Ballarat’s landscape today is the culmination of thousands of years of land management and change, not least the gold mining story which is of national significance. It is a layered, complex and nuanced landscape unique from other places. As the municipality prepares for future planning challenges through the Ballarat Strategy – Today, Tomorrow, Together, it recognised that it is vital that the cultural and social values attributed to this urban landscape are retained, revitalised and celebrated.

Context undertook an indicative characterisation of Ballarat’s historic urban landscape, considering a range of historic and contemporary data and developing a characterisation framework. With a selection of community informants, Context to start to explore the diversity and complexity of community readings of the landscape. Finally, the project developed a methodology to guide Stage 2, where further community engagement and refinement of the historic urban landscape characterisation will be carried out.

The City of Ballarat has adopted the Historic Urban Landscape approach (UNESCO 2011) to guide their work. This study is one of a series of international pilot projects that are contributing to the development of methodologies of mapping and understanding the values of historic cities and their landscape settings.