Living Lab Northern Rivers: A Case Study in Recovery Planning Co-design
By Barbara Brown Wilson
Introduction
On February 28, 2022, the riverside town of Lismore, Australia experienced what the Sydney Morning Herald described as “the biggest flood in modern Australian history.”[1] Torrential rain broke the existing levee system and pumped water into the city faster and at a greater quantity than the New South Wales (NSW) government had ever imagined. That morning, many of the town’s 28,000 residents woke to water in their homes, often rising to the second stories where people had typically felt safe to ride out previous storms. Water also filled the streets and shops of the entire central business district, ensuring nobody in the region would escape hardship brought by the floods. A second storm hit a few weeks later, re-flooding the already decimated area.
The effects of the flooding were exacerbated by inconsistent communication and poor emergency management. Days before the storm, the government denied Lismore City Council’s request for funds to improve its flooding warning system, calling it “premature.” Residents were left to lead the first wave of successful rescue efforts, with almost 10,000 people across the region forced from their homes by the floodwaters. As a result, trust in the NSW government was incredibly low in the aftermath of these floods. This shaped the attitudes of residents when, in the wake of these, the NSW government implemented the largest buyback program in their government’s history in Lismore. Without a chance for significant input or a locally calibrated communication strategy, this program was met by many residents with confusion and a sense of exacerbated grief.
Lismore is a key economic hub for the Northern Rivers region, with anchors like Southern Cross University and several health care centers. The Wilsons River runs through the downtown, which historically allowed Lismore to serve as a key port location on the Richmond River catchment. Its residents have great pride for the surrounding natural beauty as well as a culture alive with art, music, and the continuous custodianship of the Bundjalung Nation.
Lismore also struggles with deep socio-environmental inequities. Almost a quarter of Lismore residents are living below the poverty line and without broadband. The levee built to protect the Central Business District (CBD) from river flooding was not designed to protect those lower income communities living in the lower lying North Lismore area.
In response to the floods and the buyback program that followed it, a rich set of community institutions and projects came together to meet the goal of creating a meaningful, resident-driven set of projects for the future of this community. The most impactful series of innovations are coming from the formation of new complex social and organizational ties. Southern Cross University (SCU) partnered with the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and the NSW government to create Living Lab Northern Rivers (LLNR), a “space where research and community come together to create the solutions that will allow our region to thrive in uncertainty.”[2] With a store-front office space in the CBD of Lismore, LLNR is working to become a place of bi-directional translation in the service of place-based transformational adaptation. It seeks to bring the planning and design skills of technically trained experts in Lismore, Sydney, and beyond to aid in solving the considerable climate change adaptation challenges the region must address in partnership with the NSW government. It does so, however, with a focus on ensuring that this technical expertise is woven into a fabric of local expertise with a focus on regional values, assets, cultural traditions, hopes and fears. The goal is to create a process that guarantees that the plans produced for the future are specific to, respectful of, and co-designed by the people of the Northern Rivers region.
LLNR was part of a broader series of attempts made by the NSW government in the aftermath of the floods to build new systems that could navigate the increasing number of climate crises in the region and the state. Regional government efforts were consolidated within a statewide entity called the Reconstruction Authority (RA) that took over the government role in the LLNR partnership. But the RA had not fully understood the unorthodox and novel approach that animates LLNR’s work when it absorbed this partnership. Although government authorities consistently cite LLNR as a vital anchor in the region’s recovery, many challenges have arisen because of the gap between this creative, place-based process and the more traditional government culture of the RA. The LLNR process seeks to cultivate the dialogue necessary to co-produce a community driven, trauma-informed recovery agenda specific to the region, and some state government officials struggle to see this shared decision-making model as viable or replicable. A growing literature supports the need for trauma-informed co-design recovery and adaptation processes, but the opportunities for and limits of such a model to thrive alongside more rigid governmental hierarchies is being tested by this partnership in the Northern Rivers region.
The Northern Rivers Recovery Arch Alongside an Ever-Changing Government Infrastructure
There are often four overlapping phases in a disaster recovery process: response, recovery, reconstruction, and adaptation, but these phases blend across one another, and each stage involves many different types of actors processing loss and grief in different ways.
The early response phase after flooding is often focused on debris and property clean up and the provision of emergency shelter. This response phase often takes a year or more and is marked by prolonged waves of processing trauma for a large percentage of the affected population. In Australia, the government provided caravan vehicles to many and set up temporary pod villages for many more families. In Lismore alone, over 3000 properties were inundated with an estimated $1 billion worth of damage, and the region had over 6,000 flood-impacted residences requiring raising or retrofit. Many people were airlifted out of the waters to the SCU Rugby field, and the university campus was used as an emergency shelter.
SCU leadership, namely Ben Roche (Pro Vice Chancellor of Research & Education Impact) and Mary Spongberg (Senior Deputy Vice Chancellor of Research), knew their university must help create an infrastructure that could support adaptation focused planning, design, and capacity building to ensure that the region could thrive despite the threat of more extreme weather events. They began discussions with Elizabeth Mossop, who was not only the Dean of Design, Architecture, and Building at University of Technology Sydney at the time but also brought deep expertise as a key leader in similar recovery efforts along the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. Mossop aided in the recovery of New Orleans as an academic through the Coastal Sustainability Studio at Louisiana State University and as a founding principal of Spackman Mossop Michaels landscape architects. Concurrently, Dan Etheridge, another key leader in post-Katrina recovery while running the Tulane City Center, who also happened to be a graduate of Southern Cross University’s Applied Science in Coastal Management, came back to help in recovery efforts as he had recently restored a property in North Lismore in anticipation of moving his family back there someday. These leaders were all keenly aware of how much care must be taken to build reciprocal relationships of mutual respect that center local knowledge and honor past trauma to cultivate authentic, creative, place-based solutions. A plan began to form to build something truly innovative to assist the Northern Rivers.
Etheridge was hired as the first staff member, with Mossop, Roche, and Spongberg as key to the three-person Executive Team that supports staff leadership to animate the vision for LLNR. The original Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that outlined the LLNR charge and partnership was made between Southern Cross University, the University of Technology Sydney, and the Northern Rivers Reconstruction Corporation (NRRC). But as Kieron Hendicott, current Deputy Chief Executive Officer for Infrastructure in Western Australia and former CEO of the NRRC explains, the NSW disaster “apparatus was already in transition. After the 2019/20 bushfires, government made some recommendations about how to restructure their disaster response and recovery arrangements… Resilience New South Wales wasn’t a mature organization at that stage. They were still doing their organizational build, and they were left exposed.” Although the NSW government acknowledged that fundamental systems change was needed to meet the ever-increasing wave of extreme climate events harming the state, the shape of that organizational infrastructure was nascent at best when the floods hit the region. As Mossop explains below, the lack of government capacity to respond adequately further exacerbated the local community’s continued distrust:
Rural Fire Service, Surf Life Saving rescue, and State Emergency Service is staffed by volunteers. The structure is paid, but the workers are volunteers. And there were a number of massive failures in this particular flood of the warning system data and of the rescuing system. So people were rescued by each other. And it was very reminiscent to me of what I saw post Katrina, that people were angry, of people feeling that they'd been abandoned and left to die. And the death toll was low here, but a lot of people came really, really close and had the most terrifying and prolonged experiences in the dark, in the middle of raging flood waters, waiting on their roofs that they'd had to sort of climb and swim to… and then you just have a whole lot of people trying to get on with things and to normalize things, and to try to make everything okay after the flood. But a very significant proportion of the housing here was really badly damaged. At the same time, there are parts of the community that weren't really damaged at all. And as everywhere, the people worst affected are the people with the least economic resources to be resilient. Yet also the most effected in places like North Lismore in particular, and South Lismore to some extent, are long established, stable communities, with powerful social infrastructure, the strong feeling of identity, and beautiful, beautiful neighborhoods.
Mossop’s explanation of what happened in post-flood Lismore highlights patterns that are all too common in post-disaster recovery processes. There were two major flooding events within a few weeks of one another, and as Mossop describes, the key actors in the first wave of both rescue efforts were largely residents.
After the floods, Bundjalung man and Jagun Alliance Executive Director Oliver Costello emerged as an influential regional thinker in the post-flood planning efforts. Drawing from his considerable knowledge of post-disaster community recovery from his roles in regional wildfire recovery, Costello’s contributions to an official flood inquiry on what happened during the floods of 2022 helped shape government paradigms on how they might better value local and indigenous knowledge.[3] Costello remembers that the self-organizing capacity of the local community was the most vibrant aspect of the early recovery efforts:
When the floods happened, Koori Mail and Resilient Lismore and individuals all stepped up. We have these brands because they had organizations that could have insurance and bank accounts and could have some staff, but most of the capability was just crowdsourced. The people just turned up. Literally thousands and thousands of people turned up, and so the better. And that wasn't the government. The government was trying to work out what was going on, and lots of trauma happened with people, because the government was saying things that were often not right. I was watching the weather very closely after the first flood and could see there was another big flood coming. I took photos around my home, and I was watching someone posting photos at the pump of the water coming up just about to breach the levy. And I was watching the State Emergency System (SES) at same time saying, “Oh, it's just flash flooding.” But I knew the levy banks were about to be breached, because it's only got a couple of centimeters, and we were getting tons of rain. This water is coming, and it is definitely going over (the levy), like there's no doubt. So we're seeing, even a month after (the first flood), the system was still failing us, but the community was largely activated. And because the first flood was so bad, it was kind of like nobody even really remembers the march flood, but I remember it because it was such a reinforcement of the lack of communication and the lack of situational awareness of the government, and the need for that situational awareness to be empowered in the community directly, so they can make those decisions.
Resilient Lismore and Koori Mail, mentioned above, were cited by many as central to the connective tissue that helped the region recover. Resilient Lismore coordinated mental health and basic service provision to those most effected, including a program called the Two Rooms Program, where teams of volunteers including electrical and carpenter services would do emergency repairs to get people back into their houses. Etheridge notes that these services are preconditions to getting people to think expansively and collectively about a more adaptive future state. He explains, “I've often thought that ideally someone might pass through Resilient Lismore, and while they're still benefiting from their services, but a little able to connect beyond their own emergency situation, they might start interacting with LLNR. I am so grateful for the work Resilient Lismore does to get people to the point where they can think a bit bigger.”
The new Mayor and other key local government officials were displaced from their homes, and everyone was reeling from the physical and mental distress of it all. At some point post-disaster communities typically move from an emergency rescue phase into a phase of repair and planning for future housing for those unhoused, but this decision-making is often done while trauma is still being actively processed by those most affected. If a trauma-informed approach is not taken, this can be a time marked by infighting and disfunction. In contrast to typical recovery efforts that prioritize rebuilding over community well-being and healing, key aspects of a trauma-informed recovery approach include making space to engender collaboration and mutuality, trust and transparency, connectedness and peer support, a feeling of safety (both physical safety and cultural safety), compassion, and clear communication.[4]
The timeline below (Figure 1) illustrates how the staff of LLNR have been a key source of consistency as support for the region through the growth cycles of the NSW government infrastructure and the region’s recovery journey. In each phase of the recovery process, LLNR supported local communities by disseminating information and restoring collective well-being. The exhibits and workshops educate people and bring them together. Residents are more open to learning alongside LLNR because they are seen as an honest and quasi-independent broker with the NSW government. Further, the government cannot test hypotheticals without causing confusion and stress in residents, so the government values LLNR as a nimble and more approachable place for such ideation to take place.
Figure 1: Timeline showing the organizational maturation of the NSW and LLNR alongside the major recovery related events, Illustration by Daniel Carmelo
When the location of pod villages and other decisions were being made amongst a collective experience of deep need and raw emotion, the Living Lab served as a place for community discussion. Professors Penny Allen, Martin Bryant, and Andrew Toland from UTS produced much of the content for the first two exhibitions.[5] The timeline in the first exhibition in the history of flooding in the Northern Rivers Region prompted collective storytelling about past floods while case studies of recovery from across the globe cultivated what many government officials referred to as a much-needed hopefulness (Figure 2). The relationship between Lismore residents and the New South Wales government was quite antagonistic, and the storefront allowed for residents to reach out on their own terms and seek repair in non-transactional ways.
Figure 2: Visitors to Look Ahead, the launch exhibition, review the timeline of recorded flood events.
Photo by Elise Derwin.
Local and quasi-local government leaders consistently expressed deep frustration with some of their national or state level colleagues, who often made decisions with only an abstract understanding of the local recovery challenges. The first government entity in charge of the recovery effort was regional in scope but did not have the proper capacities and mandates to implement the large-scale recovery effort required. During the first 20 months of recovery, the state governing entities changed names and leaders many times, which only increased the feeling of disfunction and disregard for local knowledge. The mayor of Lismore describes the frustrations this way:
31 months on our recovery is really just starting. It's a misconception by everyone that comes into Lismore, aesthetically, you can sort of say that Lismore has recovered. But when you scratch the surface, there is a long, long journey ahead, and I think Lismore will go down in definitely New South Wales history as a landmark or a watershed moment about disaster recovery for this state. Queensland is probably 10 to 12 years ahead of where New South Wales is as far as disaster management and recovery processes. And our great frustration is our proximity to the Queensland border and the same weather event that affected us so dramatically, we're still struggling with things like getting legislation through state government to make things happen, whereas they've had those tools in place now for probably 10 or 12 years. Their watershed moment was probably Cyclone Larry in about 2010 or 2011 I think it was, and that's when they that Queensland government implemented their Queensland Reconstruction Authority and a lot of those sorts of legislative changes that New South Wales are only implementing now because of the Lismore flood. So, it's very frustrating, because coming from private enterprise and owning my own business, where you can make decisions and things happen very quickly, when you're dealing with multiple levels of government agencies, it can be quite tedious and monotonous, having the same fights and quite often not achieving the outcomes that are really needed due to bureaucratic failure.
Because the NSW government’s RA was new, it did not yet have policies that made it explicit how flooding might be linked to landslides or other key tools that make dealing with these interrelated hazards more feasible and responses timelier. Further, a government entity still in its infancy is predictably not robust enough to have the organizational capacity to adopt a sophisticated trauma-informed approach to recovery.
The creation of the LLNR was driven by a desire to do things differently by cultivating space for a place-based, internationally linked, trauma-informed planning. This, argued many government officials interviewed for this case study, should be considered the state’s most important early contribution to the region’s recovery.
LLNR Approach: Trauma-informed and Community-Led
After a community experiences a collective trauma like a flood, design and planning processes must make space for the grieving not only of a past trauma, but also of a future that can never be as it was imagined. As extreme climate events continue to alter our communities, these fields must become better versed in the methods of co-design that build capacity and mutual respect, open spaces of deep dialogue, and create intellectual platforms for radical reimagination. LLNR aspires to nurture the region’s connective tissue so that the network of collaborators is supported by a wealth of ideas and conversations that can foster innovative positive change (Figure 3).
Figure 3: LLNR Organizational Network; Illustration by Daniel Carmelo
The LLNR approach is shaped by their leadership’s prior experience facilitating community engaged design on the Gulf Coast for a decade and brings an innumerable wealth of local and internationally significant experiences to the team. Mossop has joined Etheridge in a shared directorship model: Mossop serves as the Academic Director and brings in key colleagues from the UTS faculty as well as a global academic network, and Etheridge serves as Engagement Director, working with and through SCU but also ensuring all actors feel deeply connected to the web of support LLNR is trying to create. The work is supported by researchers and designers at partnering universities and actualized by key staff with significant design research (Megan Louis) and trauma-informed engagement expertise (Zerina Millard), which allows LLNR to produce exhibition and communication materials that are beautiful, data-rich, and community-appropriate (Figures 4 and 5). Megan ensures that everything produced by LLNR is clear, beautiful, data-rich, and community-informed. Zerina ensures that Indigenous thinking, local partnerships, and trauma-informed practice guide the engagement processes.
Figure 4: Visitors to Bring It On Home, an exhibition exploring housing in the Northern Rivers.
Photo by Elise Derwin.
Figure 5: Streets of the Northern Rivers: visualizing a typical street typology in the Northern Rivers.
Illustration by Rick Shearman.
LLNR describes themselves as a “collaborative hub, bringing community, academics and governments together to explore new ways of living in a world full of uncertainty. (Their) mission is to foster new ideas and ways of thinking that will turn the Northern Rivers into the gold standard for resilience and sustainability.”[6] During an interview in December 2024 Engagement Director Dan Etheridge described the major components of the work as twofold:
First, the shop front, which is a space and a way of working, is where we, as an organization, connect with community, but more importantly, where we create a space where different parts of community connect with each other, and where individuals within our community and outside our community that have particular training and technical expertise can come and share that in a way that is helpful and accessible. So we literally have a shop front to do that in, which is our office, and from the beginning we set regular open hours where people could engage the self-guided programming we designed, so people who feel uncomfortable interacting… you know, they just want to first look at it themselves and circle around it a couple of times, they can do all of that. We say on the sign: “Welcome. You can have a look on your own. And we're in the back if you need us.” And people that want to talk to you don't hesitate to come and talk to you. And second, the Adaptation Research Network was where we saw the universities really leaning on their core business, the assets that they have to offer, and we assemble groups of technical experts and organize their work in a way that focuses it on particular questions that provide ongoing, real-time advice to the government. So in that way we would be more of a pro tech stream, as opposed to the shop front, which is more of the kind of engagement stream, but really the key. And then, if we're doing our job well, as the Living Lab grows those things just get woven together. We haven't fully executed on that part yet for a range of reasons, partly, we haven't been around long enough and don't have enough diversity of work to develop those systems. And I'm not going to force it.
One of the vital parts of the organizational design is working to not only create a third space for community to come together across difference, but also to foster collective learning that includes the state government as a part of the learning network in respectful and productive dialogue with local and technical knowledge holders. Many local and state government officials understood they were not in a position to foster the co-creation of truly innovative ways of recovering, in part because any ideation led by the government is seen as a proclamation of future plans. Many people, furthermore, were already frustrated by the government’s poor handling of the emergency and the immediate aftermath of the flood and so had little trust in officials’ capacity to plan effectively for the future. LLNR was built as a response to this situation and to foster an independent, trusted space for high quality community co-creation of a way forward out of recovery and to a more adaptive future in the region. One of the key principles of their work is to avoid pushing a particular agenda. LLNR Academic Director Elizabeth Mossop explains the challenges inherent in this quasi-autonomous model:
There's this real tension, because a big part of our strength is our independence. We're not inside the university, we're not inside government. We're our own thing. We're an honest broker. We've got no dog in any of these fights, and so we act in the public interest. We have the best data but I also want our work to be adopted and taken on board by government, by industry, by whoever. And we're sort of early days with that. We're trying to see what happens with Look Ahead. That was something dreamed up by us to address this gaping hole in in the recovery work. But there's no point in it if it doesn't get taken up.
LLNR Collective Learning Platform
The LLNR model weaves together beautiful, finely curated thematic exhibitions that bring together technical and local knowledge with programming. These events take place in the shopfront space, but also around the region, to foster rich, informed dialogue and community capacity for regional adaptive planning. Etheridge describes how LLNR is meant to function as an intellectual and emotional bridge for many from the emergency services phase to a space of collective planning:
With our first exhibit that we opened in November 2022 which was called Look Ahead, we did some documentation of historical flooding in the Northern Rivers and of this particular flood, because we wanted to give people who went through the flood beautiful and compelling visual communication to process what happened, and people loved it. The exhibit included visuals of the maximum extent of the flood across the catchment, a timeline showing our history of flooding, and a series of examples of case studies of recovery elsewhere. More people stood around that timeline and told stories about where they were during other flooding events. Timelines do that to people every single time. Amazing. The other the core piece was a collection of 18 case studies from around the world, a handful of them in Australia, but also global, and organized into themes. The goal for me was twofold. One is that people would come in on this trajectory, where they've resettled, or there's some people that never got personally impacted but need to understand and are now ready to think about the future a bit. They lift their gaze and look a little further down the road like they're not just thinking: What's my emergency today? They can start to think a little more expansively long term and understand that they are not alone. There is a lot of hope and a lot of things to be excited about, and a lot of things to work together on.
Exhibitions, and associated programming have been developed for topics that emerge as critical collective learning points including flood mitigation, housing strategies, and adaptation paradigms and approaches. Youth engagement and community-centered methods are key themes throughout all LLNR work. Building events around rich partnerships, deep histories, and local assets (like A Place of Oysters event featured in Figure 6) are a hallmark of LLNR practices.
Figure 6: A Place of Oysters; showcasing the humble oyster’s role in healthy Richmond River catchment systems.
Photo by Clare Bernadette.
In the theory of change diagram co-created with LLNR for the purposes of this case study (Figure 7), we draw on a mangrove metaphor to explain the value of the approach. Mangroves function as a key stabilizing force for the coastlines of the Northern Rivers region, as their roots are strong, plentiful, and serve as an important medium to process the brackish waters that mark the estuaries and protect the thousands of lifeforms developing there from extreme weather. In this graphic, the roots represent the plentiful actors making up the local, regional, national, and global networks helping the region recover and adapt. The LLNR is depicted as a space where these roots convene via co-created exhibits, creative practice, research, and workshops to make new knowledge while strengthening connections, to guide quality technical advice toward government leaders, and to enhance community capacity to guide public discourse so that these entities can plan for future adaption in a productive, innovative, and healing way.
Figure 7: LLNR Theory of Change, Illustration by Daniel Carmelo
We can see how this mangrove approach works in the work of Zerina Millard, the Community Engagement Lead at LLNR, who utilizes her background in trauma-informed planning to ensure all public programming is done with the wide range of recovery needs always being experienced in the region. She knows that priority populations hit hardest during a flood event are often also grappling with the struggles many low wealth populations face, and the traumas associated with those struggles. “We can assume that there could be existing levels of trauma in those communities before the flood,” she notes, including in the “large aboriginal population,” which was compounded by the flood itself. And then, the (flood event) trauma has this compounding effect. “Originally, the goals of events were often to have this wonderful celebration,” she recalls, “and the depressing message of this (post-flood recovery) might actually be really upsetting for a lot of people.” But at the same time, “just because we put on a joyful celebration doesn't mean it feels safe or joyful for people who've experienced and are still experiencing trauma. So we need to put in a whole range of different supports to make sure that it's not just us privileged people who've all recovered from the flood coming in and going, ‘Let's celebrate this new life!’ when a lot of people can't afford to buy another place.”
During co-design workshops, Millard noticed that “while people were really nostalgic and felt really good at the end of it, most people said they felt sad, so to me that was a pretty big alarm bell. And so, I’ve been trying to incorporate grieving spaces into all of our engagement because there is a lot of research about this climate grief, and how, if we're not processing it in an embodied way then we become inert and depressed.” That acknowledgment is the foundation for confronting the future as a community. When the trauma and grief is processed, “it can create energy and action and hope. We need to explicitly say, ‘this is a messed-up situation that we're all going through together, and let's actively grieve.’”
This trauma-informed approach also means that the products produced by LLNR are more thoughtful than most emergency management resources. For example, an early effort to map values and vulnerabilities in the region started as an analytical mapping exercise of high burden areas. But the team soon became concerned that this more traditional approach might potentially retraumatize those being mapped as “vulnerable” while obscuring their incredible acts of heroism and community service during and after the flood. The project then shifted approaches to begin with the production of a series of eight short human-interest videos that together capture the richness and strength of what makes the region adaptive, strong, and beautiful. The work of value mapping is now expanding into a mobile tool that can be deployed anywhere to invite residents to co-produce maps of what they individually and collectively hold dear. It asks the question “what do you love about where you live?” as a starting point for risk reduction and adaptation planning.
Figure 8: Living Memory community co-design workshop. Photo by Elise Derwin.
Living Memory is another example of an LLNR project that seeks to center local narratives in understanding place (Figures 8 and 9). In this case, the project is designed to develop a community history of North Lismore, the neighborhood with the highest rate of property buybacks after the flood. Recognizing the scale of transformation, the New South Wales Reconstruction Authority (NSWRA) commissioned this project to ensure this community was documented and could be remembered in the way the locals chose. Using oral history, portrait photography, archival research, and documentation of relevant objects and artifacts, the project team are developing a publicly accessible online archive so that North Lismore can be explored for years to come, even though most of the homes will be gone and the residential neighborhood will no longer exist. In keeping with the commitment to co-design principles, the project started with a co-design workshop where residents were invited to contribute to how the project would be delivered. A committee of North Lismore locals guided the project on its journey and provided direction at critical points. At the time of writing, the project celebration is three weeks away and will be celebrated with an exhibit at the LLNR shopfront. Kristie Clarke, Executive Director Northern Rivers Adaptation Division of the NSWRA, sees the Living Memory project as a really good example of the way that LLNR (builds new) networks, not only within the community, but also across the university and research sector. She recalls, “I rang Dan and asked if the Living Lab could document memories and stories of the North Lismore community. We wanted to ensure we captured and recognized the history and people’s connection to the area, as it undergoes transformation.” The Living Memory project is capturing the memories the community have of North Lismore, their cultural connections. “This work also supports the recovery journey of the individuals and the community as a whole.” Although the budget is very small for this particular effort, she notes that the value given to the community is incredible. Clarke sees the partnership between LLNR and the NSWRA as a source of pride. “We’ve seen great innovation and research into very complex challenges. The Living Lab partnership has added significant value to our work in the Northern Rivers.” The avenues provided by LLNR for programming and community education are rich because they are community-specific.
Figure 9: The power of group portraiture: community members were invited to attend the Living Memory pop-up photobooth, share stories, and join a digital archive of North Lismore.
Photo by Elise Derwin
This project-based work was always envisioned as a core component for how LLNR would connect the technical expertise in the universities with tackling real-world problems of regional reconstruction. The initial partnership agreements developed by the founding partners proposed a specific vehicle for surfacing wicked questions and creatively investigating them. The idea, called ‘Think Tanks,’ was for the NSWRA program staff to articulate a challenge (or related set of challenges) and for LLNR to assemble a diverse set of experts and relevant local practitioners to explore creative solutions and propose pilot projects to address them. These workshops are meant to make the expertise in academia nimbler and more responsive so that it can better assist the government in innovating with purpose and focus. New approaches need to be explored across a range of issues, and this approach balanced rigor with flexibility.
The first Think Tank was convened to explore waste and the circular economy (Figure 10). A little more than a year after the floods the immediate crisis of hauling flood waste was still looming large, and as they looked to the massive reconstruction spending on the horizon, NSWRA staff saw an opportunity to support the development of a regional circular economy. Several regional government officials highlighted these as among their favorite activities because of the way they create invaluable generative space for ideation. How to translate these creative working sessions into implementable government action has yet to be solved, however. While large funding streams have been approved for well-defined programs, governments still struggle to resource novel program design and the development of new methods. Those who could fund them often see these new approaches as not sufficiently understood or tested and therefore too risky. But this overlooks the fact that their core purpose is precisely to explore issues where all possible effective solutions are not yet understood. As a result, this technique is only demonstrably valuable to date via its less tangible benefits.
Figure 10: Inspecting timber specifies at the deconstruction of two homes in the NSW Government buy-back program. Part of Circular Timber, a pilot project exploring deconstruction and materials reuse.
Photo by Kurt Petersen.
The Living Lab’s important research and design role continued as the government moved fully into the reconstruction phase, when a land and housing buyback program needed to be explained clearly and questions and concerns around affordable housing challenges processed for community. The Bring It On Home Exhibition in the storefront, alongside associated lectures, workshops, and other programming across the Northern Rivers Region made space for residents to feel a sense of possibility about what future housing options might include. Marco Geretto, Principal Design Advisor for the NSW Government Architect, sees the role of the LLNR as an integral place-based knowledge broker with the RA that should be replicated in other settings. He explains,
After a catastrophic event both government and the community tend to develop divergent and sometimes unrealistic expectations of what can be achieved and how best to achieve it. Government struggles because they cannot treat all emergencies in quite the same way. Every situation is unique, and you are not going to have the same resources in another location at a different point in time. Bushfire recovery is different to flood recovery, different services can be provided by different agencies, and there are different needs from the community. It is just more complex.
Added to that, the NSWRA is a relatively new agency within government. It has new powers, new systems and new people, and a lot of it hadn't been tested. There was uncertainty around how best to use its new powers, and what sorts of diverse skills it would need to get the job done. You need a planner, but not a conventional planner. You need an architect, but not a conventional architect. You need to engage, but you know it can’t be a conventional engagement process. The approach post disaster requires a level of nimbleness that is really challenging to foster in a government setting.
During this period of uncertainty, the Living Lab provided an invaluable bridge for the community between local and state [government] and brought with them the rigor of academic methodology and process. The Living Lab was also effective because it was able to act with a level of autonomy, provide independent and well-informed advice and talk up and down the power hierarchy. This is sometimes a delicate line to tread, because they also rely on funding from government to sustain its activities–so talking truth-to-power is tricky. As a result, the conversation is much more authentic. Community members talk differently and are more open when speaking with intermediaries or civil society than they are when they talk directly to local and state government. They can ask questions and they can be given genuine advice. We need more of those types of conversations.
Jamie van Iersel, Strategic Planning Coordinator for the Lismore City Council, agrees that precisely because LLNR is not tied to the government their approach should be supported by the government. LLNR “can do more hypothetical testing and explorations with community,” she notes. “As Council, we need to be cautious with hypothetical situations. But the living lab can do that, and they have the resource of the academic partners to really test what the community is saying and then come back to the community.” “The cyclical process of listening, testing, listening, testing is really beneficial when thinking of new ways of planning,” she concludes, adding that it is particularly valuable that they do this “in an exhibition space downtown, with well curated exhibitions that really visually articulate what they're trying to show based on what they've heard from the community and then serve as a meeting room and workshop space.”
After a year of participating in ideations about how to best support a community-led recovery process and in the absence of State government-led efforts to guide such work, Living Lab Northern Rivers launched a co-design process they call “Look Ahead” – focused on the Lismore CBD and surrounding flood impacted neighborhoods – as a pilot for what might become a model the region can adapt to other larger areas. Living Lab Northern Rivers consults with the NSWRA and the Lismore City Council on the project but focuses on facilitating an independent resident-centered process. Although the Look Ahead process is extra-governmental, it is filling a critical gap where government-led planning might typically exist and takes extra care to ensure their process is inclusive of all perspectives at every stage.
Given the Look Ahead project was not commissioned by government, the LLNR team took care to explain that the work was not currently aligned with any formal planning processes. This was simultaneously a weakness and a strength. The weakness lay in the fact that LLNR could not guarantee that any time committed to the project or information shared by members of the public would enter an authorizing environment. The strength was that members of the community did not bring past frustrating experiences around planning into the experience. In this way, the strategic benefit of LLNR as a government adjacent but independent entity was clear.
From February to June 2024, LLNR ran many formal and informal workshops and information sessions with diverse stakeholders across the community to gather the ideas, priorities, concerns and hopes for Lismore’s future (Figure 11). With this information in hand, two intensive design workshops were held with a panel of invited design and planning experts from across Australia. What emerged was a set of scenarios for a future Lismore for which work could start immediately. The LLNR team set out to balance ambition and vision, with pathways for immediate implementation. The decision was also made to orient the plan towards an immediate future before a clear flood mitigation program and associated future risk profile were known.
Figure 11: Community feedback during the Look Ahead: Community design for Lismore exhibition.
Photo by Elise Derwin.
Look Ahead: Community Design for Lismore was launched in early June with a packed house at the Lismore Heights Bowling Club. The next day the plans were put on public display in the LLNR shopfront and there were multiple opportunities for public comment. At the end of the project the LLNR team had documented the entire process, summarized the information gathered from the community, and packaged the final proposals along with the feedback gathered (Figure 12). Local and state government staff have been excited to use the material informally as they develop their own programs, though the work remains unrecognized by any official process.
Figure 12: Look Ahead: Community design for Lismore exhibition.
Photo by Elise Derwin.
State local member for Lismore Janelle Saffin organized a briefing for the state Planning Minister – The Honorable Paul Scully – where Elizabeth Mossop and Dan Etheridge presented the work, and the methods used. They specifically called out that a primary learning from the process was the beneficial role of a trusted third party in leading the early stages of a community informed planning process. In making this claim they are really stating that the best way for the government to proceed with a government process is to start without government, and when doing this, the outcomes are better for government and the community.
At the time of writing, 12 months after the public release of the Look Ahead work, local and state government have yet to start a community centered plan for the future of Lismore’s flood impacted areas. The work done by LLNR has been recognized by both levels of government as being of high quality in both process and output. Neither Lismore Council or the NSWRA have formally responded to the work, however. The Mayor of Lismore hopes for something more formal and action-oriented, however. “I think they've been an amazing voice for community,” he says. But, he admits, while government institutions from the Lismore City Council to state and federal governments all “preach community consultation” they are “not really serious about it.” In such a context, “the Living Lab has been instrumental in actually being a place for the community to come in and have a say on the future direction of where they want their city.” The local government has an opportunity to “tap into that community engagement,” building on the fact that “people are also not as threatened by an organization like the Living Lab. They're an independent body, and people, I think, are more free to actually speak their minds rather than speak what government agencies want to hear.” The Living Lab, he concludes, has “been critical in actually talking to the community and letting people have a say, and that's really important in where we're going to end up as a city…. I'd love for the living lab to do all the community consultation, and then as a local government, we can use their findings in our in our documentation and planning moving forward.”
The Living Lab’s important role continued in the repair phase, when the buyback program needed to be explained clearly and questions and concerns around affordable housing challenges processed for the government and for community. The Bring It On Home Exhibition in the storefront, alongside associated lectures, workshops, and other programming across the Northern Rivers Region made space for residents to feel a sense of possibility about what future housing options might include.
Measuring success
Almost unanimously, respondents identified the stable set of leaders in the Living Lab with considerable experience in post-flood recovery as a critical asset for the region. This is particularly valuable, they noted, in a socio-political environment where the local government leadership had less than a month of experience before the floods, and where the state government remade its recovery entity several times following the disaster. Craig Jenkins, Director of the Economic Development Network for the NSW Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, admits: “I don't know what we what we would be doing with community, or how far community would be along, if we didn't have something like the Living Lab.” “We government missed a big opportunity at the start to not engage with community more. There was, and there still is, a lot of criticism that community were not involved in the design of programs and support, and how we basically don’t support their community and are seen as someone that just comes in and does not listen.” The Living Lab fills a key gap as a place where residents had “the opportunity to feel like they were a part of the reconstruction.”
In the Northern Rivers region, while the NSW government was still refining its own organizational infrastructure for recovery, it also began planning for the largest buyback program ever attempted in Australia. Called the Resilient Homes Program, this program offered financial support for flood resilient retrofits or house raising, and in the cases of high flood risk, offered money to buy back the property and remove it from these locations. For some of those practitioners involved in planning for and implementing this repair phase, this did not seem like the best option. Before he worked with the NSWRA on their rehousing plans, recovery consultant Jamie Simmonds aided the town of Grantham in a collective land swap, where the town chose to move together and retain its social infrastructure instead of each receiving some funds for their home without a real sense of options for where they could move in the region.[7] He explains the difference as relational versus transactional:
The buyback is just a check at the end of the day, a transaction. It's not a story about what's going to happen. People want to know what's going to happen in my home, right? What's going to happen to my neighbor, what's going to happen to my street, my community. Whether I stay or go, this is my life. You are taking a part of someone's soul away. And they may, they may give that away for a better life, sure, but it's got to be on your terms, in their time, in their own way. (In a collective land swap) you deal with those issues, right? With the buyback you just say, here's the deal. Sign it. I don't want to hear about your problem. Here is a check. Take it or leave it. I don't want to hear about how your cat doesn't have a place to chase birds. Not my problem. Whereas if you look at it from a land swap point of view, and it was all about that. What do you want where you're going? How much land do you want? Do you want a downtown? Do you want park land? What do you want to do with the land you're leaving behind?”
As homeowners started accepting the buyback option, renters in the neighborhood were displaced with no other options at all. Further, the empty homes were often occupied by squatters and remaining neighbors felt no choice but to join in the pattern of abandoning their neighborhood. This further exacerbated the trauma already deeply felt by these hardest hit communities. With huge housing shortages, even homeowners who accepted the buyback often did not have the resources to find new housing within Lismore and in proximity to their social infrastructures.
Figure 13: Participant at our What Matters Most? workshop. A new methodology created to measure and map the values communities hold about where they live.
Image by Tajette OHalloran
As the region now enters an adaptation phase where future master planning must guide next steps for the North Lismore and the river itself, the LLNR is serving as a catalytic entity to reframe ways of thinking and working. In the NSW disaster adaptation planning realm, LLNR first produced a set of community-focused short videos that illustrate the relational, local, and creative nature of what it means to be adaptive in the Northern Rivers region. More recently, they created an interactive workshop to help people define what matters most to them. The initial exercise has participants sorting 100 cards–each with a valued service of thing on it–into four categories- matters most, matters more, matters less, matters least. Then participants are asked to complete a booklet asking five questions where they respond by choosing five cards from their piles. The LLNR team is then able to get a quantitative sense of how much people value certain things and how concerned they are protecting those things across a broad spectrum of residents throughout the region. This will aid the state government as they start to develop long term planning and infrastructure investment strategies, otherwise based on simple risk reduction, to ensure that the things residents care most deeply about are protected and valued in those calculations as well.
Figure 14: Weaving and Yarning: Stories Behind the Fishing Net: a Collaboration with SCU, Jagun Alliance, and Namabunda Farm & Mindy Woods (Karkalla). Photo by Paul Daley
Through consistent engagement, including a transformative Bundjalung-led fiber making and weaving workshop, the Living Lab team has built bi-directional relationships of mutual respect with the region’s Aboriginal leadership and helped communicate how the country-centered worldview might guide recovery to the larger regional audience (Figure 14). The exhibit undergirding this effort was coproduced with aboriginal designers in leadership on all sides, and pairs scientific and Indigenous ways of knowing to explore the richness of what is possible in adaptative futures (Figures 15 and 16).
Figure 15 and 16: The opening board for the exhibit (above) describes the approach taken, and the board across from it (below) is a landscape section in Tracing the Past, Shaping the Future, an exhibition exploring Indigenous Knowledge and cultural land management. Section by Mackenzie Saddler.
Programming associated with the exhibit also invited visitors to engage in indigenous-led co-design exercises, including one workshop designed by Indigenous designer Josh Creighton of Agency in Design, who created a unique version of the Visual Dialogue process for this effort. Visual Dialogue is a “straightforward practice of writing and drawing that focused on individuals contributing their thoughts and ideas visually and then working together to identify connections and grow group patterns” in collaboration with others.[8] Figure 17 (below) is an example of the small pallets on which participants were invited to sketch ideations that were then built into shared mosaic of visual concepts that aided in amalgamating these paradigm shifting ideas into grounded collective thought.
Figure 17: Visitors to Tracing the Past, Shaping the Future exhibition, reflect on their own connection to Country. Photo by Elise Derwin.
As of September 2025, the NSWRA has commenced a collaborative process with all of the Councils in the Northern Rivers to plan for the future use of land bought back as part of the Resilient Homes Program. This will take a community centered approach, building on the look ahead work and other Council and community plans and strategies. Councils are guiding the process and NSWRA is providing support throughout. Developing a plan for almost 1000 properties will involve extensive community engagement and involvement of stakeholders to decide land use, ownership and management of land for long term benefits to the community and the environment, while decreasing future flood risk and cost to government. The work is expected to be completed by June 2027 to provide certainty for the community.
The Jagun Alliance, the lead on a recovery proposal for North Lismore written in collaboration with the Living Lab, the NSW government, and the local government, attributes LLNR with changing the way they approach their work. The local Aboriginal community is diverse and multifaceted but expresses a shared sense of respect and trust in the LLNR that is a testament to the value of their model of mutually respectful and deeply local engagement. Jagun Alliance Director, Oliver Costello, sees the work of LLNR as “hugely impactful.”
It's helped guide some of our engagement and demonstrate our thinking…And you're also supporting the recovery. So you're bringing people into the CBD. You're supporting local businesses, feeding people. You're supporting artists. You're supporting cultural knowledge holders and different designers, like either supporting them financially or morally, by providing this network. So I think makes sense to be maintaining these functions before a crisis because…social infrastructure has become dormant or redundant. There's still stuff that's been learned (from the past crises). But often, people come and go and there is new staff, new landholders, new businesses, and so they're not being connected to that story…. And (the work of the LLNR is) giving that substance for change. It is making the region better prepared to respond. And it has changed the way we work. We wouldn't be involved with that North Lismore precinct plan if it wasn't for the work. LLNR and the Reconstruction Authority and the Lismore City Council collectively asked Jagun Alliance to lead the application to the Commonwealth to develop a precinct plan. There's no way that would be happening without the work that the Living Lab does, because we wouldn't be socialized and connected to those parts of the Reconstruction Authority.
LLNR Design and Delivery Lead, Megan Louis, also sees the ever-increasing strengths of LLNR networks as the key to long-term impact. For her, “everything is relational. So where I see our network growing through ongoing relationships with people and groups, that's a really great success, because that network is the platform from which we're going to be able to affect change. I think the desire across the team to value relationships is one of our strengths.”
Because the Living Lab’s local shopfront is seen as such a key asset and community anchor, one stated weakness is that their contributions to Lismore-focused recovery efforts are more pronounced there than in some other impacted areas in the region. The few respondents who noted this, however, also pointed out that Lismore was also the hardest hit area in the region, so this choice made sense. Another stated weakness was that the Living Lab, much like local and state government, struggled to connect with the “harder to reach” communities in the region including rural farmers. Many interviewees mentioned the case of one city councilor who they saw as overly vocal about his perception that the Living Lab is catering to a left leaning population. Local elected and staff leadership, however, both said this perception did not align with the reality of their experiences at Living Lab events. Finally, there is a critique that the Living Lab finds it difficult to align itself with the NSW government communication norms. Most respondents, however, saw this as more of a challenge to be collectively overcome than a weakness of the Lab itself.
Organizational gestation and maturation often require many phases of growth, but Northern Rivers Region residents often felt like the “guinea pigs” of post-disaster recovery because of the many phases of birth and rebirth the NSW government underwent after the floods. When NRRC was absorbed by the NSWRA, the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and its innovative goals and structure were also absorbed, but the relationship with government partners had to be completely rebuilt multiple times as leadership changed. This presents a considerable set of institutional and translational challenges and has not yet been resolved in terms of communication and decision-making strategies. Ben Roche, Pro Vice Chancellor of Research & Education Impact at SCU, sees this organizational change work as an undone part of the scope articulated at the launch of the LLNR. He wishes that they would have foreseen the need to include systems change educational support for the government into the LLNR scope:
We articulated a very sophisticated way of working around (the question of): How do we create stable process within seriously dynamic and complex environments? … We created this very nuanced process, but the reality is, we probably should have sat down with the state government and said, “Okay, so for this to work, these are the roles you guys need to have, this is what you're going to need to do. You're going to need to be joined up internally around this. You're going to need a committee that does this.” We didn't really think around how we could support the state to set up these new ways of working. I think it's very easy just to blame the kind of the madness of the machine and the bureaucracy, but you've got a government that knows acutely well that it has very little social license. It's had huge reputation challenges because they've made such huge missteps around delivery, mostly associated with when they wanted to front the delivery program themselves, and suddenly realized they didn't really understand the nuance of the community well and the communications wizards in Sydney maybe didn't know how to frame a message to not only a disaster impacted community, but to a very different community, socially and culturally to that in the inner city of Sydney. So there's been some spectacular failures on their part, but their failures associated with not knowing how to organize themselves and then not knowing how to harness the connections that these local anchors have within the community, that has been the biggest failure.
The challenge of midwifing organizational change in dynamic and multi-scalar systems seems applicable to many community engaged design and planning processes. Community driven design is often about amplifying local knowledge so that larger governmental bodies can better see and value such knowledge, and then better share resources and decision-making power with communities. A third space where these hybrid knowledges that honor both local and technical expertise without the burden of governmental power dynamics is a precondition to that creative flow. Making space for calling in the government at every stage to serve as the humble partner required in this context means educating not just the first government partner, but every government partner that you encounter along the path toward transformative climate adaptation. There is a need to retain the honest, quasi-autonomous and approachable spirit of LLNR, while also ensuring that the necessary state-level bureaucratic systems are navigated successfully and appreciated fully. Further, LLNR staff often feel that they are providing more value for their work than they are compensated for by the partners and that this is unsustainable as well. This means that LLNR must identify a new funding model if it is to continue to thrive.
How Do Systems Change?
LLNR emerged in a paradigm shifting moment where every level of government was ready to consider planning and reconstruction work fundamentally differently. Given the scale of the flooding event in 2022 and the obvious failure of government systems to warn, protect, rescue and aid in response or recovery, the NSW government made public commitments to exploring news ways of working and learning from experience and mistakes. Oli Costello sees the type of social capital nurtured by the LLNR as an investment akin to green infrastructure in terms of its ability to increase resilience. “We need to do more investment into preparedness and response capability, but better to be able to build that into organizations and communities living their everyday lives. Social capital and natural capital are critical drivers for reducing the risk. Natural capital means more carbon sequestered, more nature-based solutions that reduce cultural fire and increase river restoration.” But he goes on to add that strengthening community networks are as important to climate change adaptation. He asserts that investing in events that build the communities’ capacity to feed people and organize people are also important investments in disaster recovery. “If we actually invest in these different systems that are functioning all year round, and build the right training and crossover systems, then when the disaster happens, the government and different emergency services know who to talk to because they've mapped the systems and the businesses and the community organizations that provide the functions that they need and can empower them not compete with each other. Then we are all stronger.”
NSW has invested time and resources into this project because they understand that recovery planning might also need to be about building local capacity and engendering interpersonal and physical connection in communities. NSW is the most populus state in Australia, and the potential for this co-design model that prioritizes the lived experience and local knowledge of residents working effectively with technical experts to incite systems change is significant.
This case makes very clear that innovations in climate adaptation must come from local lessons in recovery-informed preparedness. But it also highlights a tension that must be resolved for this to work. State-level bureaucracy is meant to convey stability via structures and rules, whereas innovation requires temporary suspension of those rules to foster creative space for new, hybrid solutions to emerge. The Living Lab model offers a pathway to allow for innovative, locally informed solutions to emerge amid government recovery aided processes, which will be crucial to becoming more adaptive (locally and regionally) to climate change.
In the quote above, Costello reminds us that this relational infrastructure is a crucial precondition before a transition to truly adaptive communities is possible. He follows that thought with this quote:
Some of the stories we tell become really central to our identity and practice, and if the stories are true, they can bring meaning and purpose to our lives, and they're rewarding. Some of the stories that we get told bring endless trauma…and you see that through a lot of economic capitalism trends. It's just like, “Oh, if I get this job, if I get this house, if I get this, if I get that,” the liberal, classical ideas like trickle-down economics and all these things. It doesn't work. What works is when you have local people connected to a landscape where they have localized economies that share the benefits more fairly, so people have better relationships with each other and you don't end up with huge inequities, which creates conflict. And we see that even the people that benefit from that privilege, in many circumstances, still are not getting what they need. Because what they need is connection to country, connection to community—those are the things that make people happy, and they are not things that you can buy.
Storytelling can be important, but it can also be harmful. Costello posits that if we hope to move toward better associations with the land and with each other, ensuring that the stories we embody are less transactional and more relational is key.
“Anatomy of the Lismore disaster,” Sydney Morning Herald, June 30, 2022, accessed at https://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2022/lismore-flooding/ on June 20, 2024 ↑
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2022 Flood Inquiry, New South Wales Government, accessed at https://www.nsw.gov.au/nsw-government/engage-us/floodinquiry ↑
Heris Christina L., et al, 2022, “Key features of a trauma-informed public health emergency approach: A rapid review,” in Frontiers in Public Health, Volume 10, https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2022.1006513 ↑
Allan, P., Bryant, M., Toland, A. (2025). Local Community Agency in Post-disaster Displacement. In: Ochiai, C., Carrasco, S., Tsai, S.L. (eds) Disaster and Displacement. Disaster Risk Reduction. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-2583-3_15 ↑
Living Lab Northern Rivers, What We Do, accessed at https://llnr.com.au/what-we-do on May 1, 2025 ↑
Simmonds, Jamie (2020). Rising from the Flood: Moving the Town of Grantham, Bad Apple Press: Australia. ↑
Living Lab Northern Rivers, Draw Together Workshop: Accessed at https://llnr.com.au/what-we-do/draw-together-visual-dialogue-workshop on August 21, 2025 ↑