PART OF THE EMPOWERING SENIOR VOICES PROGRAM
City North: Empowering Senior Voices In Action
A city through experienced eyes
The City North Precinct is changing fast with new towers, new footpaths and new rules. Twenty-three older residents set out to document what that change actually feels like to live through.
Empowering Senior Voices in Action gave participants a supported process to turn everyday observations into evidence, shared priorities and pathways for change.
23
Participants
675
Community observations
8
Priority themes
65
Stakeholders at showcase
Where Empowering Senior Voices began
The Empowering Senior Voices Program was born from a gap identified by project lead Professor Bernardo Figueiredo: older residents were often surveyed about ageing, but rarely equipped to generate their own evidence about the places where they live.
When a funding opportunity emerged through RMIT's City North Activation Challenge, Professor Figueiredo saw an opportunity to address that gap by partnering with Stanford University's Our Voice initiative and drawing on its international citizen-science methodology. Watch a short explainer.
The City North project brought together multidisciplinary researchers, the City of Melbourne, community organisations and older residents around a shared question:
Could citizen science help build healthier, more inclusive neighbourhoods?
From methodology to innovation
City North became more than an application of an existing methodology. Shaping Connections adapted Stanford University's Our Voice approach for the project, introducing a Prepare stage to strengthen the beginning of the process through relationship building, ethical community engagement and participant readiness.
Shaping Connections also developed a Future Focus stage to extend learning beyond the delivery of findings and recommendations, creating space to consider how relationships, evidence and project learning could support continued participation and future action.
Together, these additions strengthen the process at both ends, supporting meaningful participation from the outset and creating pathways for learning, relationships and ideas to continue beyond the project.
Capturing lived experience in City North
For the City North project, participants used the Our Voice Discovery Tool app to document their experiences as they moved through the precinct. The tool enabled observations to be captured in place through photographs, location data, voice recordings and written reflections.
Capture
Photograph places
and experiences
Locate
Connect observations
to locations
Reflect
Record observations
and experiences
Share
Bring evidence
together
Every great journey starts with a walk
Instead of asking older adults to complete another survey, Empowering Senior Voices invited them to become citizen-scientists, walking their own neighbourhood, camera and voice recorder in hand, deciding for themselves what mattered enough to document.
Explore the six stages of the City North project to see how participants moved from local observations to shared priorities and action.
Walk the precinct through their eyes
The StoryMap brings together observations captured during the Discovery Walks. Explore geotagged photographs, comments and ratings to see how participants experienced different parts of the City North Precinct.
Select a coloured marker to explore the observation, photograph and participant reflection captured at that location.
Credit: This StoryMap was produced in partnership with the Australian Urban Observatory and through in-kind contributions from ARC project DP230102101.
Slowing down changes what you notice.
Normally we walk so fast in the city we don't see anything.
The Discovery Walks revealed how everyday features such as footpaths, lighting, seating, trees, safety and social connection shape experiences of ageing in place.
Eight priority themes emerged
While participants experienced the precinct differently, recurring patterns emerged across hundreds of observations. Through collaborative analysis, these were grouped into eight priority themes reflecting the places, experiences and issues that mattered most.
Select a theme to explore the evidence, participant insights and recommendations that emerged from the project.
 Safety/Falls & Accessibility |  Equity & Inclusion in Public Spaces |  Regulation & Enforcement |
|---|---|---|
 Infrastructure & Maintenance |  Sustainability & Green Infrastructure |  Collaboration & Partnerships |
 Community Engagement |  Environrmental Urban Design |
Where the journey leads
Older adults are experts in their own lives
Empowering Senior Voices starts from a clear principle: older adults bring valuable knowledge about their own lives, communities and the places they experience every day. Their lived experience is a form of civic knowledge that can help shape better decisions.
They are not just participants. They are co-creators in this project.
Prof Bernardo Figueiredo
City North showed what becomes possible when older adults' lived experience is recognised as civic knowledge and connected with people and institutions able to respond.
The project also highlighted that being heard is only part of the process. Sustainable participation depends on creating visible pathways between lived experience, decision-making, institutional response and continued involvement.
Watch City North: Empowering Senior Voices in Action
Project partners
Our team & acknowledgements
City North brought together researchers, community partners, government organisations and older adults across a multidisciplinary collaboration.