as a tool to disrupt traditional citymaking processes. Brooke will provide case studies of projects which shook up traditional built environment processes by bringing a placemaking mindset. The result? Strong communities and more sustainable places.

Brooke Williams, Director, Fourfold Studio

Digital Placemaking: Our Future in the Metaverse

Digital Placemaking is the creative use of technology to transform and redefine environments, engage with people and enhance human behaviour. 

This innovative session showcases the rise of the Metaverse and how Digital Placemaking is changing human behaviour on an unprecedented scale.

Join me on this mind boggling journey as I showcase the future of placemaking and how the Metaverse is changing our communities, art, sculpture and culture into an augmented reality like never seen before.

Emile Rademeyer, Executive Director, Creative Strategy, VANDAL

Do Smarter Cities Really Lead to Better Places?

• New technologies like big data are transforming the way we understand cities, but does it help make better places for people?
• This keynote will unpack how better data and technology can help us understand the social life and wellbeing of places.
• We'll look at case studies from cities around the world who are using data to make evidence-based, citizen-centric decisions and answer the questions you may have about big data. 

Lucinda Hartley, Founding Director, Neighbourlytics

Placemaking in Fishermans Bend – Opportunities and Challenges

• Fishermans Bend is entering a period of significant transition. Building on the areas rich history of industry and manufacturing, each of its precincts will soon become distinct mixed-use neighbourhoods focused on people and human scale interactions. 
• This presentation will explore what opportunities exist for placemaking and activation in Australia’s largest urban renewal area.

Peter Smith, Chief Executive Officer, City of Port Phillip

Starting With Place and Not Forgetting the People

• Shakespeare said “What is the city but the people?”. Why starting with place is right, why place is critical to humans in cities and why placemaking should go deeper than decoration
• Lessons learnt and updates from our journey making places across the ditch in Tāmaki Makaurau

Frith Walker, Head of Placemaking, Panuku Development Auckland – New Zealand

PANEL DISCUSSION

Placemaking and Property Development

• Potential Benefits of placemaking for developers 
• Creating more desirable communities through placemaking
• Placemaking as a winning real estate development strategy

Andrew Hoyne, Principal, Hoyne
Bec McHenry, Founder, To Good Use
Cat Burgess, Head of Frost Place, Frost* Collective
Obelia Tait, Director, Inhabit Place
Sophie Pickett-Heaps, Co-Head of Design, Stockland Design Studio

A Place-Making Paradigm for Liveable Cities & Neighbourhoods

City of Parramatta Council has one of the largest local government place-making teams with 17 place-makers creating great places from ‘concept’ to ‘curation’ through an annual $26M capital budget. Council’s Place Managers link projects, initiatives and priorities across multiple business units, but what that really means is that they’re motivated silo-busters who know how to find a ‘yes’ in a large bureaucracy. Narrative is key: they make decisions based on what they know and what they can prove, but they persuade and engage property owners, local businesses, state agencies and community groups through strong narrative. This presentation shares Council’s place-making paradigm that redefines ‘design’ from drawings to a process of discovery, places end-user acceptance as the greatest determinant of success, and champions the value-add of ‘non-scientific’ success criteria.

Bruce Mills, Group Manager – Place Services, City of Parramatta Council

Urban Waterfront Transformations through Placemaking

The last 40 years have seen massive changes in our cities caused by rapid population growth, global mobility, increasing cultural diversity, new technology and climate change. The challenges and opportunities arising from these changes has meant that cities around the world have had to look for new, imaginative and bold ways to address the challenges of the present to shape their futures. Through the lens of placemaking, this presentation explores how cities are evolving to meet these challenges by reconnecting with their waterfronts and provides key insights to unlock their potential.

Daniel Boesen, Senior Design Consultant, Urbis

Enhancing Local Public Spaces for a Growing Community

• Placemaking projects delivered and currently being delivered in Melbourne’s West focusing on lessons learnt and the collaborative journey.  

Georgina Pikoulas, Placemaking & Activation Coordinator, Wyndham City Council

Design-Led City: A Design Strategy for Brisbane

As the largest local government in Australia, Brisbane City Council recognises the value of well-designed places, spaces, buildings and structures and their collective contribution to the culture, lifestyle, prosperity, environment and health of Brisbane and its communities. Design-led City – a design strategy for Brisbane is a new corporate, city-wide strategy that seeks to achieve a people-centric approach to design, delivery and maintenance of the built environment, and ensure that all developments make a positive contribution to the community. The strategy demonstrates Council’s leadership in Australasia and commitment to design that reflects Brisbane’s character, identity and climate across all aspects of the built environment, as well as cultivating a culture across Council, industry and the community that values design quality

Omar Barragan, Manager | Design Brisbane | City Planning and Economic Development, Brisbane City Council

PANEL DISCUSSION

Placemaking and Public Lighting

• Lighting’s contribution to the creation of a high quality public realm

• Adding visual interest to public spaces through engaging, interactive lighting designs where appropriate. 

• Exploring lighting’s influence on the quality of our built environment 

• Role of lighting in creating safer and vibrant night-time economies

Anne Truong, Specialist Lighting Lead, Wrap Engineering Pty Ltd.
Dimitrios Tsiokaras, Senior Lighting Designer, Electrolight
Ian Dryden, Principal - Industrial Design, City of Melbourne
Ingrid Baldwin, Studio Director, FPOV
Tim Hunt, Melbourne Lighting Leader, ARUP

Meekarlba: Testing the water in Newcastle

Four million people live in regional capitals in Australia, and another four million surrounding residents depend upon them for education, health, employment, and goods/supply chains every day.  This is the equivalent of Sydney and Melbourne’s population combined. Yet dollar for dollar the investment in regional centres and in particular their public domains on average is ten times less than in capital cities. In the past decade, increased funding has been made available for placemaking efforts outside of capital cities across Australia. This has offered interesting opportunities for experimentation before major redevelopment as well as testing public responses to heterogenous notions of place.  This presentation will be discussing recent and current projects in Newcastle, NSW which explore placemaking outside of capital cities as a way of opening up dialogue, generating productive friction and inviting contestation in the public realm.

Professor SueAnne Ware, Head of School, School of Architecture and Built Environment, The University of Newcastle

One Minute Once Chance - Rapid Talks

From Paddock to Postcode – Placemaking in Greenfield Developments

• Around 65,000 people move to Melbourne’s outer urban growth areas each year
• Hear a local Government view on the opportunities and challenges of creating a new community
• What soft and hard infrastructure is needed to turn a paddock into a postcode?

Bronwen Clark, Executive Officer, National Growth Areas Alliance