Look Ahead
Community meetings summary
At the end of 2023, we asked the Lismore community to come together and dream up the future of our town.
We asked you to imagine how our current spaces could look as we adapt to meet future needs.
On February 15 and 17, 2024, many of you answered that call and generously shared your time, knowledge, aspirations, and ideas. Over the course of two meetings at the Lismore City Bowling Club, we articulated what Lismore means to us, what we love about it, what we’d like to improve and, most critically, we discussed how Lismore should step into the future.
These questions are critically important to explore together right now. The urgency cannot be overstated. We are literally rebuilding our community and in doing so creating a path forward that will guide us for at least the next few generations.
This report describes the process we went through together to organise the broad array of creative responses — from the specific to the aspirational. The meetings generated a great diversity of ideas and you’ll see some common themes emerge from the community who participated. All the content from these meetings provides a strong foundation to use as a launchpad for creating a future with purpose.
Living Lab Northern Rivers is using this process to develop scenarios for Lismore’s future that represent the hopes and dreams of the people that live and work here. It’s so important for everyone to have an understanding of where we are heading together. We acknowledge these meetings do not represent the entire community. Our community is too diverse for any one process or report to neatly capture everything.
Please read this as a summary of what approximately 180 people who chose to attend one of these conversations, produced together. It’s a proactive start to creating a future for Lismore based on community ideas. We are committed to sharing the process and its results so everyone can see the important foundations of our work.
Dan Etheridge
Engagement Director
Our most important issues
From our conversations we learned that there is very broad agreement about what issues are important, what people value about Lismore and what people’s aspirations are.
Here is our summary of the the issues with the broadest agreement that came out of the community workshops:
Regenerate and celebrate the river
Regenerate the river and reconnect the town — particularly the CBD — to it to make it easier to enjoy for recreation and as a meeting place.
Increase safe, diverse and affordable housing
Build diverse housing with increased density (in safe areas that are close to the CBD (and other areas with social and economic activity). Seize the opportunity to develop a mix of affordable house types that meet the needs of our diverse community.
Improve public and active transport infrastructure
Improve community connectivity with broader networks of pedestrian and cycle paths and public transport.
Invest in food security and urban food options
Enhance food security by supporting existing local large and small-scale food production and creating opportunities to grow and share more of our food locally.
Nurture a circular economy and regenerative industries
Use reconstruction activities to build a circular economy and become a hub for regenerative industries that serve the region and beyond.
Improve parklands, green spaces and reclaimed land
Enhance the network of parklands and green spaces and embrace exciting uses of reclaimed land for recreation.
Become a world-leading, adaptive and resilient city
As we recover and grow, ensure Lismore is recognised as a world-leading adaptive and resilient region that other disaster-affect communities come to for expert advice.
Create a flood-resilient and safe CBD
Preserve our vibrant, vital and affordable CBD, but do the work to make the buildings flood-resilient and its uses and activities safe.
Designing a path forward
Look Ahead is a co-design process that brings together local knowledge and technical expertise to plan a sustainable future for Lismore.