The Lived Experience of Residents in an Emerging Master-Planned Community

Nicole Walker ,Laurie Buys,Cameron Newton

doi:10.3390/su132112158

Nicole Walker , Laurie Buys + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su132112158

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Abstract

Master-planned communities around the world are developed and purposefully planned to address housing sustainability and community connectivity; they often have a distinctive look, and appeal to a particular customer base desiring a strong, utopian-esque community. However, the lived experience of new residents joining master-planned communities has not been explored. This paper examines the lived experience of new residents within an emerging Australian master-planned estate, and reports on the first two stages of a longitudinal study focusing on the results of an online forum. This unique study presents real-life findings on a culturally diverse community. The findings reveal how the purposeful development of community identity in the early stages of the MPCommunity has not led to satisfactory levels of social infrastructure or social connectedness for the pioneering residents. The physical and social environment, as interpreted by residents against the developers’ imagined vision and marketing testimonies, has not been entirely satisfactory. Infrastructure issues—such as transport, and access to daily activities such as shopping, work, and school—were points of frustration and dissatisfaction. The findings provide insight into the challenges and opportunities for residents in a developing MPC, and further our understanding of the specific factors that inform us as to how social infrastructure can best encourage and support connection within existing and future MPC developments.

Highlights

Creating residential communities that provide housing and accommodation along with an engaging environment that facilitates community connections has been a priority for many cities and communities
This study explores the lived experiences— social connectedness—in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the issues faced by a group of pioneer residents in relation to their everyday community lives together in the early stages of master-planned communities (MPCs) development; it does this by first examining the notion of MPCs, and the characteristics that are designed to influence the development of community within them, and investigates an incipient MPCommunity in Australia
Master-planned community estates are promoted, sold, and purchased on the basis of powerful symbols of identity, community, safety, and security [1,2,3], and it is unclear how this manifests in the lived experience of pioneer residents moving to a new MPC [2,4]

Summary

Introduction

Creating residential communities that provide housing and accommodation along with an engaging environment that facilitates community connections has been a priority for many cities and communities. There have been a variety of approaches to addressing this challenge, with recent development focusing on master-planned communities (MPCs) [1]. MPCs are capital-intensive forms of master-planned estates (MPEs), purposefully designed to encourage the development of community identity and connectivity [2]. Given recent global events, including COVID-19, providing insight into how MPCs are experienced in the initial stages of their development, by people from diverse backgrounds, is important to delivering sustainable communities [3]. This study explores the lived experiences— social connectedness—in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the issues faced by a group of pioneer residents in relation to their everyday community lives together in the early stages of MPC development; it does this by first examining the notion of MPCs, and the characteristics that are designed to influence the development of community within them, and investigates an incipient MPCommunity (the label for the case study MPC) in Australia.

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