Prioritising placemaking, empowerment, and citizen engagement: Caroline Kelly’s pioneering social planning in post-war Sydney

Post-war suburbanisation is a foundational element of the Australian urban experience but brought a balance sheet of social costs alongside material benefits. Most development authorities were slow to acknowledge the need for a more explicit social approach to urban questions until the 1970s, a decade of questioning conventional wisdom, promoting wider community participation, and greater awareness of the importance of place in planning outcomes. This paper explores this narrative in reconstructing the career and contributions of a relatively forgotten figure in the development of Australian planning. Caroline Kelly (1899–1989) pursued a remarkably varied life. Her three core careers: actress-entrepreneur, social anthropologist, and social planner were shaped throughout by her feminist outlook. Kelly’s third career for a succession of major planning bodies in Sydney saw her advising on social wellbeing and placemaking activities for relocated suburban populations and receiving communities as the social aspects of urban planning were first being considered as an integral part of the wider planning mission. In an era of great social change, her skills in communication and social research enabled her to appreciate and promote consideration of human issues in the planning process. Kelly’s was a resolute voice for qualitative inquiry, and for planners listening to, acknowledging, and addressing the needs of displaced communities, with particular concern for the isolation, loneliness and lack of social infrastructure suffered by women, children and teenagers in suburbia. A place-based perspective provides the interpretive structure to analyse Kelly’s activities from the 1940s to the 1980s.Caroline Kelly’s social research revealed that all residents in expanding urban environments were experiencing social displacement and disconnection.Kelly promoted better-informed planning and active place-making supports to encourage the reformation of individual social identity, thereby nurturing a stronger connection to place.As a social anthropologist, university lecturer and planning consultant, Kelly helped drive the emergence of social planning as a fundamental component of modern planning in Australia.