The City of Port Phillip in Victoria is using placemaking to collectively reimagine and reinvent spaces as the heart of their community. The City is using technology to strengthen the connection between people and the places of Fitzroy Street, South Melbourne and Waterfront Place via collaborative processes to shape the public realm and deliver maximum shared value.

The Love My Place project demonstrates how powerful people’s collective vision can be, helping them via engagement tools such as Visioner and Gather to re-imagine everyday spaces and see their potential anew. The City is using a separate platform from its main Have Your Say community engagement platform called Love My Place, a dedicated space for placemaking in the City.

According to the Project for Public Spaces, “With community-based participation at its center, an effective placemaking process capitalizes on a local community's assets, inspiration, and potential, and it results in the creation of quality public spaces that contribute to people's health, happiness, and well being.” Through the Love My Place project, the City of Port Phillip is attempting just that, with excellent results.

One of the benefits of employing placemaking principles at the City is in breaking down the silos of planners and decision-makers who usually govern the system. The usual system results in rigid planning processes and a system so institutionalised that community stakeholders seldom have a say. By breaking down those silos and ensuring the community has a voice for their ideas and aspirations about the places they inhabit, developers and planners can also benefit from the community’s wisdom.

We like this project because it is one of the few that takes the principles of placemaking and introduces serious collaboration with the community, as well as broadcasting vital place-based information (particularly relevant in the time of Covid-19). By creating a unique brand for the project, the City of Port Phillip made sure the project stood out, and connected with its community which is surely befitting for such a unique project.