海角社区

Innovations in Planning

Thursday 2.00pm-3.00pm

• Nicholas Stevens M海角社区
• Liam Campbell M海角社区 and Laura Harvey M海角社区
• Amy Degenhart 海角社区 (Assoc.)

Nicholas Stevens M海角社区
Designing for ‘cool’ public open spaces: a new approach to community-based climate resilience

This presentation outlines the planning and design requirements to establish ‘cool refuges’ in public open spaces. Cool refuges are purposefully and passively designed public space areas that can provide relief and comfort to the community during hot weather. These locations are important for promoting public health, safety, and well-being in our urban environments and neighbourhoods. They seek to offer community-based resilience to heat and hot weather which could otherwise pose risks to public space users, including vulnerable populations such as the young and elderly.

Incorporated in the development of an infrastructure masterplan review, this cooperative project between the University of the Sunshine Coast and Noosa Shire Council presents new approaches to climate resilience. This partnership between research science and infrastructure development is an important transition to the evidence-based integration of urban cooling within and beyond public open spaces.

This case study project details the use of sociotechnical systems (STS) modelling and analysis. The science of STS is used worldwide to improve the adaptive capacity of complex health and safety critical infrastructure systems, making them more resilient. This first-of-its-kind project supports the recognition that public open space is an important health, safety, and liveability asset. The innovation is the ability to design, and redesign, public spaces to optimise their latent adaptive capacity for urban cooling. Using STS approaches it is possible to design more resilient public spaces, which enhance community experience under most climate conditions.

The project has established the necessary key indicators which support the data collection to evidence the cooling effect in public open spaces and surrounds. It has detailed the range of STS based design principles, system activities, and required resources that will establish the successful integration of cool refuges. These results are now supported in the holistic redesign of a major public space and continue to inform a regional urban greening masterplan to improve the liveability, inclusion, and climate resilience for all the community.

Liam Campbell M海角社区 and Laura Harvey M海角社区
Flying into the Future: Exploring the Potential of Advanced Air Mobility on the Gold Coast and Beyond

Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) offers the potential to provide safe, accessible, low-carbon, low-noise, automated, and affordable air transport for passengers and cargo, capable of serving previously hard-to-reach urban and rural locations. Into the future, AAM has potential to revolutionise and become part of an integrated transport network that is accessible to all.

AAM and specifically electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft have recently received significant private investment, with numerous established and start-up aircraft manufacturers now having developed a range of designs, which are in various stages of testing. These aircraft vary in design, seating capacity, speed and range. Manufacturers are working with aviation authorities in various countries, including Australia, to certify their eVTOL aircraft, with some planning for commercial operations to begin by 2025.

As part of the Gold Coast Airport Master Plan 2024, Gold Coast Airport commissioned a series of research pieces into future aviation technologies, including AAM and eVTOL. In partnership with Arup, Gold Coast Airport was placed at the centre of a case-study, which sought to investigate the future accessibility that could be achieved by the new technology for the Gold Coast and northern NSW region.

The case-study compared AAM and eVTOL to private vehicle and public transport travel times and distances, showing the realistic catchments of each transport mode and how accessibility of the Gold Coast and northern NSW region could be transformed by eVTOL.

The modelling indicates a “sweet-spot” for AAM journeys of between 25km and 40km, whereby AAM can reduce journey times to close to 10 minutes (as opposed to 40+ minutes by other modes) and at a realistic cost per commuter, equivalent to the cost of using a conventional taxi. As such, for a conurbation such as the Gold Coast and Tweed which is stretched along the coastline, AAM could provide a viable alternative to ground-based modes for air passengers travelling from Coolangatta to, for example, Southport, which is typically a 30km or 50 minute journey by car.

In light of Arup’s research and case-study using Gold Coast Airport, what is the role for AAM on the Gold Coast and northern NSW? How can this be applied to Queensland and Australian cities more broadly? What infrastructure is required to realise the specific opportunities of AAM? What is the role of planning in facilitating these new, and still largely unknown, technologies? How will cities, airports and transport networks change in the face of new aviation technologies?

Amy Degenhart 海角社区 (Assoc.)
Housing 1 to 3

REFLECTION

There are two reasons why I am an architect practicing in Queensland today, and K’gari Island is the first. Long ago in a suburban home south of Chicago in mid-winter I would drool over the photos my brother, who was already living in Australia, would present of this island at his annual slide show.

The second reason was a professional and personal passion to preserve the community of that ubiquitous childhood home while removing the intrinsic isolation of car dependency and cookie cutter homogeneity.

REALIGN

Fast forward a century and a decade or three, and my architectural focus across Australia is to realign our suburbs one back yard at a time into walkable, welcoming, diverse – and even affordable – villages.

My “how to” proposes a reciprocal question, “why not”, and is a simple “1 to 3” form-based gentle density strategy. What if we could transform one large dwelling into three smaller ones?

I’d like to take planners, professionals, politicians, and communities on a visionary architectural journey that starts and ends with the form of a single suburban home, but which has transformed itself in an “industry instant” – i.e., one year or less – into three separately titled dwellings that form a mini village, while contributing positively to the larger one.

Every level of government in Australia is doing its best to nudge industry into the production of more and better housing, but industry is still often stuck in the detail sludge of regulatory catch up.

Good design could be a pathway through the regulatory challenges by creating an approval process that combines a form-based code, a registered professional designer, and a building certifier or – alternatively – professional planning consultants and local authorities could equally be a bridge over the approval gap by processing the same code through risk-smart assessment options.

Importantly, the vision is that the same built form outcome should be able to start from either approval process and should also be able to finish with either a standard format plan – with or without common property – or a building format plan title, whichever suits the developer, builder, financier, and/or residents best.

Easy as 1 to 3!

REVOLUTION

With currently more than 1.5 million detached dwellings in Queensland – most already serviced by sewer, water, paving, and power – if even just 1% of those existing dwellings was transformed into three new dwellings in a single year – that’s 30,000 additional, accessible, 7-star homes by 2025 and – if that pace could be maintained – this strategy would supply more than half the 1 million new homes targeted for 2046.

Now that’s a revolution!