Resilient Melbourne

View the Community Resilience Framework

This action will develop a comprehensive community resilience framework for Victoria’s emergency management sector. This is a key action of the Victorian Emergency Management Strategic Action Plan 2015–18, a three-year rolling plan that outlines the Victorian Government’s plans for creating safer and more resilient communities. The Resilient Melbourne Delivery Office and Emergency Management Victoria (EMV) are working together to develop an approach to community resilience that is relevant to communities and the emergency management sector alike, and is practical and consistent across local governments and their communities, including business and community organisations.

The framework will be a lens through which sector-wide activities can be viewed, to ensure all activities have community benefit at their core. It will help the sector ensure that empowering communities and their leaders to develop awareness, shared responsibility and self-reliance will be part of all emergency management activities, plans, programs and systems.

EMV will map Victoria’s resilience challenges, using the Cities Resilience Framework, and highlight desired community outcomes (such as ‘protection against bushfire’ or ‘social connectedness’) against each emergency service agency’s roles and responsibilities. They will also identify which other actors are required to achieve the community outcomes. EMV will then consult on these findings, and use the responses to develop the framework and guidance for use.

The Resilient Melbourne Delivery Office will work with councils across Melbourne to coordinate a metropolitan proposal for establishing cycle paths and corridors that is both holistic in scope and tailored to local needs. This work will link closely with the Victorian Cycling Strategy, which is currently being updated and will then be implemented by Active Transport Victoria, a unit in the Department of Economic Development, Jobs, Transport and Resources (DEDJTR).

This planning and coordination initiative furthers the objectives of the Victorian Government, specifically the Active Transport and cycling commitments outlined in Plan Melbourne, by:

• pooling knowledge from researchers, government and infrastructure agencies and cycling advocacy groups
• drawing on local government and infrastructure agency expertise to plan the metropolitan bicycle path network and connect existing bicycle paths, building on existing initiatives such as the Northern Trails initiative
• encouraging local government and infrastructure agencies to build new bicycle paths.

The Neighbourhood Project will provide 12 months of capacity building, resources and mentoring to participating communities in how to turn under-used land into green spaces. This will include training in design and project management.

The Neighbourhood Project will also tackle barriers that impede community-led place-making projects, such as planning scheme requirements. It will work with councils to better understand and remove these barriers, while still ensuring that councils can fulfil their legal and public safety obligations. The action will transform 24 under-used spaces in 8 neighbourhoods into useful community public spaces, using a ‘tactical urbanism’ methodology.

The first three Metropolitan Councils to participate in Round 1 of The Neighbourhood Project included: Cardinia Shire Council, Hobson’s Bay City Council and City of Whitehorse.

Applications are now open for Round 2, offering funding of up to $20,000 to bring a community project to life. Download the information packs and sample EOI form. Accepting EOIs from 1 – 10 July, 2017.

 

Partners: Co-Design Studio, Myer Foundation

The Melbourne Apartments Project (MAP) will put home ownership within reach of more public housing tenants and provide a funding stream for the development of further similar projects. A pilot project is already under way at one site in inner Melbourne, where new two and three-bedroom apartments are being offered solely to social housing tenants who meet specific eligibility criteria. Having assessed this approach, we believe it could be replicated in a number of areas around Melbourne, and the Resilient Melbourne Delivery Office is working with partners to identify sites and funding for further developments.

The current pilot project is being run on a not-for-profit basis. This means no GST (goods and services tax) is payable and marketing costs are negligible, so properties can be offered for a significantly lower price – approximately 35 per cent below market value. An innovative financing method rewards purchasers for each of the first four years they reside in the property.

The Resilient Melbourne Delivery Office is working with the creators and financial backers of MAP to identify new locations and partners to turn an innovative pilot into something able to address a systemic challenge

This action builds on a pilot project led by the cities of Melbourne, Moreland, Port Phillip and Yarra. It will give councils a group purchasing process for buying energy from new, utility-scale, renewable power sources. It will enable councils to support the emerging renewables industry, in a way that is financially efficient, by pooling resources and tackling financial, regulatory, risk and market barriers together.

Resilient Melbourne has completed an attitudinal study that will help us to develop more effective programs to inspire and equip people to be more active in their communities. The research provided us with:

• a better understanding of Melburnians’ motivations and barriers to participating in community resilience activities
• a better understanding of the issues, needs and opportunities associated with community members helping one another
• a benchmark against which we can measure changes in beliefs and behaviours in the future.

This research will help the Resilient Melbourne Delivery Office and others (including the Community Resilience Unit) develop programs that address community sentiment and individual attitudes about taking more responsibility, and help people reach out to others, create connections and support each other in good times and bad.

Summary Report

Full Report

Monash University Disaster Resilience Initiative (MUDRI) and Emergency Management Victoria (EMV) have developed a community-based resilience compendium, which explores how different communities prepare and strengthen their response to disasters and emergencies.

Working with Resilient Melbourne, EMV and MUDRI are expanding the scope of the compendium, to take a broader view of urban resilience, encompassing not just shock events but actions and programs tackling the chronic stresses that weaken the fabric of our society. This will encourage more holistic discussion, collaboration and sharing knowledge on how to build a resilient Melbourne.

The community-based Resilience Compendium identifies and showcases leading practices and lessons learnt, facilitates networks so that communities can share and distribute community-based resilience ideas and successes to other communities, and documents evidence for building more resilient and safer communities.

Contribute a case study to the Compendium

This first element of this action is based on developing education sessions to encourage people who might otherwise be considered vulnerable to take out insurance cover, thus increasing their personal resilience. It will draw on local government networks and communication channels to reach members of the community who might not traditionally have insurance. The action will build on ‘Essentials’ by AAI Limited, an innovative insurance scheme that provides basic, affordable and accessible home and contents and car insurance to low-income individuals. Developed by Good Shepherd Microfinance in collaboration with Suncorp, ‘Essentials’ is for people who have a pension or healthcare card, receive regular Centrelink payments, or have an annual household income of less than $48,000. Customers can choose to insure their contents, car, or both, and pay their premium in annual, monthly or fortnightly instalments through Centrepay (Australian Government Department of Human Services).

Suncorp developed Essentials with a view to driving increased competition and innovation in the insurance industry, particularly around more accessible insurance offerings. The Resilient Melbourne Delivery Office will build from this platform and work with additional partners to establish new forms of insurance at various scales, including for small businesses.

The community-led neighbourhood renewal and development pilot projects will support citizen participation in neighbourhood and local infrastructure planning. In its first round, this will involve partnerships with up to five property companies. The project will include a range of development types, from multi-unit buildings to redevelopments of entire precincts, located in inner, middle and outer Melbourne municipalities. We anticipate that some of the developments will be entirely new, while others will be scheduled or already established, with developers willing to try new ways of putting residents at the heart of decision making.
Property companies and their partners will:
• Test a range of tools and frameworks, both existing (such as Green Star Communities, Ecodistricts) and new, to collaborate and share in decision making
• Measure results and report on their findings, working in conjunction with academic and other partners
• Contribute to a body of publicly available guidance on participatory planning across Melbourne.

Citymart is a global platform partner of 100 Resilient Cities.

Resilient Melbourne were successful in receiving a $50,000(USD) grant to work with Citymart to crowd-source potential solutions from around the world, in achieving two important goals simultaneously: reducing transport congestion while promoting increased positive social interactions.

Organisations, enterprises and individuals – locally and globally – were invited to propose solutions to these complex challenges across greater Melbourne.

An internationally recognised Challenge Panel is currently assessing ideas to identify a winning solution, which will be considered for implementation.

For more information, visit the Resilient Melbourne Citymart Challenge page and sign up to our newsletter.

Building on work conducted with the University of Western Sydney as part of the Australian Government’s Cooperative Research Centres Program (CRC), the Young and Well CRC will develop up to five living laboratories across metropolitan Melbourne, one in each of Melbourne’s sub-regions. The Resilient Melbourne Delivery Office will coordinate between potential partners to develop the living labs. The Young and Resilient Living Labs will bring together young people, researchers, policy makers, employers, health practitioners, parents and technology providers to investigate, design, create and test innovative technology-based strategies that equip young people to tackle personal problems and promote individual, community and social wellbeing.

The laboratories will:

• develop and test strategies for minimising harm and supporting the resilience of young people and their communities
• research the role of technologies in the lives of young people
• foster processes for generating new software, apps, initiatives and enterprises that help young people build the skills and access the services that will equip them to improve their personal wellbeing and resilience
• be a catalyst for community-based initiatives to support the resilience of young people.

LifeJourney is a social-purpose driven business that lets students test-drive future STEM careers and learn from top industry professionals through a free, interactive, online platform which in Australia is known as The Day of STEM. It links students with mentors in a secure online environment, allowing students to get a real-life appreciation of what happens in the professional world and how these executives got to where they are today. It also provides an opportunity to learn about STEM careers, develop new skills, and to understand industry challenges facing Australia now and in the future. The goal is to help students find their own passion and identify career paths that they may not otherwise have known to be available to them.

The Day of STEM platform works with top STEM-related professionals from major Australian organisations to inspire students to identify and then pursue their dreams, providing them with an educational roadmap as they begin their own career journeys. LifeJourney’s technology enables a single mentor to inspire and guide 10,000 or more students at the same time and has an ambitious target of reaching 2.5 million students across Australia, with potentially up to 1 million in Melbourne alone. The Resilient Melbourne Delivery Office is working with LifeJourney to tailor the Day of STEM service, enabling local government and other partners to help the service reach our young people who are least likely to get this guidance from any other source.

To help Melbourne’s SMEs understand their biggest business problems and vulnerabilities, and put management plans in place, the Resilient Melbourne Delivery Office will work with B Lab Australia & New Zealand to deliver ‘B Corporation’ training to SMEs. This will use the basic ‘B Impact Assessment’, which is a free online resource that helps businesses to understand their business operations and their impacts. It is therefore an affordable way for SMEs and emerging businesses to prepare for future shocks and stresses. It also provides a platform and tools for interested businesses to understand and improve the social and environmental effects of their operations.

Students from Melbourne’s business schools, working through established business training programs, will help deliver training on applying the B Impact Assessment and taking actions based on the assessment findings, giving mature and experienced students access to new networks, while providing SMEs with affordable business advice.

Port Phillip Bay is an important recreational, economic and environmental asset, not only to Melbourne but to all of Australia. Melbourne’s development has placed the bay under stress, and bayside municipalities will face an increasing number of shock events originating in the bay, such as coastal storm surges and flooding from sea-level rise.

Many of the actions required to protect Port Phillip Bay rely on a coordinated effort across councils and all levels of government. But not all areas of Melbourne fully understand how activities that occur upstream affect the health of the bay, or the threats posed by climate change.

In response, Victoria’s 10 bayside councils formed the Association of Bayside Municipalities (ABM) to coordinate their efforts. They have begun work on a regional coastal adaptation framework that will protect Port Phillip Bay’s value for tomorrow. To date, a document describing the present situation has been prepared. A discussion paper will then provide a basis for consulting bayside councils and other parties. An exploration of adaptation options will include a high-level risk screening of potential hazards and impacts.

The Resilient Melbourne Delivery Office will look to work with the ABM and its project partners to support the implementation of identified resilience building actions, including addressing the impacts of upstream regions on the health of the Bay.

Australia’s former Chief Scientist, Professor Ian Chubb, has stated that 75 per cent of the fastest-growing occupations now require STEM skills and knowledge, yet Australia lags behind many other developed countries in school-level maths and science skills. In response to these trends, the Victorian Government and other groups across Melbourne are encouraging increased STEM education.

An innovative approach led by the Northern College of the Arts and Technology (NCAT) has been successful in providing students aged between 14 and 18 with industry experience and an associate degree qualification, while supporting and inspiring them to equip themselves for the jobs of the future.

Local government connects closely with citizens, yet has traditionally had little role in education provision. As part of Resilient Melbourne, local government is exploring opportunities to build on local strong connections with TAFEs and upper secondary schools to extend the work led by NCAT into other tertiary and further education colleges and upper secondary schools across metropolitan Melbourne.

Ask Izzy was launched  March 2016, in Melbourne by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and the Lord Mayor of Melbourne, Robert Doyle.

Ask Izzy is a free, location-based mobile website that helps homeless Australians find food, shelter, health and other critical support services. On any night, one in 200 Australians are homeless; almost 80 per cent of them own a smartphone. Ask Izzy allows people to search more than 350,000 services across Australia, anonymously.

Ask Izzy has been designed by people who are or have been homeless, and developed in partnership with not-for-profit group Infoxchange, Google, realestate.com.au, News Corp Australia, and more than 20 other partners.

Melbourne is ever more complex and we need to be able to communicate with our citizens in the most effective ways, particularly in times of severe disruption. At the moment, different organisations use different channels, depending on the situation. Further, citizens are self-organising and using social media to inform one another when unexpected events occur.
As part of the IBM Smarter Cities Challenge, Melbourne is drawing on the expertise of senior IBM personnel to consider how we can make better use of technology to improve the resilience and safety of our citizens across our metropolitan region. IBM will also consider how social media information created by people in real time can help authorities respond to an unexpected event.
The City of Melbourne is one of three Smarter Cities selected in the 2015–16 cycle to receive an additional grant from Twitter. Twitter will provide access to both current and historic data relating to Melbourne, which can enable time-lapse geographic mapping of the movement patterns of city residents, analysis of citizens’ sentiments towards existing or proposed policies and programs, and heat-mapping of food-borne illnesses and other infectious diseases. Insights gleaned from this data will be incorporated into IBM’s recommendations.

We can’t always stop floods from happening, but we can plan for and manage the risks, and reduce the consequences. For this reason, the Flood Management Strategy – Port Phillip and Westernport was completed in 2015. It sets out how participating organisations will work together over the next five years to understand and better manage flood risks, support flood-emergency preparation and response, and achieve the best social, economic and environmental results. The strategy was produced by Melbourne Water, in collaboration with more than 70 organisations, including local government, and 250 individuals.
It sets the following long-term vision: ‘Together we are aware, responsive and resilient. Communities, business and government understand flooding, plan for challenges, and take action to manage risks.’
Melbourne Water is coordinating governance and implementation of actions in the strategy, with the input and participation of councils and endorsing organisations.

Migration will be the greatest contributor to Victoria’s future population growth, with an average of 48,000 people estimated to arrive annually between 2006 and 2036. Programs that provide a solid foundation for cultural integration, as well as offering opportunities for people to learn valuable language and practical skills, are essential for the safety and wellbeing of our communities.
Life Saving Victoria’s multicultural water safety and settlement program teaches water skills to refugees, new arrivals and international students, and helps them settle in to Melbourne. The initiative includes swimming lessons, beach programs, a ‘meet a lifeguard’ program in classrooms, regional open-water learning experiences, and accredited training programs. Perhaps most importantly, it gives participants the chance to establish new social networks, through the recreational, volunteer and employment opportunities it creates.
The initiative aims to remove barriers to participation, such as:
• distance or lack of transport
• cost of swimming lessons
• lack of facilities and equipment
• cultural and language differences
• lack of ‘learn to swim’ and water safety programs in schools.
Program participation is up from 1,956 people in 2006–07 to more than 13,000 people in 2014–15. All participants were reached via one of the 300 partnering multicultural agencies and organisations.
There is now an opportunity for local government to work with Life Saving Victoria to extend the benefits in more centres across Melbourne. Other emergency management agencies are also looking at how they can build on the success of this program by incorporating similar culturally inclusive approaches into their activities (e.g. grass fire awareness).

‘Refuge’ will be a research-action event where artists and disaster management professionals work with local, regional and international communities to devise responses to a natural disaster scenario. The project, to be led by artists, will involve configuring Arts House and North Melbourne Town Hall as a place of community refuge, as a rehearsal in preparedness and building community networks and connections.

Evaluation will contribute to policy on the role of artistic and cultural communities in emergency management plans, preparedness, resilience and recovery.

Over the five years of the project, Refuge will simulate four natural disaster scenarios:

• seven days of extreme heat leads to city-wide power outages and reduced access to food and accommodation
• a North Melbourne community hosts a community evacuated from Natimuk in western Victoria
• a North Melbourne community is evacuated and hosted by the Natimuk community
• a North Melbourne community hosts environmental refugees from Tuvalu.

Refuge is a collaboration between Arts House, the University of Melbourne, the Performing Studies International conference, and a range of organisations involved in emergency management in Victoria.

The Resilient Melbourne Delivery Office will participate in planned ‘Refuge’ events, share lessons across local government, and explore opportunities for running similar events.

In an effort to improve community resilience and preparedness, Victoria State Emergency Service (VICSES) and Melbourne Water joined forces to create the Flood management Strategy – Port Phillip and Westernport.

This strategy demonstrated the importance of involving groups that are often marginalised. VICSES concentrated its efforts on leaders and members of Koori and culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities, using events created by the community to build understanding and relationships within communities, rather than for them. As well as Koori projects in Maroondah and Darebin areas, relationships have been forged with Jewish, African and Islamic communities. Resources have also been developed to help volunteers communicate with non-English speaking people during emergency incidents.

The VicHealth Mental Wellbeing Strategy 2015–2019 is part of VicHealth’s campaign to improve the health and wellbeing of one million Victorians by 2023.

This strategy is informed by the CSIRO and VicHealth’s Bright Futures report, which states that focusing on people 12 to 25 years old was important part of improving mental wellbeing in the community. The report notes the importance of educating and preparing people in this age group to be resilient and adaptable in a world characterised by decreasing job security, the fluidity of globalisation and technology, increasingly diverse societies and increasing exposure to the internet.

The capacity to be autonomous, regulate one’s emotions, have self-confidence and empathy, and solve problems, are critical resilience abilities for our entire community. A priority of VicHealth’s Mental Wellbeing Strategy 2015–2019 is building these qualities in young people, so that they are integrated and self-perpetuating for decades to come.

While Resilient Melbourne supports diversifying local economies across Melbourne, our resilience as a metropolitan area also depends on a strong, accessible, central city.

Currently, Melbourne’s 15 radial suburban train lines feed into Melbourne’s central business district via the City Loop tunnel. This creates a major bottleneck in our public transport network and prevents us from increasing network capacity to serve our rapidly growing population.

In 2015, the Victorian Government announced the construction of a 9 kilometre rail tunnel from Kensington in the city’s north, to South Yarra, via the central city. The Melbourne Metro Rail Project will also deliver five new stations and cost approximately $10.9 billion, with works to begin in 2017.

Melbourne Metro will reduce the rail network’s vulnerability to failure by providing entirely separate end-to-end lines from Sunbury in the west to Cranbourne-Pakenham in the south-east. Additionally, 39,000 more passengers will be able to reach and leave the central city during the morning and afternoon travel peaks.

Greater capacity on the public transport network will reduce congestion across all modes of transport. The project will be equivalent to removing 18,000 cars from the city’s roads during the busiest hours of the day, and will provide public transport users with an alternative to taking trams along Swanston Street, currently the city’s busiest tram and pedestrian corridor.

Launched in 2010 and led by Women’s Health West, Preventing Violence Together (PVT) is the regional partnership and action plan for primary prevention of violence against women in Melbourne’s west. Involving 18 signatory organisations, the action plan was the first of its kind in Victoria, and is now being replicated across Melbourne’s regions.

Achievements of the PVT partnership include:

• working with 57 executive leaders on gender equity
• staff training on preventing violence against women in culturally and linguistically diverse communities
• developing resources, including gender audit guidelines
• advocacy, including a submission to the Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence.

In Melbourne’s southeast, the Together We Can initiative is also tackling family violence. Led by Cardinia Shire Council, Family Life and the University of Melbourne, it brings together the efforts and resources of a range of organisations, including schools, businesses, all levels of government, and the community sector. The process began with a community convention, held in late April 2016, to share what is already working well, identify what is still needed, and start finding solutions together.

A key challenge for a resilient Melbourne is developing and maintaining the infrastructure needed to support a thriving, competitive city. In pursuit of this, Infrastructure Victoria was established in 2015 as an independent statutory authority to guide decision making on Victoria’s infrastructure needs and priorities. It provides expert advice to government, undertakes research and prepares a 30-year infrastructure strategy for Victoria.
Work on the 30-year strategy, which will outline short, medium and long-term infrastructure priorities, is now under way. The strategy will cover energy, water and waste, transport, education and training, health and human services, justice, culture, civics, science and agriculture, and information and communications technologies (ICT). Consultation will occur throughout 2016, with the final strategy to be published by the end of the year.
One of the 30 draft objectives is ‘build resilience to shocks’, as unexpected events are likely to disrupt Victoria’s society, environment and economy over the coming decades. These shocks could be anything from natural disasters, pandemics, ICT disruptions, global economic crises and terrorism, to relatively minor but more frequent disruptions to transport networks.
Victoria’s vulnerability to these shocks will partly be determined by the resilience and adaptability of its infrastructure. Infrastructure Victoria’s 30-year strategy aims to ensure that Victoria’s infrastructure is able to adapt and respond positively to unexpected events. Infrastructure Victoria is working with the Resilient Melbourne Delivery Office to best align our respective efforts.

In May 2015, the Hon. Daniel Andrews MP, Premier of Victoria, announced the establishment of the Social Cohesion and Community Resilience Taskforce. Its aim is to facilitate collective action across governments, community and academia to strengthen social cohesion and community resilience, and prevent violent extremism. The Community Resilience Unit in the Department of Premier and Cabinet was established to support the Taskforce.

The Taskforce recognised that the issues are complex, difficult to understand and interconnected, and that steps taken by governments alone will not succeed. Thus the Strategic Framework to Strengthen Victoria’s Social Cohesion and the Resilience of its Communities was developed, in partnership with communities, academics, service providers, philanthropic foundations, businesses and other interested parties.

This document identifies ways for governments, communities, families and young people to work together on projects that promote social inclusion. The Resilient Melbourne Delivery Office and metropolitan councils will continue working closely with the Community Resilience Unit to strengthen Melbourne’s social cohesion. The Taskforce has been funded for four years.