Empowering Senior Voices:
City North Precinct
A case study showing how older adults, researchers and community partners worked together to understand local experiences and shape a more inclusive City North Precinct.
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 gave participants a supported process to turn everyday observations into evidence for change.
23
Participants
675
Community observations
8
Priority themes
65
Stakeholders at showcase
Where Empowering Senior Voices began
Empowering Senior Voices 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 extended Stanford University's Our Voice framework with two additional stages: Prepare and Future Focus.
Prepare strengthens the beginning of the process through relationship building, ethical community engagement and participant readiness. Future Focus extends it beyond findings and recommendations, creating space for participants and partners to explore future possibilities and opportunities for continued collaboration and action.
Together, these stages extend the research process at both ends, supporting meaningful participation before the research begins and creating a pathway 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.
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 expertise about their own lives, communities and the places they experience every day.
They are not just participants. They are co-creators in this project.
Prof Bernardo Figueiredo
City North showed what becomes possible when lived experience is treated as evidence and older adults are involved in shaping the conversations that affect their communities.
Project partners
Our team & acknowledgements
City North brought together researchers, community partners, government organisations and older adults across a multidisciplinary collaboration.