City of Melbourne Municipal Community Infrastructure Needs Assessment
City of Melbourne, VIC
The City of Melbourne engaged CRED Consulting to deliver a municipal-wide Community Infrastructure Needs Assessment to provide a consistent approach and comprehensive evidence base to guide social and community infrastructure planning across the municipality.
As Australia’s biggest city, Melbourne has a diverse network of community infrastructure that contribute to the identity, experience and liveability of the municipality. As a capital city it performs a critical role as a central point of access to employment, education, cultural institutions, tourism and essential infrastructure and services.
The municipal-wide Community Infrastructure Needs Assessment provides a strategic, consistent and data-driven approach to planning the spaces for libraries, recreation centres, health services, arts and culture, early years, and community gathering that people rely on every day.
The assessment brings together asset condition, fit-for-purpose assessments, utilisation, population change and emerging community needs to create a citywide blueprint for resilient, accessible and sustainable community infrastructure to 2043.
HOW WE DID IT
Planning for community infrastructure provision in a global city requires insight, consistency and vision at scale. CRED designed and delivered a comprehensive and evidence-based suite of tools to support the planning of and investment in a responsive and sustainable network of community infrastructure.
We delivered:
- A consolidated database of the community infrastructure network across the municipality comprising 370+ Council and non-Council assets that were audited to capture the extent of the network and map ownership and management responsibilities.
- Engagement with various City of Melbourne teams and adjoining councils to understand key community infrastructure needs and utilisation trends.
- Review of previous community engagement to gather place-based insights relating to different types of community infrastructure.
- Community infrastructure planning templates for 49 different types of spaces and facilities to provide a consistent and contemporary methodology for strategic community facility planning.
- A bespoke and leading practice framework to assess the level of fit-for-purpose of community facilities, which aligns with key United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) and considers aspects such as accessibility and cultural safety.
- An assessment of the level of the fit-for-purpose and utilisation for 49 different Council owned / managed buildings. This was the first time the entire network had been assessed consistently.
- An analysis of the latest resident and worker population for the municipality – by cohort, local area and overall to understand how different communities are growing and changing, but also what makes each local area unique and ‘who’ they are.
- A three-volume community infrastructure needs assessment to understand demand for different types of community infrastructure and by local area to 2043.
- An interactive dashboard that provides an overview of needs that can be filtered and viewed either by community infrastructure category, type or local area.
Image credit: CRED Consulting
OUTCOMES
The municipal-wide Community Infrastructure Needs Assessment provides the City of Melbourne with a citywide, evidence-backed and scalable framework to assess, plan, prioritise and invest in community infrastructure for the next 20 years.
Now being embedded across Council it enables better alignment between land use planning, capital works and service delivery. The outputs from this project have also provided critical input into the development of Council’s new Community Infrastructure Plan.
The interactive dashboard provides an ongoing data source to understand the supply, condition, utilisation and fit-for-purpose of its assets and to use this information to guide negotiations, improvements, investment and activation.
“This will help us confirm our approach to determine how we plan for population growth and ensure our city provides the services and spaces people need to feel connected, supported, and live well”
CITY OF MELBOURNE COUNCIL