Community Infrastructure Strategy
The City of Canning's Community Infrastructure Strategy guides the City's planning and delivery of community infrastructure.
The CIS aligns with the Strategic Community Plan (SCP) 2021-2031 and, together with the Asset Management Framework, will provide a robust decision-making tool for prioritising community infrastructure investment.
What is Community Infrastructure?
Community infrastructure includes the building and spaces that provide services opportunities to support individuals, families and groups to meet their social needs and provide places to improve their overall health and wellbeing.
The scope of this document suite includes one overarching Community Infrastructure Strategy (CIS) and 14 CIS Types:
CIS Type – Public Libraries
Public libraries are built community facilities that provide access to a range of physical and digital resources and services, including book collections, public computers, learning programs, and meeting spaces.
CIS Type – Aquatic Facilities
Aquatic facilities are typically large community infrastructure that focus on aquatic elements for health, fitness, training, competition, and learn-to-swim programs.
CIS Type – Community Halls and Centres
Community halls and centres are multi-purpose facilities hired to community, commercial and family groups. They provide a variety of activities and services, such as community meetings, social gatherings, celebrations, performances, exhibitions, sports events, youth activities and educational classes.
CIS Type – Indoor Sports and Recreation Centres
Indoor sport and recreation centres are facilities designed to cater for individual and group physical activities that take place indoors. These facilities provide a safe, all year round environment for a range of activities, such as team competitions and training, individual sport and recreational pursuits, play and fitness activities, and casual hire.
CIS Type – Active Sports Facilities and Reserves
Sports facilities support the use of active sports reserves. There are many sporting codes represented across the City, with differing requirements. This document aims to give clear guidance when considering sports clubs and groups, planning renewal, upgrades or construction of new facilities across the City.
CIS Type – Youth Centres
Youth Centres are dedicated spaces where young people can engage in recreational activities, seek support, and develop important life skills. They are typically aimed at those aged between 12-25 years and staffed with Youth Workers, who support young people through a variety of activities and offer a safe, consistent presence.
CIS Type – Action Sports Infrastructure
Action Sports Infrastructure primarily includes facilities for skateboarding, BMX biking, and scooter riding, as well as infrastructure for mountain biking.
CIS Type – Scouts and Guides Facilities
Scouts, Girl Guides, and similar groups (such as Navy Cadets), are youth organisations with similar goals. They aim to help young people develop important life skills, values, and social connections that enable them to make a positive impact on their community.
CIS Type – Men's Shed
Men’s Sheds (also known as Community Sheds) are community organisations or spaces where people, typically older men, can come together to engage in various activities, socialise and pursue hobbies and interests.
CIS Type – Sports Lighting
The provision of quality sports lighting is integral when planning sport and recreational pursuits on City parks and reserves. Community sports lighting infrastructure allows reserves to be utilised safely for extended periods of time for training, match play and for recreational pursuits outside of the structured sporting environment.
CIS Type – Creative Arts
Creative arts Infrastructure is a building, place or space the primary purpose of which is to house or support the making or presentation of an artistic product.
CIS Type – Playgroups
Playgroups Infrastructure are facilities and spaces designed to cater to young children, typically from infancy to around eight years old under adult supervision. These facilities play an important role in providing a safe, nurturing, and developmentally appropriate environment for young people and their caregivers.
CIS Type – Seniors Centres
Seniors Centres are facilities and spaces designed to provide social connection and engagement for older people (within the City of Canning those over 55 can become members of the City’s seniors facilities).
CIS Type – Athletics Infrastructure
The sport of athletics is made up of a variety of events comprising running (sprints, middle distances, cross country etc.), jumping (high jump, long jump and triple jump), throwing (shot put, javelin, discus etc.) and walking.
Strategic direction
The CIS will inform the City decision-making as it relates to current and future community infrastructure.
It is a guiding document for decision-makers, asset and service managers, developers and the users of our community assets. The strategic directions will guide the necessary provision of community infrastructure to meet the needs of current and future communities within the City of Canning.
The Strategic direction image outlines how the Plan integrates and aligns with the City’s existing plans and strategies.
Evaluation
The costs of maintaining and delivering community infrastructure is significant and the resources available are limited. This means that work programs and projects will be prioritised based on research and their contribution to CIS outcomes.
A Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA) has been developed that allows comparisons between community infrastructure priorities by measuring them against standard criteria. It is able to provide relative rankings of options that are agile, transparent and defensible to enable informed decision-making.
The MCA uses principles, criteria and weightings to rank and compare options.
This criteria will guide the City’s investment into the projects and work programs that provide the highest alignment to the principles and deliver the highest community benefit.
As we move forward
The MCA not only empowers the City to guide projects and work programs but will also enable residents to propose projects beneficial to the community.
To ensure transparency, the City will facilitate this process through an initial submission form, leading to detailed discussions with City Officers. These detailed discussions will allow the City to evaluate proposed community projects using the MCA framework. These projects will be assessed and compared with CIS outcomes.
If you have a project related to any of the Community Infrastructure types mentioned above, please fill out the submission form:
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