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PIA President Dyan Currie – Angela Forrest – Raelene Thompson (Attorney General’s Department)

A young planner from a Hobart consultancy has received national recognition winning
the industry’s premier award for a planner with less than five years experience.

Angela Forrest from engineering, architecture and environmental consulting company
GHD, has taken out the ‘Outstanding Achievement by a Young Planner Award’ at the
Planning Institute of Australia’s (PIA) 2012 National Awards for Planning Excellence.

Judges said Angela Forrest demonstrated excellence in her understanding of a range of
complex issues and showed an early maturity in her work.

Angela said receiving the award was a big surprise. “I was quite overwhelmed to be
honest. I didn’t know that I’d won. I knew I was in the running for something but didn’t
know I’d won,” she said.

Nominations in the category covered a variety of planning projects and disciplines and
Angela was recognised for excellence across a broad cross section of her work.

“The nomination included a variety of things I worked on with some bigger projects like
Parliament Square but I think it was more to do with the breadth of experience that I’ve
had.”

PIA National President Dyan Currie congratulated Angela on receiving the award and
said recognition of excellent work by young planners is important.

“Recognising young role models like Angela is extremely important for the planning
industry. It’s essential we encourage our young planners to achieve great results,” Ms
Currie said.

“But it’s also important that young planners involved in great projects continue to look
for better ways of creating better places and spaces for people with well planned
communities in the future.”

The PIA National Awards for Planning Excellence is held annually and includes entries
of planning projects that have received recognition at State and Territory level. This
year’s awards presentation was held at the Adelaide Convention Centre as part of the
annual PIA National Congress.

Angela Forrest was among seven nominations in this award category with the judges
recognising the high standard of entries.

‘The judges would like to congratulate all of the outstanding nominees in this category,
which can only be seen as a very healthy sign for the planning fraternity. Making a
distinction was therefore an extremely difficult task and all nominees in the judges’ view
were high achievers and role models for their peers.’
Planning Institute Australia