What do communities value? And what is their lived experience?
The huge shifts being felt by communities from a combination of pandemic and climate change is resulting in a period of demographic and economic disruption that is alarming, fascinating and full of opportunity. Here are a few observations.
Shift to the regions
The regions have been asking for ways to keep young people and attract more people and skills; now that it’s happening, they’re struggling with housing supply and service provision. They are unprepared. How can they rapidly advocate for infrastructure spending and put plans in place to grasp this opportunity?
Loss of overseas migrants
Australia’s engine for population growth has stopped (but is slowly returning). We’ve experienced an experiment. How to we breach the skills gap? How do we reintroduce overseas students?
Loss of land supply through climate change
Large swathes of land we have settled on are becoming uninhabitable with fire and flood. How do we rapidly respond to this?
Shift in the role and function of our CBDs
The WFH phenomena is undermining the massive infrastructure investments we have made in radial cities. Do we adapt the geography of our infrastructure spend to reorient to multi-centric cities
Changing role of the states
Much of this driven by the geographic and economic characteristics of each state and how they are responding to many of the factors outlined above. Where are the opportunities?
And yes, there’s new census data to the rescue.
But we’re not just relying on that. Increasingly community builders will look to subjective data to understand the lived experience of communities in place.
Within all this disruption, what do communities value? What is their lived experience? And what needs to happen to advance quality of life at the local level?
Ivan
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