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Sue McGill, 'Healthy Environments' Program Manager, VicHealth.
The Selandra Rise Evaluation Project is a partnership between VicHealth now and RMIT and a range of other organisations.
What we went through in the initial stages was to create an evaluation, a concept
so to try to understand how can you evaluate health and wellbeing in a community master plan process.
We went through a competitive public process and RMIT, as a leader in planning and the development of communities,
won the opportunity to drive the evaluation of that project.
Dr Cecily Maller. Senior Research Fellow, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University.
Selandra Rise is a demonstration project being built in the City of Casey
and it's a demonstration project because there's a number of unique partners involved
and the idea behind Selandra Rise is to trial a whole lot of best practise planning principles
for health and wellbeing to see if the health and wellbeing of residents can actually be improved through design.
Mike Davis, Regional Manager, Stockland.
We're very much a customer-led business and understanding our customers from an insight perspective
will help our business better tailor our product options to our market
so we saw the Selandra Rise demonstration project as being a great opportunity to
more intimately understand our customers, what they demand from a community and
I guess as a developer, have an ability to better provide product that suits their needs.
Sue McGill: Now, the project itself, the evaluation is still underway.
It's a five-year research practise fellowship that VicHealth have supported through my partnership with RMIT.
What Cecily is able to do in her work is quite unique in that she's developing relationships
and evaluating the community connections that people have before they move into Selandra Rise
as well as what they develop when they're there.
So we're finding what's important to people in the development of a community so it's putting people at the centre of community planning
and what we're finding is that access to open space, to parks, to opportunities to connect with other people
through community houses and neighbourhood centres
and essentially opportunities to improve connections, physical activity, healthy eating
and opportunities to meet and gain social connections with others
are the most important things to people in community planning.
Karina Carrel, Selandra Rise resident.
To have everything so close by and such an abundance of things that are available to families and children
is really helpful to us as parents because you're always searching for new activities
and new things for children to go to or even shopping centres they have fun in
so to have those things so accessible to us where we live is great;
it's just a really great place to live.
Mike Davis: And probably with the commercial benefits of undertaking an innovative approach to residential community development
a very responsive education-based approach to understanding customer insight
and then responding with appropriate localised employment initiatives,
diverse product options and then also health and wellbeing initiatives is very much a point of difference for Selandra Rise in market.
Our competitors don't offer what we offer at Selandra Rise and we see that as a commercial advantage
and it certainly held our project in this community in good stead.
Dr Cecily Maller: I think the research will help understand what sorts of planning and design
can really make a difference to people's health and wellbeing in terms of an everyday life sense
so having places they can walk to, making workplaces and homes closer together and that sort of thing
will hopefully mean that these principles that are being tested at Selandra Rise
can be used to design and plan and deliver future communities.
Mike Davis: The research methodology that has been evolved
as far as the longitudinal study is concerned
is something that could be applied more broadly to other developments
and not necessarily within a green fields environment, certainly within an inner-city environment
or whatever the case may be, that these types of learnings could be evolved and applied to a local context.
Sue McGill: For the work that RMIT are doing in this project is essentially central to it
so VicHealth's role is to fund the evaluation.
Without the work of RMIT, we wouldn't have that evidence base that will take us
and all of the organisations including State Government and Growth Area Authority and developers
into a position where they now have evidence to ensure that the next community is as healthy as the one before
and that's the basis of that is the work that RMIT are doing,