Fishermans Bend and Jacksons Hill show how strategic direction, design, engagement and early investment can restore confidence in a place’s future, and why that confidence must be maintained through delivery.

Fishermans Bend and Jacksons Hill are very different urban renewal precincts, in scale, character and complexity, yet both show how heavily urban renewal depends on confidence. Communities need confidence that change will respond to the place they know. Governments need confidence that long-term commitments can withstand political and delivery pressure. Landowners, employers and investors need enough certainty to commit their own capital and plans.

That confidence is easily damaged and slowly rebuilt. I saw this through my work on both precincts while in the Victorian Government.

Fishermans Bend presented a challenge of metropolitan scale. The area covered approximately 480 hectares, more than twice the size of Melbourne’s CBD, across five precincts and two municipalities. It was planned to accommodate approximately 80,000 residents and 80,000 jobs, with about 90 per cent of its land in private ownership. Its transformation would depend on coordinated decisions and investment across government, councils, landowners, developers and infrastructure providers over several decades.

Jacksons Hill represented a different form of complexity within 32 hectares. The former Victoria University campus included 25 buildings on the Victorian Heritage Register, protected landscape elements, established community uses and an adjacent operating school. The site held continuing significance for Traditional Owners and deep personal meaning for many people in Sunbury. The closure of the university campus had left its collection of valued buildings, landscapes and community activities without a agreed long-term future.

Public confidence had been dented in both places, for different reasons. At Fishermans Bend, rezoning and pressure to develop had moved faster than the strategic and infrastructure planning needed to coordinate Australia’s largest urban renewal area. At Jacksons Hill, prolonged uncertainty had left the community concerned about the future of a place with deep historical and personal significance.

Each project needed a credible public promise and a practical basis for believing it would be honoured. The work followed a sequence that remains relevant to urban renewal: understand the truths of the place, be honest about the choices, use design to make their consequences visible, deliver catalyst projects and sustain the direction through governance and capital investment.

Start with the truths of place

A strategic direction becomes credible when people can recognise their place within it.

Fishermans Bend and Jacksons Hill both carried histories, relationships and experiences that would shape how people received any proposal for their future. The work needed to recognise continuing First Nations connections to Country, alongside the layered post-contact histories of each place and the experiences of the people connected to them.

At Fishermans Bend, that meant looking beyond an industrial redevelopment story. The place had been shaped by Country and water, industry and working lives, migration, community and self-determination. The social history commissioned for the Framework captured many of these layers and created a touchstone for future placemaking and interpretation.

Jacksons Hill carried continuing significance for Traditional Owners alongside complex histories of education, mental health care, confinement, culture and community life. Many people in Sunbury knew the site through personal or family experience. Its red-brick buildings, landscape and long period of uncertainty all shaped how its future would be received.

These histories provided strategic evidence. They helped reveal what people valued, what had been neglected, what required protection, repair or reinterpretation, and which future uses could feel authentic to the place.

People needed to see their experience of the place reflected in the work before a different future for it could become credible.

Be honest about where choice is real

Engagement in both projects began with clarity about three things:

• What was already locked-in

• What remained open to influence

• Where genuine trade-offs would need to be faced.

That clarity focused engagement on real choices. It also established a more respectful relationship with participants. People could see where their knowledge and preferences could shape the outcome, and they could examine the reasoning when a suggestion was not adopted.

At Fishermans Bend, I project-managed the 2016 Recast Vision and helped establish the strategy and structure for the Framework that followed. My role included developing the organising logic connecting the Vision and its eight sustainability goals with precinct directions, planning controls, infrastructure priorities and delivery responsibilities.

That work depended on contributions from across the Taskforce, councils, government agencies, the Ministerial Advisory Committee and specialist teams. The organising structure provided a common basis through which those different contributions could be integrated.

The Recast Vision established a renewed public promise for Fishermans Bend: the kind of place it should become and the strategic directions that should guide its transformation. The public conversation involved 769 participants from the community, industry, local government and other stakeholder groups. The majority of feedback supported the recast direction, while placing particular emphasis on transport, planning certainty and a credible funding strategy.

The work operated within a broader governance arrangement. The Taskforce worked in close collaboration with the Fishermans Bend Ministerial Advisory Committee, which brought together independent expertise, council representation and community perspectives. The Committee had recommended refreshing the Vision, participated in the recast consultation and provided independent advice as the Framework developed.

The emerging Framework then had to turn the public promise into a structure for action. The Vision described the future people were being asked to support. The Framework established how successive decisions, projects and investments would contribute to it.

The core approach was later adapted at Jacksons Hill, where I led the masterplan and engagement process in a smaller, heritage-rich setting with a very different community and delivery context.

Engagement began before a draft plan had been prepared. Community members were invited to share their experiences, concerns, ideas and stories, and to examine principles covering heritage, education, community and arts, complementary uses, access and design quality.

The resulting masterplan gave spatial form to those choices. It also provided a basis for showing how community input had influenced the outcome.

Honest engagement does not remove disagreement. It gives disagreement a useful structure and allows decisions to be tested against a shared understanding of the place and the choices available.

Use design to make choices visible

Strategy and design performed different but connected roles in both projects. Strategy defined the public promise, the priorities and the trade-offs. Design showed what those choices would mean on the ground.

At Fishermans Bend, choices about density, transport, schools, open space, employment, sustainability and neighbourhood identity could not be resolved as separate policy positions. Their spatial relationships would determine whether the precinct worked as a complete community.

At Jacksons Hill, the masterplan made it possible to examine how heritage buildings could be reused, where new development could occur, how education and cultural uses could reinforce one another, and how the site could reconnect with Sunbury.

A design-led urban framework is particularly valuable at this stage. It makes strategic intent tangible while consequential choices remain open. Streets, public spaces, movement networks, built form and community infrastructure become a shared language for examining trade-offs before individual projects begin fixing them in place.

This visibility contributes directly to confidence. People can understand the future being proposed, see the implications of different choices and hold later decisions against the direction that was agreed.

Demonstrate commitment through catalyst projects

Better strategy and engagement established a basis for confidence. Early investment showed that government was prepared to act.

At Fishermans Bend, the Taskforce and partner agencies secured the land and public investment that enabled the Ferrars Street Education and Community Precinct. The precinct brought together South Melbourne Primary School, Kirrip Park and shared community facilities.

It gave physical form to the promise that Fishermans Bend would become a complete community supported by schools, public space and local services. It also created momentum that private development alone could provide.

At Jacksons Hill, the masterplan identified education, arts and community uses as catalysts for the site’s renewal. The 2018–19 Victorian Budget subsequently committed $10.8 million to expand the Sunbury and Macedon Ranges Specialist School into two heritage buildings and $3 million for a community arts precinct around the Boilerhouse Theatre.

The Victorian Government also purchased the site from Victoria University, giving the masterplan a practical pathway into implementation. These commitments showed that the planning process would lead to action and began returning valued buildings and spaces to community use.

The precise delivery path for the cultural facilities evolved. Hume City Council later adapted the former Female Refractory Ward and an adjacent building into the Sunbury Community Arts and Cultural Precinct, now known as Artrise. This carried forward the masterplan’s direction for arts, culture and community use at Jacksons Hill.

In 2026, the project received the John George Knight Award for Heritage, an Award for Interior Architecture and a Commendation for Public Architecture at the Victorian Architecture Awards.

Catalyst projects add more than facilities. They make intent visible, create momentum and give communities and other participants a reason to believe that the longer-term direction will be acted upon.

Confidence must be renewed through delivery

Public confidence grows through a pattern of commitments kept.

Fishermans Bend has continued to advance. In June 2025, the Victorian Auditor-General noted that all five of the Framework’s short-term projects had been delivered within their intended timeframes and that stage one of the Fishermans Bend Innovation Precinct remained on track.

The same audit found that agencies were not on track to deliver all projects and outcomes as originally intended. Fourteen medium-term projects had been delayed or deferred, delivery of the Framework had extended by at least five years to 2055, and the priority of the proposed tram remained unclear.

The transport question was understood from the start of the Recast. In its 2017 report, the Ministerial Advisory Committee described the proposed tram corridors as essential to realising the Vision and argued for the early provision of new public transport. It also recognised that a credible, staged funding plan would signal to the investment market that government was serious about Fishermans Bend.

That logic still makes sense today.

The Victorian Government’s Integrated Transport Plan for Fishermans Bend now sets out three broad horizons. These include new tram connections in Horizon Two and a heavy-rail tunnel through Fishermans Bend in Horizon Three. The plan provides a useful sequence. Funding and time-bound delivery commitments will determine whether communities, universities, employers and investors can confidently plan around it.

The University of Melbourne's 2025 decision to pause its Fishermans Bend campus provides a tangible example of this interdependence. The University linked the decision to financial constraints and the timing of government and industry investment. It said the project would be reassessed through its next ten-year strategy from 2030.

Governments, communities, universities, employers and private investors make commitments in response to one another. Confidence created through early projects therefore needs to be renewed as conditions and investment decisions change.

In my view, the clearest next confidence-building move is a funded, time-bound commitment from the Victorian Government to the next stage of mass transit for Fishermans Bend.

Such a commitment would provide stronger evidence of continuing commitment to the Framework. It would also give communities, universities, employers and investors a firmer basis for making complementary decisions of their own. Public investment can make the strategic promise credible enough for others to act.

A believable public promise

The experience of Fishermans Bend and Jacksons Hill points to a model for rebuilding public confidence in urban renewal.

Strategic direction must respond to the truths of the place. Engagement must be candid about what is fixed, what can be influenced and which trade-offs are unavoidable. Design must make those choices and their consequences visible. Catalyst projects must demonstrate commitment. Governance and capital investment must carry the promise through changing conditions, teams and political cycles.

Public confidence does not require consensus. It grows when people recognise their place in the proposed future, understand the choices being made, influence what is genuinely open and see commitments translated into action.

That is the strategic work at the front end of urban renewal: establishing a future people can recognise, providing an honest basis for choice and beginning to build it.
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Tom Shield undertook both projects while working in the Victorian Government. At Fishermans Bend, he project managed the 2016 Recast Vision and helped establish the strategy and structure for the Framework that followed. He subsequently led the Jacksons Hill masterplan and engagement process at the Victorian Planning Authority. This article draws on publicly available records and reflects his current professional perspective. The views expressed are his own.