Co-constructing the peri-urban: making space for community imaginings of rurality alongside regional strategic visions

Planners use vision statements to persuade the community of a preferred future trajectory of development and growth. These visions, with spatial and temporal settings and events involving actors, replicate stories. Through listening to these stories, the audience is able to both make sense of the past and prepare for the future (van Hulst 2012). This research adopts this view of planners as storytellers and takes a particular vision statement of an alternative future for a peri-urban region of Victoria and assesses its success in being persuasive and constitutive. The case study area consists of seven Local Government Areas in Victoria, including municipalities along major transport routes up to Bendigo as well as those on the outskirts of Melbourne. This region is known as the 'peri-urban' and is the subject of current debate around appropriate development that maintains agricultural productivity, landscape character and natural resources (Buxton et al. 2008, Buxton et al. 2011). Unprecedented growth in these regions is causing concern to communities, academic experts and planners alike. This research aims to bring a vision statement to residents, community groups and planners in the study area. It seeks to make space for their interpretations of the vision, and the future of their region, alongside that of the dominant planning narrative represented by the vision. It seeks to determine where their visions intersect with those expressed in the statement and whether there are critical disagreements. It is hoped that through this process of counter-narration, the community will offer suggestions of how best to plan for the future of their environments. Drawing on the theory of imaginaries, this report recognises the multiple and diverse narratives that exist in the peri-urban, both within the dominant planning stories and in the community itself. Without a normative vision, or a coherent foundational narrative (Sandercock 2003) of a resilient peri-urban, agreeing on a univocal or meta-narrative for these regions might not be possible. The intention of this research is to make space for pluri-vocal narratives alongside a regional strategic vision in the hope that a degree of cross- III pollination will occur that could assist planners understand better the lived-in experiences and community aspirations of the peri-urban