The Entrance is one of the most beautiful coastal towns in New South Wales. Its stunning scenic qualities and natural features established it as a coastal holiday destination in the 19th Century. Its role as the ‘playground’ for Sydney made the town a desirable destination. This makes it easy to forget that The Entrance is a place many people call home. When a town evolves primarily for a visiting market it can tend to push away the people living in its own backyard.

This is evident in the growth of other centres and villages around The Entrance - leaving it the hole in the centre of the doughnut. The latest challenge, the global pandemic (COVID-19), stripped the town of its visitor market for a period of time. This made 2020 a unique opportunity to see
the town without its usual visitor market and better understand how the locals use the town centre. Locals are essential to the survival and indeed the success of The Entrance - to be successful through the colder winter months and the non peak periods. On top of this new strong baseline will be a stronger and more direct approach for the visitor market - establishing activations, events and spaces that will make The Entrance number one on their destination list.

The Place Plan identifies methods that activate the town centre for both locals and visitors. The goal is to develop a range of opportunities that establish a local baseline, which is then built upon for a visitor market. The Place Plan takes a evolutionary approach to The Entrance and its next stages of life. An evolutionary approach, recognises that it takes time for a town to transform into its desired form and character. In particularly it takes time for people to accept the new norm. An evolutionary process, sets a vision and goal and identifies the steps to achieve it. This means each place and project can move at its own pace, shedding and adding key ingredients along the way.

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We call this the Place Evolution Process.