Structure Planning
Preparing structure plans that guide the future development of towns, activity centres and precincts. Our work integrates strategy with implementation to support deliverable planning outcomes.
A good structure plan gives a community a shared, defensible, workable vision for the next 15 to 20 years, one the community helped shape that is championed by a Council. The Victorian planning system is complex, community expectations are high, and the gap between strategic intent and what is actually implemented in a planning scheme can be vast. We know how that gap can be bridged, effectively.
We have prepared structure plans across Victoria for councils and state government for decades. Our portfolio spans regional towns recovering from flood events, established suburbs managing growth pressure, industrial precincts needing strategic direction, and small communities working through questions of heritage, character, and change. Clients include Greater Shepparton, Campaspe, East Gippsland, Loddon, West Wimmera, Maroondah, Maribyrnong, Moira, Darebin, and the Department of Transport and Planning.
What We Do
A structure plan is built on evidence and inherently multidisciplinary. We bring together strategic and statutory planning, urban design, economic and land capacity analysis, heritage assessment, environmental and natural hazard review, infrastructure servicing, and community engagement, assembling the right team for each project rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach.
We begin with a thorough background report, drawing on demographic and economic analysis, land supply and demand, infrastructure capacity, environmental and heritage constraints, and hazard assessments including flooding and bushfire. Alongside the technical work, meaningful community and stakeholder engagement is central to how we operate. We design engagement processes that give communities a genuine say, while keeping the project on track and the outcomes implementable.
The final product is a structure plan that sets a clear vision, identifies strategic directions, and includes draft planning scheme amendments ready for Council to progress through the amendment process, removing the lag between strategy preparation and statutory implementation.
Recent Projects
Why Plan2Place Consulting
We are totally across the Victoria Planning Provisions and the way the planning system actually works in practice, which means the plans we prepare hold up when they’re tested. Our director Paul Buxton was instrumental in shaping the Victorian planning system’s residential, commercial, industrial and rural zones and the Activity Centre Zone. That background means we understand how planning provisions are designed, how panels assess them, and what makes an amendment stick. We don’t hand councils a strategy and leave the hard work to someone else. We specialise in implementing the plan to the place.