Working with reverberations: new ways for small towns

ABSTRACT Typically, metropolitan governance literature and practice has lacked focus on the ways that processes of urbanisation affect rural areas or small towns. As urbanisation is increasingly recognised as a process that reverberates across peri-urban and rural regions, the entwined and interdependent nature of governance across scales becomes evident. This interaction is recognised in the 2017 iteration of Plan Melbourne’s directions relating to peri-urban and regional areas. This illustrates the need for planning to respond to opportunities and challenges arising from interactions between small towns and metropolitan governance. This article investigates these gaps in two ways: Firstly, by introducing the idea of reverberations to describe the effects of external factors like metropolitan governance exert on lived experience in small towns. Secondly, we use reflective practice to explore how working with those reverberations has shaped the development of a place-based ecological model for small-town planning. Informed by the work of practitioners and scholars such as Randolph Hester, David Seamon and Patsy Healey, the place-based ecological model innovates by bringing a phenomenological and relational sensibility to planning, fostering place-based assets to allow for responses to reverberations, and address existing gaps in planning practice. The article then suggests future directions for the evolution of small-town planning and governance frameworks.