Placemaking living lab: creating resilient social and spatial infrastructures

The Placemaking Clarence Valley (PCV) living lab is an action research project working in partnership with communities affected by the 2019–20 Australian bushfire season. The programme trials innovations in community-led disaster resilience. The living lab reinforced the fact that the strength of place-making methods in building resilience is due to its highly relational process that activates place-based participation. Place-making aims to support community resilience planning through a socially engaged process of co-creating ideas for places, as well as through built outcomes generated from that process. Limitations existed in relation to the scale of participation reach and breadth. However, reflections on these learnings unlock answers for how creative participatory processes can be finetuned for social and ecological transformation initiatives, especially within the Australian disaster landscape. Practice relevance Place-based initiatives recognise that communities themselves are often best placed to understand their unique local needs in relation to civic resilience. The increasing adoption of place-based programmes in Australia is an acknowledgment that a collaborative and community-led focus in ‘place’ can generate shared understandings that have local relevance which in turn can unlock systemic issues and tackle challenges including entrenched disadvantage and compounding disasters. This article describes a living lab in regional Australia and considers how the co-design of places can help identify, describe, envision, and implement social and spatial infrastructures that strengthen social cohesion, social capital and resilience. Living labs in place-based initiatives are well-placed to test and rehearse community-led innovation. Co-design and place-making methodologies can provide adaptable approaches to improving civic resilience, offering alternatives to dominant top-down paradigms of post-disaster reconstruction approaches.