Placemaking Designers, Urban Design Consultants, Urban Designers

Placemaking & Urban Design Consultants

POMO is an award winning placemaking practice. POMO specialises in artistic, bespoke urban design and construction and placemaking consultancy services. POMO partners with landscape architects and local governments who want to bring artistic, meaningful, place-driven designs to life in the public realm. We specialise in working on urban renewal projects that deliver community benefit, from town squares and playgrounds, to downtown centres, infrastructure and everything in between. We believe that local identity, culture and history should be expressed in all public realm design programs.

Based on the Sunshine Coast and in Melbourne, but working Australia-wide, POMO conducts deep research and community engagement in order to unlock the hidden narratives of places. We bring local culture and place qualities to life through the design process and then work with artists, creative professionals and hand-picked tradespeople to deliver artistic and award winning urban outcomes.

POMO works from the concept and consultation phase, through the design documentation process then manages all facets of fabrication, building, construction and handover.

As placemaking and place consultants, POMO is also involved in policy writing, preparation of design manuals and various other forms of place-orientated research and documentation, often for local government.

Other Projects

Miles Streetscape

POMO was engaged to collaborate with FourFold Studio and Vee Design in the revitalisation of the main street in Miles Western Queensland. Our role was to delve in the cultural history of the town and then design a number of bespoke creative elements in the landscape that express the uniqueness of the town.

POMO Bush Studio

When we set out to design our studio we approached it like any design project, we began by identifying the priorities and creating a strategic framework to guide the decision making.

The initial priority was to create something simple to build, something sustainable, creatively inspiring and something that was cost effective. Through research it became clear that achieving these things was not necessarily difficult.

Palmwoods Town Square

Working with the landscape design team POMO were able to create a number of key design initiatives that would contribute to the locally inspired placemaking program and deliver on practical community needs.

POMO was engaged to design and construct a number of landscape elements. Each element was custom designed and born from the uniqueness of Palmwoods, they reference local history, using locally sourced materials and were being made collaboratively with local craftspeople and artisans.

Underlying this was a larger design and management process run by POMO involving construction design, design reporting, engineering certification, construction and project management and installation on-site. A true multidisciplinary and multi-skilled program with a wide range of stakeholders and projects participants.

The project won the Excellence Award at the 2018 Queensland AILA awards for Civic Design. It also won gold in the same category at the national awards.

Cribb Street Landsborough

POMO was engaged to work alongside the Sunshine Coast Council in the renewal of Cribb Street - Landsborough’s main street. The project was part of a larger master planning process being run by council.
Specifically we participated in the community engagement process to help ascertain community attitudes and expectations around the revitalisation project.

C-Square Nambour

Wayfinding is the process of finding one’s way through an unfamiliar environment; signage is one part of a wayfinding strategy, the part that most of us rely upon. In this project, POMO was engaged to create a comprehensive wayfinding strategy for what was arguably the Sunshine Coast’s most difficult to navigate urban precinct.

The owners of the precinct identified wayfinding as a very real need that, is addressed properly, could help improve people’s experience of the space and play a key role in creating of a more vibrant urban centre.

108 Wickham Street Fortitude Valley

POMO was engaged by principal contractors Buildcorp to undertake the detailed design and fabrication of a number of placemaking elements at 108 Wickham Street Fortitude Valley Brisbane.

The public space between two commercial buildings was being revitalised be lead designers AECOM and POMO worked alongside AECOM to inject meaning, history and locally appropriate stories and overlays into the space

Southport Broadwater Play Attraction

Our design response for the Southport Broadwater Parklands play attraction is unique to the complex environment of the Broadwater estuary - a place which marks the confluence of river to ocean and denotes a powerful connection between land, sea and sky. We are proud to be shaping the detailed design and delivery of this project, teaming up with Fleetwood Urban, Simone Eisler, LVX and Burchills to create this exciting new play attraction for the region.

Maroochydore City Centre

This project involved the detailed design and construction of smart city digital concrete signs for the new Maroochydore City Centre. These signs hold large format digital touch screens which advertise community events and wayfinding information for the new Maroochydore town centre.

The signs are currently in operation at the new Maroochy Town Centre.

Terry Summers Recycled Book

Terry Summers is a Brisbane based practising visual artist and sculptor. Terry wanted to create a coffee table book that would be a retrospective of his life’s work focusing on the years 1999-2009.

State Library of Queensland

Marking 100 years since the First World War, the State Library was tasked with putting on an important exhibition that told the personal stories of Queenslanders’ involvement in the First World War. POMO was asked to assist in the design of this important event.

USC & Sunshine Coast Council Co-lab Studio

In early 2019 the Sunshine Coast Council funded a cutting edge experimental design studio which was run as a capstone industry based subject for students at the University of the Sunshine Coast. Students were given the chance to work collaboratively with industry professionals to design something that would be built in a public place.

Downtown Nambour Public Art

Public art has an important role to play in placemaking projects, helping to establish a sense of place and an identity for urban environments.

This project involved three installations of public art, all with different objectives. POMO played a different role within each of these projects.

Sandgate Kids

The environment in which this project was undertaken was a child care centre that had been renovated and changed a number times throughout a long period of time. The centre has a number of distinct areas of care, separated into sections for children based on age plus a number of staff rooms and administration offices. This method of expansion coupled with the need to direct people to distinct areas in a confined space configuration presented a special wayfinding challenge.

Sunshine Beach Noosa

Sunshine Beach is one of Queensland’s most beautiful seaside villages. It has a long history as a surfers’ coastal enclave nestled against the pristine Noosa National Park. This project aimed to upgrade a local public park using a placemaking process and gathering views through a community engagement program.

A 20 Year Vision for Downtown Nambour

POMO spearheaded a pro-bono urban renewal project for the benefit of the local Nambour community. The project involved the creation of a sustainable plan aimed at revitalising the downtown Nambour CBD re-shaping the future of Nambour.

Nambour is expected to grow in population by 50% over the next twenty years. With this change comes immense opportunity for Nambour to revitalise and recreate itself as a sustainable and unique Sunshine Coast community. This change must be managed carefully in order to retain the unique character of the township as well as accommodate the changing demographic and land use patterns that will invariably occur.