海角社区

Hannah Neumayer

City of Wodonga

Hannah is currently the Team Leader of Strategic Planning at City of Wodonga. Hannah worked abroad and in Melbourne in community engagement, strategic planning and transport planning, before moving back to the regions to take up a role as the first and only Transport Planner in the North East. She has a keen interest in deliberative democracy and community education as the key to successful planning projects. Hannah is dedicated to spatial justice, particularly how this plays out on our streets, and will talk to you longer than you think she could about bike parking.

‘MOVE: The Albury Wodonga Integrated Transport Strategy’: a 'document, deliberate and deliver' approach to strategy development

Business as usual strategy development often takes the ‘decide, deliver and defend’ approach; a consultant writes a strategy that, when put to the community appears done and dusted, resulting in a lack of community investment and therefore relevance and uptake. With Albury Wodonga’s Integrated Transport Strategy, a different approach was taken: ‘document, deliberate and deliver’. This presentation takes the audience through a new way of strategy development that aims to really engage the community, and therefore produce a more robust and accepted strategy.

In Albury Wodonga, Australia’s second most car dependent city, many challenges arose when developing an Integrated Transport Strategy for two Council’s under the Two Cities One Community banner. How to encourage active travel in a car-centric regional town? How to broach the topic of the consequences of getting a rock star car park? How to tackle public transport across a border, where two states run separate networks in one community?

It was hoped this approach would lead to a smooth adoption and uptake of a strategy, however the outcome was a surprise. One Council approved the Strategy, the other one didn’t. New challenges and questions now come to the fore regarding transport planning in a regional area, politics, community engagement, resourcing and cross-border logistics.