FAQs

The City Plan will be a spatial vision for Fremantle’s city centre to guide its growth over the next 20 years. It will identify priorities for development, planning strategies and policies that guide infrastructure investment. 

It will investigate the capacity, implications, and benefits of a range of growth scenarios for the city centre’s population, including growing the current population of 2800 people by an additional 10,000 more people.

The City Plan will bring together different ideas and strategies into a clear, visual and spatial blueprint to establish a vision for the way forward.

• The City Plan will set a clear direction, an agreed framework that coordinates the needs of all the varied stakeholders and community members that live, work, and play here.
• It will identify challenges that exist in the city centre and identify what we can do to resolve them.
• It will help to celebrate Fremantle’s significant First Nations cultural heritage and protect Fremantle’s world-class colonial heritage.
• It will recognise Australia’s housing crisis and advocate for Fremantle to remain as an affordable place for everyone to live.

Ultimately, the City Plan will instill confidence in current and prospective residents, businesses, institutions, and government agencies to be confident about investing in our growing city.

The City Plan area of study is included as a map in the ‘Background Reading’ page of this website.

The area includes what is historically considered the City Centre as reflected in the Metropolitan Region Scheme and also includes surrounding city precincts like Fremantle Oval, Cantonment Street, the Northern Gateway, Victoria Quay and the Fishing Boat Harbours which all have strategic importance for the city centre and should be considered as a cohesive whole.

In developing the methodology of the City Plan we have looked at several city shaping strategic documents from around Australia and internationally. Closer to home the City of Fremantle produced the ‘Freo 2029 Transformational Moves’ in 2014, which provides a useful benchmark which the City Plan will provide an updated response to.

Some other references that we have looked at include:

• Postcode 3000, Melbourne
• Adelaide City Plan
• Central Hobart Plan
• Central Geelong Framework Plan
• Mandurah City Centre Master Plan
• Birmingham City Plan

Growing a city requires a considered and thoughtful process.

To begin the City Plan project, we have undertaken an extensive process of mapping everything about the city centre documented in the ‘Draft Baseline Report’ available to download in the ‘Background Reading’ page of this website. We have compiled mapping data sourced from GIS, historical maps, and new maps to understand how the city has evolved through time, how it looks, how it works and how we move around. We have documented where we live, learn, work and play and broader issues of affordability, city revenue sources, vacancy, safety and community support.

We are now collecting early input from the community both online and in person workshops to inform the next steps of the City Plan which will explore a series of different growth scenarios and strategies for various city centre precincts.

The City Plan will be a representation of community values for Fremantle and we intend to establish a co-design process to inform the final City Plan outcome.

City officers aim to:

• Obtain feedback on analysis, alternatives, or decisions. 
• Work directly throughout the process to ensure that public concerns and aspirations are consistently understood and considered.
• Work with you to ensure that your concerns and aspirations are directly reflected in the alternatives developed.
• Provide feedback on how public input influenced the decision.

The Future of Fremantle project is led by the State Government Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage to develop a long-term vision (50 years) for the future of Fremantle’s inner harbour port precinct. That project envisions the relocation of port functions to Kwinana to free 260 hectares of industrial land for new urban development.

The City Plan is a separate project being led by City of Fremantle and provides an opportunity for continued public dialogue on the future of the broader Fremantle area which considers the future of Fremantle city centre when the port functions eventually relocate, which will have significant impacts on the city.