Background
Rapid population growth in a regional Victorian city created intense pressure on housing supply. Council faced competing demands: long-term residents feared neighbourhood character change; newcomers needed affordable options; developers sought streamlined approvals; advocates pushed for social housing targets.
Standard public consultation — surveys, open forums — produced polarised feedback that made policy direction difficult to determine.
The Intervention
A deliberative mini-public was convened over three weekends. Forty-five residents were recruited using stratified random selection to reflect the community's demographic profile. The process included:
- Briefings from planning experts, housing economists, social workers, and developers.
- Small-group deliberation facilitated using structured dialogue protocols.
- Values mapping to surface the normative commitments underlying different positions.
- Policy design workshops where participants drafted and refined recommendations.
Key Findings
Participants, who arrived with sharply different views, converged on several recommendations:
- A mandatory inclusionary zoning requirement of 15% affordable units in developments above 20 dwellings.
- Expedited approval pathways for infill development meeting design standards.
- A community land trust model for long-term affordable housing retention.
Notably, the values mapping exercise revealed that the apparent conflict between affordability and neighbourhood character was partly a communication failure: most participants actually shared both values; they disagreed about whether specific policies would advance or undermine them.
Outcomes
Council adopted the three core recommendations. The process was cited by council as a model for future contested planning decisions.
Lessons
- Random selection produced a group more representative than open-call volunteers, and participants reported higher trust in the process as a result.
- Separating value identification from policy evaluation reduced defensiveness and increased genuine deliberation.
- Three weekends was sufficient for meaningful deliberation but constrained depth; future processes would benefit from four sessions.