What Gibbs: Share your Story

Executive Summary

The ‘What Gibbs?’ Project is an initiative of the City of Canning Safe Active Street that encourages the community to take ownership for shaping the ‘what’ of Gibbs Street.

The project sought to understand how the neighbourhood stories of Gibbs Street could contribute to a growing local vision for enhancing the area. Gibbs Street is the artery connecting important local destinations within the area - including open spaces, education, and transport hubs - and has potential for further connectivity.

In asking residents and community members alike 'what makes a great street?', the Council can consider the ways to deliver on this vision for Gibbs Street.

The City is excited about the opportunity to upgrade Gibbs Street in line with the local community’s vision for ‘what makes a great street?’. Building on community feedback received, the opportunities to ‘Gibbs back' and improve the street can be captured into four key areas. These include:

Create a Quieter Street

• Reduce the speed limit to improve street safety
• Reduce width of the road to create single lane slow-points
• Install traffic calming measures such as slow-points and raised platforms

Improve Street Connections

• Create user friendly pedestrian crossings
• Improve path connections to local destinations
• Dual footpath connections
• Introduce on-street parking

Green the Street

• Additional tree planting and landscaping
• Flush kerb rain gardens
• Increase shaded thoroughfares between street and local parks
• Work together with residents to make verges more attractive and water wise

Create a Street of Welcome

• Places for neighbours to gather
• Enhanced lighting
• Wayfinding
• Activation of the street (community led events) to nurture connections between people
• Enhance local identity through public art

Evaluation Methodology

The City of Canning used Culture Counts to conduct an evaluation of neighbourhood perceptions by surveying members of the community and those participating in 'What Gibbs?' activities. Surveys were delivered through intercept interviews, postcards with QR codes, and through the Your Say platform. In partnership with Culture Counts, this survey was designed and developed to evaluate the strategic goals and outcomes of the City of Canning

107 responses were collected from public attendees. 66 were collected In-Person. 32 were collected through QR codes. 9 were collected through Your Say.

Each survey contained a range of ‘dimension’ questions, asking members of the public about their experience of the street. These dimensions have been developed and tested in collaboration with industry, practitioners, and academics to measure the impact and value of arts and cultural events and activities.

Appropriate dimensions were chosen based on their alignment with the City of Canning Safe Active Street strategic objectives.

Dimensions are assessed on a Likert scale, in which respondents move a slider to a point that indicates whether they agree or disagree with the dimension statement. An example of a dimension question in the Culture Counts survey tool is presented below.

Engagement Plan

Through a range of community events and activities led by the What Gibbs Welcome Team, feedback about local stories and neighbourhood-building projects was gathered.

The engagement plan sought to program activities that celebrated the diversity of our community and provided opportunities for the neighbourhood to get together and nurture connections. These welcomed efforts had multiple outcomes, including breathing new life and vitality into the street through tree planting, and opportunities for seniors to stay physically active. The focus of the engagement plan on strengthening local community activity was embraced by the neighbourhood, and the success of the 'Walk/Bike/Scoot to School' demonstrated the willingness of the community to get involved in shaping the ‘what’ of Gibbs Street.

Other opportunities for neighbourhood-building and engagement included social media marketing, QR codes on postcards and community decals, as well as a general online survey that was available to the community through 'Your Say'.

The following image represents a brochure of community activities that took place, between 14 July to 6 August 2021.

Community Program

Published Engagement Program Timetable

QR Code

Gibbs St Decal

Source: City of Canning

Marketing Plan

From 7 July to 4 August 2021, 10 posts were published on the City's Facebook page to promote the What Gibbs activity program. Five of these posts were 'boosted' to increase their exposure. Three articles were published in the traditional media outlet the Canning Gazette.

The following items are two examples of marketing engagement, with a table following that summarises the marketing engagement across all channels used.

Facebook

4 August 2021

Canning Gazette

15 July 2021

Source: City of Canning.
Note: Facebook stats includes Facebook (Paid) results and are therefore not summed in total results.

Respondent Profile

Demographics

Survey respondents were asked to provide their current living location. This data identifies the demographic sample of people who responded to the survey and took part in the event. It enables data to be matched to the wider population and responses to be filtered to understand differences in demographics.

The following charts show the proportion of survey responses captured for respondents' identified living location and whether they currently live on Gibbs Street or not.

Participation

Respondents were asked about their participation in community activities and various community groups. Category responses were sourced from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) General Social Survey for benchmarking purposes. This allows responses to be compared to the Australian average for community participation types.

Respondents were asked whether they had engaged with a community group in the last 12 months, based on the group's primary focus (i.e. social group, political group, etc.) Respondents were also asked if they had participated in a selection of activities in the last month, focused around the kind of activity type (e.g. sports, family, etc.)

Results for these questions are shown in the charts below, accompanied by the ABS benchmark for the 2020 General Social Survey for comparison.

Visitation

Respondents were asked if they had visited any of the following locations in the local community in the last month. Category responses were generated by City of Canning staff to create a representative list of major community locations.

Respondents were also provided an 'other' option that they could provide their own custom response for, in addition to the prompted list. Results for this question and a selection of commonly provided 'other' options are provided below.

Have you visited any of the following places on Gibbs Street in the last month? (Other)

• Cunnington Park (32%)

• Carousel Shopping Centre (29%)

• Mills Park (14%)

• Leisureplex (14%)

Community Stories

Reflections

Respondents were asked to provide comments regarding their reflection of Gibbs Street and share their thoughts on what makes a great street.

A summary of these terms and a selection of this feedback is presented below.

What was Gibbs Street like when you first moved here?

What words do people who did not live there use to describe Gibbs Street?

Opportunities

Respondents were asked to provide comments regarding opportunities for Gibbs Street and how others who did not live there might describe it. Feedback was analysed with top terms highlighted.

A summary of these terms and a selection of this feedback is presented below.

What makes a great street?

If you could change one thing about Gibbs Street what would you change?

Community Perceptions

Outcome Averages

Survey respondents moved a slider to indicate whether they agreed or disagreed with the included dimension statements in relation to the street. The following charts contain the response data for 'public' responses, showing the average result for each dimension.

The Culture Counts platform provides various methods to capture survey responses at a minimal marginal cost. Achieving larger samples enables organisations to be more confident about the average results and that opinions of the survey respondents are representative of all attendees. The accompanying margin of error chart shows the expected differences for the associated dimension results calculated at a 95% confidence level.

The What Gibbs survey used three dimensions to track community perceptions and outcomes. These dimensions were:

• Belonging: I feel like I belong to my neighbourhood

• Sense of Self: I feel like I can be myself in my neighbourhood

• Satisfaction: I like living in my neighbourhood

The first chart below shows the average result for these dimensions. The second chart shows the interquartile range (IQR) of dimension responses. This chart represents the areas on the slider where most responses typically fell and the median result for each dimension (i.e. the most common response). Smaller ranges indicate greater agreement between respondents, whereas larger ranges indicate less agreement.

Correlations

Respondents were asked about their community participation and engagement. These are common 'factors' that can be tested against results of the ‘dimensions’ questions to identify and understand any statistically-significant differences in results.

An analysis is run on the 'dependant variables' - in this case, these are the results for the dimensions. Results are filtered by the different factors - the larger the difference in the result, the more influence this factor has on the result. This information can be used to identify any correlating factors that may be of interest to public policy purposes.

The following factors were tested:

• Residence: Do you live on Gibbs Street?

• Involvement: In the last 12 months, have you been actively involved in any of the following?

• Visited: Have you visited any of the following places on Gibbs Street in the last month?

The following charts highlight the results and factors that were explored.

Comments and Feedback

Sentiment Analysis

Respondents were asked to leave any additional feedback about their experience of Gibbs Street or the community engagement program. This feedback has been classified into positive, neutral or negative categories, with the percentage of each of the sentiment types presented in the following chart.

General Feedback

Feedback helps organisations understand where the value of visitor experiences lies and how they can be improved and strengthened in the future. A selection of comments has been highlighted underneath.