Movement and Place is aimed at achieving efficient investment by thinking about the built environment holistically including the social, environmental, and economic context.

The Practitioner’s Guide to Movement and Place sets out the desired alignment of projects relating to roads and streets and their adjacent land uses. It provides a method and common language that can help practitioners to deliver the shared outcomes set out in the Future Transport Strategy, Connecting to the future: Our 10 Year Blueprint and Better Placed: An integrated design policy for the built environment of NSW.

Projects aiming to support the policies set out in these strategic documents need to demonstrate how they contribute to achieving these shared outcomes. Project teams are encouraged to document their process in an assessment report and provide supporting analysis, including listing the features or actions that support the outcomes. Using the Movement and Place reporting template to document the process can help project teams with subsequent assurance and development assessment processes.

Understanding the broader context

Understanding the broader context can help practitioners and decision-makers to ensure the vision and objectives of a project or plan are strategically aligned and deliver intended outcomes.

For evaluating the alignment of a plan or project with strategic policy, decision-makers need to be given sufficient information to understand:

• the strategic and geographic context of the study area, including spatial constraints
• the social and cultural, environmental, and economic factors that influence the study area
• existing documented aspirations, policies, strategies, and plans relevant to the study area
• the planning intent and case for major investment in the study area
• the current local policy context for the area, and any changes in the local context that may have occurred since the plan or policy was created.

Information and scrutiny should be proportional to the long-term permanent impacts of projects. A reversible temporary intervention to test a response, or local intervention, may be less rigorously evaluated than a large-scale permanent change.

Maps are a vital method of communicating complex spatial information. Emphasis should be given to mapping strategic information at the same scale and, where possible, overlaying that information to reveal considerations, conflicts and confluences. For example, a single map that overlays current and future precincts (for instance growth areas or clusters set out in a local strategic planning statement), and current and proposed transport routes across the project boundary, will help to identify key issues and considerations relating to local integration of movement and place.

Supporting Future Transport

Projects need to support the policies presented in Future Transport and Our 10 Year Blueprint: