Creating community: high-amenity and high-liveability development

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Local developers with a local focus are adding to the local identity.

Richard Gibbs View Profile

In the drive to build community across Australian cities, towns and suburbs, developers play an integral role. Local developers with a local focus are adding to the local identity – they create places that welcome a sense of belonging, spaces for locals to linger. The built environment can be a constructive force for social change and the property industry is uniquely placed to invoke a sense of community that will maximise social value. A vital step to measuring social value starts with speaking to the people who will ultimately benefit.

Community-centred developments based on engagement and evidence-based decisions tend to leave a more positive imprint on our landscape as people become part of the process and feel in control of their environment. With more buyers looking to live in apartments and townhouses there’s an expectation that community is worth something.

We’re starting to see non-market factors – social inclusion, health and wellbeing – begin to have real value attached to them. We’re developing ways to value benefits beyond the usual metrics, using formulas like Social Value and the more stakeholder informed Social Return on Investment, both of which have been developed from traditional Cost-Benefit Analysis.

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Whole communities can be born out of well-planned mixed-use developments.

Richard Gibbs View Profile

Whole communities can be born out of well-planned mixed-use developments. Investing in critical social assets like hospitals can create a similar vibrancy, catalysing wider community economic activation by creating homes for specialists, practitioners and their families nearby. Such precincts also encompass greater levels of social value capture: for example, by providing the resources for the development of community-based health care programs.

There are also added health and environmental benefits of high-density living, with increased walkability to local amenities and services like supermarkets, medical facilities and schools. Residents are encouraged to leave their cars behind, meet their neighbours and immerse themselves in the local community.