Measuring Urban Change Readiness: Insights and Implications

Cities in Australia are expanding and transforming quickly. To ensure sustainable and equitable change, it's essential to consider the effects of these changes on our communities.

As part of the first stage of the  Step-Change Cities Partnership, Studio THI recently conducted a comprehensive analysis of urban growth and change in Australia. This analysis included 780 individual responses to our Urban Change Readiness survey across four Local Government Areas (LGAs). The findings are used to create the Urban Change Readiness Index, which reveals a wealth of information on location specific urban change literacy, place attachment and re-attachment, confidence in the urban development system, and citizenship.

The Index provide us with a better understanding of how our communities are responding to urban change. It can help us to identify areas where we need to improve our planning and management of change and they can help us to develop strategies to build community support.

The full report of this analysis can be found here.

Urban Change Readiness Parameters

Our definition of Urban Change Readiness encompasses several crucial domains and indicators. These included understanding and awareness of projected population growth and urban change, sustainability strategies like the 20-minute city, and the identification of the challenges and benefits of urban change. The Urban Change Readiness Index measures the level of trust in government, developers, and elected officials to deliver change effectively, and citizens' participation in urban change.

The LGAs involved are all in areas preparing for or undergoing significant growth and urban change: Ballarat, Hume, Penrith and Cairns. An important outcome of this process was the creation of an urban change narrative for each LGA, an invaluable tool for informing community, staff, and stakeholder information and education initiatives.

Key Findings

Readiness Challenge: Our growing communities face an urban change readiness challenge, characterised by a lack of population growth awareness, limited understanding of the need for urban consolidation, minimal participation in urban change discussions, and low trust in the urban development system.

Shared Strengths: Communities share some strengths to build readiness, including openness to growth and change, support of foundation planning strategies like the 20-minute city concept, trust in local government leadership and a desire to participate actively in shaping future urban landscapes.

Different Priorities: Growing communities have diverse priorities and knowledge gaps, which significantly influence the focus of initiatives to build readiness. We need to understand LGA-specific priorities and develop nuanced change responses.

Index Benefits: Implementing the Urban Change Readiness Index specifically for each LGA creates actionable insights, positively shifts community sentiment by up to 57%, builds a transition leadership mindset and frames a tailored change narrative.

The Consistent Conclusions

The overall Urban Change Readiness across the four LGAs was observed to be low to medium. Among the consistent findings, we found that participants with higher awareness of population projections and strong place attachments were more supportive of increasing density in established areas. This implies that improving awareness about the necessity of urban change, coupled with fostering a stronger connection to place, could bolster support for sustainable urban development strategies.

However, certain weaknesses were noted across all LGAs, and it’s evident we face readiness challenges.

These include low awareness about projected population change and growth, limited understanding of the risks of greenfield development on the edge of cities, low participation in consultation activities, and a lack of trust in the system to manage change effectively.

In fact, the Index shows that half the participants surveyed were unaware of upcoming growth in their LGA and more than 50% of respondents did not see any issues with the continuation of accommodating growth through developing detached housing on the edge of the city.

It is also evident we are basing much of our community sentiment views on a small proportion of the population, with less than 15% of participants surveyed having taken part in any urban change conversations in the past three years.

On the bright side, there were strengths too, such as support for the 20-minute city concept, a high level of citizenship, and significant trust in elected local officials to communicate and manage urban change well. 

More that 75% of participants viewed the 20-minute city concept as “important and attractive” in shaping how cities grow.  However,  only 18% were aware of the concept before completing the survey.

All councils were pleasantly surprised by the level of community support for urban consolidation and increased density. Urban infill and consolidation scenarios were overall viewed as ‘sensible but challenging’.  Interestingly across many of the LGAs the number of participants who viewed these scenarios as ‘comfortable’ and ‘desirable’ often exceeded the number of participants who viewed the scenarios as ‘unthinkable’.

Key recommendations

Assess Urban Change Readiness: An evidence-based study of community readiness for urban change should be integral to planning and broader strategy development processes.

Localise strategies: The development and implementation of local-level preparedness strategies is a critical tool to support urban transition.

Prioritise education: Education initiatives should be the cornerstone of any preparedness strategy and should prioritise community, agency staff and elected member learning.

Invest for Local Action: As a sector we need to collectively invest in building our system’s urban transition leadership skills, tools and resources to support local-level action.

The Differences That Matter

While the similarities provided a general overview, the differences across the four LGAs demonstrated that urban and community change management strategies are not one-size-fits-all. Each LGA, place, or major project must be understood in its unique context to formulate effective change management strategies.

For example, the degree of support for increasing density in established areas varied, with Hume showing the highest support at 69%, followed by Penrith at 59%, and Ballarat at 58%. The benefits communities hoped to see from urban change also differed among the LGAs, reflecting their distinct priorities.

Where is the Trust? 

The Index found that generally there is low trust in the urban development system and significantly, trust sits predominantly with councillors and local government. A notable difference was observed in the trust placed in private developers, which was considerably higher in Hume, likely due to the presence of many long-term master-planned estates. 

Knowledge Disparities

Every community has its own unique needs and areas where more information is needed. This means we have to understand what's most important for each LGA and develop tailored plans to address these needs. For instance, the community in Hume values diverse views, while in Ballarat, the focus is on ideas for handling growth.

The Road Ahead

As we look forward to the next 25 years, Australian cities must navigate significant changes, including a growing population, net-zero targets, housing affordability, and climate change. To address these, we must give equal focus to the cultural change required, as well as the technical aspects of these changes.

Using the Index particularly sparked discussions within partner organisations about managing urban change and the Index results highlight the need for the urban development sector to address subjective aspects of change. These include increasing awareness and ownership of the need for urban consolidation, building trust in the system and enhancing our transition leadership capabilities. This requires the sector to consider how change management disciplines can be built into established planning and development processes as well as ongoing operations. Our research has found that LGAs who involved their councillors and staff in using the Index began to focus more on preparing their communities for change. Key steps in this shift included participating in defining participant recruitment criteria and completing the survey themselves.

Our Urban Change Readiness Index is a tool designed to help agencies plan and implement cultural change. It reveals a community's stance on urban change before and after educating them about the need for change, potential solutions, challenges, and benefits.

Our aim is to use the findings in the report to develop initiatives that translate evidence into action.