The Rating Place project is currently at the pilot stage. This stage has trailed the methodology to co-create a Place Certification Tool through interactive workshops with placemaking practitioners and industry experts in Sydney, Melbourne and Geelong. Organised by Place Leaders Asia Pacific, the Place Agency Consortium and a local partner from each city each workshop had 20-40 participants for a total of 98 place experts engaged through the pilot stage of this project.

Participants in the preliminary workshops were asked to identify the ‘essential’ values or attributes of place as determined by their own experience. The place values were discussed among the group to determine the most important values overall with each table creating their own evaluation framework to assess these values in practice.

The highlights of this project

The outcomes of this process demonstrate that place experts place thought that a great place should have the following characteristics: a clear Identity, be Accessible, evoke a Sense of Belonging, be Sustainable, have a good and lively Atmosphere, evoke an emotional connection with the place (place attachment), and for people to feel Safe. The next stage of this process proposes to expand the number of place experts engaged across Australia and to conduct a series of community workshops to understand the unique place values for each locality. This will either trigger change or validate place valued identified by the experts. To read more aoub the results from each workshop, please access the industry reports below.

The pilot project has enabled the research team to engage with industry partners and placemaking practitioners via iterative co-design workshops to create the foundation for an ARC Linkage Grant application (2019), that will develop the evaluation framework and test it against real-world of places and communities.