Suburban Alliance Sign Up Information

Dear? Grayson

Interest in the Suburban Alliance is growing, and the formation of a Victorian group is evidence of that. We are actively seeking interest from other States to establish similar groups to support our collective mission: "Better Suburbs = Better Cities". Please get in contact if you are interested or have a suggestion for how we drive our agenda to a national level in other centres.

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The panellists including Suburban Alliance Director Kerrianne Meulman, agreed that there has been momentum to explore suburban office markets for some time, which was accelerated during the COVID-19 challenges. The future of work will require a more flexible approach to built form, the operational practices and to locations for businesses. The opportunities for suburban markets are now not only considered to be cost savings, but amenities, accessibility, talent attraction and retention and productivity opportunities.

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• A video series and evidence-based report "The Truth About Suburbia" which debunked the myths and explored some truly great suburban developments.
• We interviewed Joel Kotkin to explore what our cities might look like post COVID-19.
• Our submission to the Queensland Budget highlighted in black and white some glaring inequality in funding. We also turned this into full colour video series to highlight just how important this issue is to our regions and economies.
• In a special collaboration between The Suburban Alliance and BE Group, UK, we broke down some international barriers to create a 6 part discussion series about the UK vs Australian experiences of property, the economy and employment before, during and heading out of COVID-19.
• In November, we officially launched the Victorian chapter of the Suburban Alliance and released our first Melbourne focused research paper. Led by our new Victorian director Rob Burgess, this was a very exciting milestone for our group and we are now actively looking for new directors to lead groups in each state.
• And finally, just last month we released our Distributed Workplaces Report which showed the true impact of COVID on workplaces and predicted a bright future for suburban work hubs. A big thank you to Moreton Bay Regional Council, Logan City Council and Springfield City Group for their sponsorship of this project over the past few months.?

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There has been much speculation about businesses relocating from centralised locations to suburban hubs. The Suburban Alliance wanted to test media and industry assumptions against the evidence. What are Brisbane based businesses thinking? If moving to suburban locations, what are their performance metrics? What are their location preferences and why?

With this in mind, we commissioned a Distributed Workplace Study, which interviewed 30 local businesses in depth on the subject. A snapshot of our findings can be viewed here.

We hope that this initiative continues to build on the reputation of The Suburban Alliance as an evidence-based public policy interest group. We support greater opportunities for suburban development and economic expansion, but this should also come from a strong basis in evidence and strategy. Fashionable planning trends have not served us well in the past, and are unlikely to do so in the future.

The ABC Recently interviewed Suburban Alliance Director Steve de Nys on this research and the interview can be found here.

We would also like to take the opportunity to thank our report sponsors?Moreton Bay Regional Council, Springfield City Group and Logan City Council for their support.

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