Place Intelligence worked with the team at Campbelltown Council to support the impact assessment of major investment and placemaking initiatives.
Challenge
Campbelltown City Council, a local government municipality in Sydney’s south-west, wanted to develop a series of place performance indicators to evaluate and quantify the economic and cultural impact of temporary infrastructure and activation programs on the city’s main pedestrian street.
The place activation program was a state government grant-funded initiative, giving councils the opportunity to test and trial innovative place activations during Covid-19. Campbelltown needed to present a business case to the state for more permanent changes.
Campbelltown is located in the greater Macarthur region, a declared priority growth area in Sydney’s Western Parklands. With the new Aerotropolis at its centre, the region had attracted more than $20 billion in government funding for critical transport infrastructure.
Campbelltown had been working through a number of urban redevelopment and infrastructure business cases, which articulated the city’s broader strategic ambitions to transform the city into a major economic and transport hub.
Engagement
Our work had to serve two functions the immediate need to quantify and validate the impact of the Queen Street activation program; and to address increasing demand for access to big data and place benchmarking. A number of Campbelltown’s government departments required access to the data, including the city delivery, development and growth teams.
The demand for a self-service mechanism led to the expansion of our scope of engagement. We developed a number of interactive dashboards for Campbelltown City Council to quantify key metrics and place performance over time.
To support Campbelltown’s existing measurement framework and place KPIs, we developed indicators for activity, place use and economic performance. To enhance council’s community and stakeholder engagement, we collaborated with the University of Western Sydney on social and demographic research, which centred on audience segmentation and using big data to measure community voice at scale.
This work led to greater insights into the local community’s response to the main street activations, as well as providing valuable data on the catchments Campbelltown’s events programs were servicing. A number of Campbelltown employees participated in our data coaching program, which provides the training, tools and framework to use data with impact.
Data literacy and advocacy is core to our practice, and the Place Intelligence team continues to invest in the development of an active community of practitioners with our toolset, skillset and mindset approach to advocacy.
“Working with Place Intelligence has really opened up a whole range of opportunities about what sort of information we can access. It’s a completely different experience when you look at the place and its data together.”
Jessica Noyes, Reimagining Campbelltown Lead
Studies
- Our team built a multi-year precinct index, delivered as interactive data dashboards on the Place Intelligence Data Studio.
“We’ve got this great data set we can use to inform business cases, project plans, and designs, and we’re still exploring all its possibilities. It’s giving us a way to unpack and analyse existing projects and new proposals, and better respond to community demands.”
Jessica Noyes, Reimagining Campbelltown Lead
Impact
- The development of a dynamic intelligence dashboard, for real-time analysis and insights to enable ongoing place performance analysis into the future
- Custom-built dashboards were used to develop diverse precinct redevelopment plans, wayfinding, transport strategies and support ongoing place activation initiatives
- Insights were used to validate the NSW State government spent on the city’s place activation strategy
- Place Intelligence data was used to build the business case for a new precinct.
- Place Intelligence data was used to inform Campbelltown’s place-based transport and infrastructure capital plans and building prioritisation.
- Council continues to use Place Intelligence data to guide and review policy decisions, for the development of business cases, and to provide impact assessment data to stakeholders and the broader community.
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