What should planners, architects and development professionals learn from Redfern-Waterloo?

I am not an Architect, by training I am a Sociologist. For the last 20 years, as spokesperson for community group REDWatch, I have facilitated community voices around the redevelopment of Redfern Waterloo in NSW with architects, planners, consultants, developers and a conga line of bureaucrats tasked with fixing our area.

When we got our own Minister and Authority in 2004 the government owned one third of Redfern Waterloo. It took planning control over Redfern’s Aboriginal heartland on The Block that was not government land, as well as the State Heritage Listed Eveleigh Railway Workshops, and other surplus government land. Also in its sights was most of our areas 4,311 public housing units and houses.

Here are a few things we have learnt from shaping public opinion that might help architects.

Understand the context and what has gone before

Before you turn up in a community do your homework on the community. REDWatch website holds a lot of this information for our area and is valued as a result. Look at reports from community centres, subscribe to email lists from local organisations. If there have been prior studies on the area then read them and read the submissions to understand people’s concerns, don’t rely on the sanitised “Response to Submissions” reports, people seldom find what they said there.

Aboriginal context is important in our area, as is their call for the delivery of practical outcomes like Aboriginal Affordable Housing.

Help Build Capacity to Participate

Building capacity is key to what we do and it is a two-way street. The community needs help to understand what is being proposed in planning speak and also what it can influence. The proponent and its consultants need help to understand the local context and to talk with the community.

We provide and support community controlled sandpits to hear from proponents and allow people to articulate their concerns back to proponents. We bring in your own experts, like Peter Phibbs for workshops on Planning for Non Planners, so tenants know more about planning and can better formulate their questions and submissions. It also helps them when they take their concerns to the media.

Think of the community as your client and be informed by them

For public housing redevelopments in particular you have existing communities that need to be involved not just vacant industrial or green-field sites. People like the current tenants will be in your new buildings. Those communities have a lot of experience, local knowledge and expertise that you can draw upon. They also have aspirations for their community which you can help deliver.

Understand that social impacts matter and have to be addressed

Public housing tenants want safe places where they can have peace and security in a housing of last resort system under strain. How does what you do as an architect deliver safety when it also depends on what happens with building and tenant management and the level of human service supports available to people with complex mental health, drug and alcohol, trauma and other complex issues?

Transparency matters

Treat all the players equally so everyone knows what is happening and is on an equal footing. REDWatch puts out the same information on our website and email lists to the Minister, the industry and to the community. For new developments the first public meeting we request is when the application for study requirements is submitted.

Know the players and stakeholders

Redevelopment is complex with lots of moving parts, and lots of places of intersection of interests for possible cooperation and influence not just in formal submissions. You need to get behind the project Comms team and build relations with key players even if that is on a Chatham house rules basis. You need to identify all the government, community and institutional stakeholders in the area and make sure they know what is happening.

Build Alliances of influence

We are not just about building capacity and trusting in submissions, we are there to build alliances and influence the process.

For example, as our sites are controlled by state government, we work closely with both Councillors and City of Sydney staff to keep them informed about what we know but also drawing on their expertise and their ability to lobby for what we want to see from Council, the state government and bureaucracy.

We have helped establish a Waterloo Human Services Collaborative of government and NGOs to work on the current people supports. This also helps put pressure on the redevelopment to take Health and Social impacts more seriously than they have in the past.

We have an alliances of state and local NGOs that have a stake in what is happening. We work also with researchers, journalists and academic and a wide range of other organisations.

Hopefully this brief overview gives you some ideas as to how architects can also shape and lead public opinion.

Source: Geoff Turnbull’s contribution to Australian Architecture Conference 2025 panel on “Shaping Perspectives: How Architects Lead Public Opinion”