The Better Cities Initiative prototypes new pathways, new processes, and new ways to support civic leadership in city-making.

Density done better is a prototyping project that focuses on putting people at the heart of planning.

In partnership with the New Democracy Foundation and a local Council, this project starts with a radically new way to deeply listen and draw on citizen intel through applying the Citizen Jury process to planning policy for the first time.

The Citizen Jury

The citizen jury is deliberative democracy process in which a randomly selected group of people, balanced for community demographics, come to deliberate, learn and make recommendations on a particular issue or policy question. The process typically involves several days of neutrally facilitated discussions over a number of weeks. It includes jury-selected presentations from a broad array of experts - developers and planners, landscape architects and community housing providers, economists and tenants – whom the jurors are invited to interrogate in a spirit of openness and active self-education.

Citizen-led design brief

The brief will outline the expectations, requirements and goals for better density design within the local community.  It will articulate the community’s objectives, constraints and design preferences, highlighting shared values and aspirations, and the character they believe denser neighbourhoods should deliver. This document will serve as a roadmap for design teams to offer creative solutions that meet the needs and aspirations of the community.

The prototype

From this citizen-generated design brief, The Better Cities Initiative will collaborate with design teams to imagine and test an array of 3-D solutions, collecting these into a pattern book of mix-and-match neighbourhood design options. After public exhibition, and with these pattern book designs in hand, The Better Cities Initiative will then work with a representative of NSW planning, a local developer, the Citizen Jury and the Council to develop an MOU agreement between all parties in order to create an on-the-ground prototype.