Leederville Connect
Leederville Connect is a voluntary business and residents’ association committed to making Leederville an amazing place to live and work.
Leederville is 3km from the CBD of Perth, Western Australia. It is transitioning from being an old inner city residential area to being a high density urban fully urbanised area.
In 2017, as major new developments were planned for Leederville and the City of Vincent were developing a new town planning scheme, Leederville Connect’s Design Group started a project to design Leederville for the benefit of its users – the people.
This process was called Design Resources.
UX2 is about upgrading the work that Leederville Connect did in the Design Resources.
Our intention is to produce a fully functional urban centre with an internationally recognised User eXperience.
Design Resources and UX
Between 2018 and 2020 over thirty volunteer design professionals, local and state government officers, developers and community members worked together to design interventions that would make Leederville a city that is good for humans. The output became know as the Design Resources.
The Design Resources are well defined thought-leadership and detailed design interventions that we considered were needed to build Leederville into a world class example of sustainable urbanism.
The Design Resources integrated into the Leederville User eXperience plan.
This work won the 2021 Place Leaders Asia Pacific Award for Place Governance and provided major input to the City of Vincent’s new town planning scheme (Precinct Structure Plan).
We developed a unique process that brought citizens, developers, local government and designers together to create the Design Resources and UX.
A unique process
The Design Resources process started by gathering over 120 good ideas about what is needed to make Leederville amazing. These ideas emerged during our street parties, discussions in bars and in more formal discussions.
We then developed criteria to evaluate these ideas:
- Wellbeing – Does the idea promote the wellbeing of people, place and the environment.
- Fun – does the idea help Leederville become a fun place to be.
- Equity – does the idea open up opportunities for everybody.
- People Centred – does the idea bring the focus onto people rather than buildings and infrastructure.
- Local and Diverse Economy – does this idea add to the local economy and make it resilient.
- Re-Imagining Leederville – does this idea shape Leederville into a place that is ready for the future.
The most important ideas were then workshopped with the Design Resources team to arrange them spatially into the UX plan.
In June 2021 Prof Peter Newman interviewed David Galloway and Anna Kelderman about the process we used to design cities for the benefit of the users.