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Ageing Strategies

URPS has prepared ageing strategies for councils such as Port Augusta, Broken Hill and the City of Onkaparinga to enable these councils to proactively respond to increasing proportions of older people in their communities. These projects reveal that an ageing population impacts on every aspect of a Council's operations from infrastructure provision, asset maintenance, customer and information services, through to community development and planning.

The State Government's policies encourage people to 'age in place', but what if the house you live in cannot easily be adapted to meet your changing needs? Two strategic responses to this are emerging. First, the introduction of planning policies and incentives for developers to include a proportion of adaptable housing that meet accessibility criteria in new development. Second, an increased provision of smaller dwellings and group housing in established areas so that, if older people are unable to age in place, they can at least age in their neighbourhood and so retain access to familiar services and support networks.

Ageing strategies also assist in identifying and strengthening existing partnerships, as well as building new relationships between service providers from all spheres of government, non-government organisations and the private sector.

The Minister for Urban Development & Planning released the Ministerial Mount Barker Urban Growth Development Plan Amendment (DPA) in June 2010 for public consultation. This DPA proposes to rezone approximately 1300 hectares of rural land on the edges of Mt Barker and Nairne for residential and light industrial use.

With the aim of ensuring that its community was well informed and empowered to comment on the Ministerial DPA, the District Council of Mt Barker engaged URPS to run a series of information sessions for the local community. These six sessions were extremely well attended, with more than 300 people able to hear about and ask questions regarding the Ministerial DPA process and how to go about getting involved in this part of the planning system.

In a letter to the editor of the Mt Barker Courier, Jean Lovell of Nairne said that "Mt Barker Council is to be congratulated for its commitment to proper community consultation" and that URPS was "highly professional and responded in detail to questions in an articulate, honest and informed manner".

This is evidence of the success of these types of community information sessions and the goodwill and engagement that Mt Barker Council has fostered with its community through the process. We also believe that this type of process leads to informed and valuable input from the community to key planning initiatives such as this Ministerial DPA."