Gold Coast City Council(2008)





Labrador Community Hub

Redevelopment of a former gymnasium, church, manse, shed and surrounding spaces into a new community hub for the Gold Coast.



Outcomes

  • Combined with the adjoining parklands, the entire precinct offered great potential for redevelopment as a community hub.
  • Plan C teamed up with Architectus and Rider Levett Bucknall to offer a highly integrated engagement and embedded design process to ensure the needs of community service groups who used or had an interest in the development of the hub were transferred into workable conceptual design responses for the indoor and outdoor spaces, under a collaborative engagement and design model.
  • Plan C engaged with a very broad cross section of interested community and government agencies, representing community, education, sport and recreation sectors, interest groups and individuals servicing target groups and clients within Labrador and beyond. We also embedded an Enquiry by Design process within our community engagement – which delivered a more sensitive and workable design scheme as designers create more responsive concepts by having an improved insight into stakeholder needs.

key success factors

A total of approximately 40 interested groups and individuals were engaged in the consultation process, representing a very broad cross section of the community, education, government, sport and recreation sectors, interest groups and individuals servicing target groups and clients within Labrador and beyond.

Stakeholders were notified about the project and engaged in face to face interviews, small group workshops or telephone interviews. In addition, a community information session was held with the broad community at the commencement of the project and a large number of community sector providers and interested persons attended an information session to provide input to the redevelopment process.

Following this initial stage of engagement, a broad list of needs and spaces was developed and an initial concept plan was developed by Architectus in collaboration with Plan C and GCCC officers. Stakeholders were then invited to attend a two stage Enquiry by Design workshop series.