When: 12.00 – 1.00pm, Thursday 8 October, 2009
Where: Room 516, Level 5, 207 Bouverie Street
Presented by Theonie Tacticos, McCaughey Centre: VicHealth Centre for the Promotion of Mental Health and Community Wellbeing, Centre for Health Policy, Programs and Economics, and Centre for Health and Society, Melbourne School of Population Health, The University of Melbourne
Australia, like other developed countries, has tendencies for socioeconomic disadvantage to concentrate in particular locations. This has led to a range of place based initiatives that aim to ‘renew’ poor areas. Renewal efforts are characterised by an understanding that causes of disadvantage are complex and require coordinated responses including government policy and service coordination; investment in social, physical, and economic infrastructure; and work in partnership with local service providers and residents. This approach is often characterised as involving ‘top down/bottom up’ processes in which centralised government policies and local level efforts combine work cooperatively to produce desired outcomes for places. However, placebased renewal efforts have had mixed success and this is partly due to a lack of understanding of how ‘top down/bottom up’ approaches work.
This seminar will present some of the findings from Theonie’s doctoral research project which uses the Victorian Neighbourhood Renewal (NR) strategy as a case study to explore a place-based approach that uses top down/bottom processes to reduce disadvantage. The study was conducted in two metropolitan NR sites: Doveton, an outer suburban broad -acre site where 12% of the housing stock is public housing; and Fitzroy, an inner-city high-rise estate of 100% public housing stock. Interviews were conducted with residents, NR workers and local service providers in both sites; as well as with personnel in the Government department responsible for implementing the NR strategy.
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