Mapping the Municipality

The Paradigm

Local Government is likely to be faced with ever increasing demands to be more accountable and more inclusive socially. Likewise communities are becoming more assertive in regard to their right to be informed as well as being more engaged in, and having more influence in, decision-making processes – Government's, Councils' and other public institutions' decisiuons.

Faced with such demands, Council Officers, and a Local Govt's Aldermen/Councillors, should be looking for new ways to evaluate their performance – in particular Aldermen/Councillors evaluating their own performance and the performance of their service delivers. Strategic planning documents such as planning schemes are instruments of governance and likewise they are very useful tools in this regard.

Organisations like ratepayers groups, social action groups, lobby groups, etc. are likely to be increasingly calling for, initiating, and themselves undertaking, 'Social Audits' to monitor and verify the social performance claims of Local Govt. – plus Local Govt. departments, community organisations and servicing institutions.

A Social Audit, and the Social Atlases that emanate from them, are important planning tools through which Councils can plan, manage and measure non-financial activities. They can also monitor and map both internal and external consequences of a Council’s social and commercial operations.

Social Atlases and Audits give an understanding of the administrative paradigm and the information it uses to make decisions. They do so from the perspective of the vast majority of people in the society for whom the very foundation of Local Govt is legitimised. Social Audits of administration means understanding the administrative system and its internal dynamics from the perspective of:

• What they mean for the vast majority of people;
• The people who are not essentially a part of Council or its machinery; and
• The people for whom they are meant to work for.

Increasingly Social Auditing processes are outsourced. While there are strengths to this strategy the weaknesses in the outcomes are often to do with their generic nature and the lowest common denominators that all too often inform them. There is strong case to be put that Social Audit processes in Local Govt. context needs to engage wit htheir constituencies – the Community of Ownership and Interest (COI).

Current Data Sources
Currently Council seems to rely very heavily upon the work of the ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) and its Social Atlases.


While Social Mapping has become much more sophisticated in recent times and likewise both the quantity and quality of information available from the ABS has increased exponentially over time. Nonetheless, good planning needs more and more information to meet current community demands and expectations.


Furthermore, there is a need to more actively engage with the Council's COI relative to both Social and Cultural Mapping issues.

Launceston, 25 years ago, was considered one of Australia’s least multi-cultural cities. At the time, one of the ways this was demonstrated was by the makeup of public service staff in the city – University, Hospital and Council in particular. Cultural diversity, or cultural sensitivities and sensibilities, hardly figured in planning processes of the time. Indeed in some respects there was an antithesis towards multi-culturalism.


However, the situation has changed quite dramatically for the city and especially so for the university, hospital and council. This cultural shift is not currently reflected in Launceston City Council's elected representatives – but it needs to be said that this is pretty much the case nationwide. This may be problematic in so much as planning for Launceston may not reflect the dynamics of the city's current cultural makeup and diversity.

Indeed it is some time since a cultural survey/audit was attempted for the municipality – and perhaps not looked at all from a regional perspective.

The possibility that the perception 'at Town Hall' is that planning decisions can still be made within the kind of 'old paradigm' – Eurocentric paradigm? – but it needs to be discounted in order to better reflect current sensibilities. Given that a great many of the city's culturally diverse residents are temporary residents – students, contract employees etc – are increasingly key players in the city's economy, new cultural paradigms need to be embraced within the city's planning strategies if its planning processes are to be 'purposeful.'

The Draft Planning Scheme is relatively silent in regard to the cultural dimension of the city's planning imperatives. Given that the city is increasingly less dependent upon 'industry' for its economic base, thus arguably, the city's planning needs to be increasingly 'culturally oriented' – a celebration of the city's cultural realities.

The city's 'Cultural Capital' comes into play more and more relative to the city's economic and social wellbeing. The city's growing dependence upon tourism, and cultural tourism in particular, is a demonstration of this. Against this background there is a compelling case to be put that it is timely that the city be proactive in regard to:

• Initiating local community driven Social and Cultural Audits to supplement consultant driven audits and surveys;
• Reflecting cultural imperatives in the city's planning; and
  
• Providing guidance in regard to the city's planning via its Zoning and Codes.

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