On Saturday March 21, forty community workers, advocates and activists participated in the first People’s Plan for Footscray Community Mapping Exercise. This included people from over twenty different community organisations working in Footscray.

Our Community Mapping highlighted some important understandings and perspectives about Footscray.

Participants spent three hours in table groups discussing:

• What’s changed in Footscray over the last 5 and more years?
• What worries you most about the future for Footscray?
• What excites you most about the future for Footscray?
• What community assets and social infrastructure do we have and value in Footscray?
• What are the equity and environmental issues, and social needs in the area?
• What are the potential opportunities for community action?
• Are there clusters of issues? Are there obvious campaign ‘sites’?
• How do we engage community members who don’t normally engage, to develop a ‘People’s Plan’?
• What practical tasks can we work on together to bring people into the process?

Outcomes of Mapping Footscray

What’s Changed

1. Footscray is becoming more polarised: wealthier incomers and more precarious residents share space but not experiences.
2. Housing pressures and land banking are eroding equity and trust in planning.
3. Local vibrancy is declining due to business closures, cost of living pressures, and post-Covid social withdrawal.
4. Social stress and stigma are rising, affecting the most marginalised.
5. Governance feels uncertain, with reduced services and a sense of disconnection between Council and community.
6. Yet there are green shoots: better transport, youth energy, cultural anchors, and a continued sense of belonging among former residents.

Fears for the future

The overarching worries about Footscray were: 

1. Being priced out and pushed out by gentrification.
2. Losing the multicultural, open, working-class soul of the suburb.
3. Becoming a surveilled, unequal place defined by fear and exclusion.
4. Government handing control to developers while community needs go unmet.
5. Deepening crisis in mental health, homelessness and basic wellbeing.
6. Loss of community spaces, services and shared life.
7. Disconnection: people don’t know what’s going on or how to get involved.

What Makes People Feel Hopeful

Across all themes, the sources of excitement are:

1. The energy and creativity of young people.
2. A strong culture of care, solidarity, and multicultural pride.
3. Powerful First Nations history and growing visibility.
4. Major physical assets that could be reclaimed by the community.
5. A collaborative civic ‘ecosystem’ eager to try new models.
6. Pride in local schools.
7. A belief that Footscray is full of possibility—if ‘community voice’ leads.

Footscray’s Assets

Across the discussions, Footscray’s identified assets fell into six categories:

1. Physical infrastructure & public spaces (market, station, parks, river, libraries).
2. Community organisations & social infrastructure (Neighbourhood Houses, arts, cultural groups, grassroots collectives).
3. People, culture & community energy (youth, multiculturalism, activism, neighbourliness).
4. Small businesses & economic life (local traders, food culture, creative enterprises).
5. Educational & cultural institutions (VU, schools, libraries, arts places).
6. Unlockable, high-potential sites (old hospital, Little Saigon, Forges, the Mall etc.).

What Needs to Change

Footscray’s opportunities lie in:

1. Activating under-used spaces for community, green, and cultural purposes.
2. Harnessing youth and community energy to co-design programs.
3. Fostering inclusive, multicultural spaces.
4. A focus on affordable housing and social justice initiatives.
5. Strengthening democratic participation, civic engagement, and involvement in planning.

Over the following months, the People’s Plan for Footscray will be supporting locals to host Community Yarns, as well as hosting topic-based Dinner Conversations, and developing a number of small scale projects.

If you would like to host a Community Yarn, please get in touch with Terri Soumilas terri@borderlandscooperative.net. If you are interested in the Dinner Conversations discussing the numerous topics and themes emerging from our community mapping and Yarns, see here …