Strategies and Policy
Developing evidence-based strategies and policy frameworks to guide growth, land use and development. These projects provide the foundation for future planning decisions and statutory implementation.
Strategic planning is only useful if it leads somewhere. We prepare strategies and policy frameworks that are grounded in evidence, shaped by engagement and designed from the outset to be implemented, through the planning scheme, through capital works, or through advocacy and place-based action.
Our work covers housing and neighbourhood character, activity centre, small towns, settlement planning, growth, industrial, waterways and environmental policy, and 20-minute neighbourhood frameworks and strategies. We work for councils and state government agencies across metropolitan Melbourne and regional Victoria.
What We Do
A good strategy starts with the right questions. We begin by understanding the planning context — what the existing policy framework says, where it falls short, and what the community and Council are trying to achieve. From there, we develop options, test them against the evidence, and arrive at clear recommendations with a realistic implementation pathway.
Our approach is integrated and multidisciplinary, bringing together strategic and statutory planning, urban design, economic analysis, heritage, housing, community engagement, and GIS and mapping expertise. We assemble the team the project needs rather than applying a standard formula.
We’re experienced at identifying the right tools in the Victoria Planning Provisions — zones, overlays, strategic directions and policy, and background and incorporated documents — and at advising on the non-statutory levers that often matter just as much: capital investment, place activation and advocacy to state agencies. Strategies we prepare hold up under scrutiny because we design them with implementation in mind from day one.
Recent Projects
Why Plan2Place Consulting
The Victorian planning system does not reward vague strategy. Policy needs to be precise, defensible, and translatable into planning scheme provisions that do what they intend to achieve. We understand how the provisions are constructed and how they’re tested at panels, at VCAT, and in practice.
The team we bring to strategy and policy work has been on both sides of the process: drafting the provisions, sitting across the table from panels, and working inside government when the reforms were being made. Our director Paul Buxton helped design the residential zones, the Activity Centre Zone, and a range of other provisions now at the heart of the Victoria Planning Provisions. Principal Strategic Planner Stuart Grigg brings nearly two decades of experience across local government, the Victorian Government, and consulting, including drafting state-wide planning scheme content and delivering significant policy reforms from within the system. Between them and the rest , they bring the perspective of people who have both built the framework and worked inside it. That background means we understand why it was built the way it was, and where its limits are. We use that knowledge to give councils strategies that are not only sound but actionable.