Form section The Adelaide Review 2012

the adelaide REVIEW november 2012

FORM DE SIGN

PLANNING

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FEATURE

INNOVATION

Winner of the branding competition for “Take your Place 2012” Yvonne Ashby, Habitat

Australian Institute of Landscape Architects

the collaborative city

IDC’s Tim Horton on the Collaborative City exhibition

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PIA Awards

The PIA SA Awards for planning excellence will reward our best planners

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take your place

The next generation are joining the conversation about their sense of place

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A collaborative city The Collaborative City exhibition showcases more than a year’s work of developing inner Adelaide’s Integrated Design Strategy, which was about listening and collaborating to make the city a great place for great people.

Tim Horton

“

Failing to plan is about planning to fail,” said Winston Churchill. This is true in any field, but especially so in our built environment. Three out of four of us live in urban centres, which explains why the things that make a city are so often discussed around the barbecue, the board table and in our media.

Eighty percent of Australia’s GDP is generated in cities. And they suck up 75 percent of our energy. Adelaide is about average.

Three out of four South Australians live in Greater Adelaide. And growth is inevitable.

How should we plan, so we don’t fail?

Every day we all make decisions about investing in the environment we build around us. State government repairs and builds new roads, libraries and health centres. Councils plant trees, pave footpaths and master plan

public space. Businesses choose where to build, invest and locate. Families decide where to live and for what reason: school, work, relatives. All these decisions involve an investment.

Most of us would rightly assume that decisions made by governments of any creed are based on good evidence and sound research. But a recent audit by just one metro council confirmed for the first time the number of streetlights in their local area. The number varied significantly from what they were being charged by the energy company. A lack of good information has allowed ratepayers to be overcharged - for years. This is just one small example of where costs and inefficiencies lay in the cities we build and how we run them. Do we use energy wisely?

Can we move people about more effectively?

Can Adelaide be a healthier place the more it grows? Evidence shows it can.

The Adelaide Review would like to wish all finalists success in the upcoming Design Institute of South Australia and The Planning Institute of SA Awards.

Please pick up the December edition of The Adelaide Review to find out who won.

December edition on the streets Friday November 30.

But to get there will need some new thinking.

Einstein knew it when he said, “you can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that created it in the first place”. So how do we get new thinking?

With vision, and a set of principles that we can use to guide the decisions we take together.

In an Australian first, Adelaide has decided to plan its future by working together across boundaries. No other capital city has drawn together its councils, the state government and the Australian government to work jointly. And no other capital city has found a way to involve 74 organisations like community groups and professional peak bodies. And no other has chosen to take a people-first, design-first approach.

This is what makes the Integrated Design Strategy special. It uses a design-based approach to explore issues that often get locked in win/lose arguments. But by harnessing designs capacity to ‘synthesise’ competing interests we’re developing a more inclusive and - compared to traditional planning approaches - innovative roadmap for our collective future.

So is this all motherhood and whimsy? Not if we choose to convert thought into action.

Where might we start?

Next time you’re headed in to the city from the airport ask yourself; is this the gateway Adelaide deserves? Across 10 lanes of bitumen, a Hungry Jacks sits in the forecourt of a Shell service station. The great windowless form of the Australia Post mail exchange looms behind, a furniture warehouse in the foreground.

Welcome to Adelaide; a place that celebrates its heritage as Australia’s first planned city. A city that’s uniquely connected to nature, to endless ancient landscape and limitless sky.

Well, almost. Or, not quite. Not yet, anyway.

So what will change our city gateway from ‘gas station grunge’ to ‘metro Mecca’? Business as usual would see individual sites bought and developed. Each site might do what it can to provide some open space - wherever fits. But a more coordinated approach that looks at this whole precinct - from West Terrace to Morphett St, from Gouger to Grote St - would allow some big planning to look beyond the ‘site’ to the scale of the ‘precinct’.

Taking a big picture, joined up approach to this whole precinct we might see existing Victorian cottages as a new village heart, supported by mixed communities of shops, offices, apartments, townhouses, bars and maybe a tram stop. In some work prepared by global design and engineering practice, ARUP, taking this big picture approach shows more affordable housing, more young families, more heritage retained, more open space and more return to a developer. What if a different way of doing things meant a gain for all of us? It would mean council, state government and private sector working better together.

“

Next time you’re headed in to the city from the airport ask yourself; is this the gateway Adelaide deserves? Across 10 lanes of bitumen, a Hungry Jacks sits in the forecourt of a Shell service station. The great windowless form of the Australia Post mail exchange looms behind, a furniture warehouse in the foreground."

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Of course, another contested area is our wonderful parklands. A true global asset, these 832 hectares swallow New York’s Central Park many times over and represent one of Adelaide’s many points of difference.

As more people choose to live around the inner metro area - closer to shops, schools and public transport - high quality green space will be even more important for them.

It may mean walking a dog in the morning or biking on a weekend; reading a book under the shade of a tree or being part of a multi cultural festival. Working with Adelaide Landscape Architecture practice Oxigen, we asked how we could protect this critical asset but see the parklands as the bridge not the moat - to surrounding communities.

Councils working together to connect the parklands to the surround.

The Integrated Design Strategy was always more than just another urban design project, but Premier Jay Weatherill put it best when he said the “solution for South Australia to rise to its challenges and to grasp its opportunities, realise the ambition of being one of the great small cities of the world, will depend on two fundamental points. One is our livability – how good it feels to be in this place. And second, our ingenuity – what it means to actually grasp the opportunities that exist in an ever

changing world, seeking to do new things, to take advantage of our traditional strengths, but respond to the challenges that we know are being put in our way and are making it imperative for us to be dynamic and change to live in a highly competitive world.”

Over the last two years, the Integrated Design Strategy has sought to do both; to leverage our unique quality of life, and redraw our future based on ingenuity and innovation.

Two things design does well.

Tim Horton is the Commissioner of the Integrated Design Commission The Collaborative City exhibition is a part of the ongoing open channel with community in developing an integrated design strategy for inner Adelaide. Open from 10am to 4pm Monday to Friday until Thursday, November 8 at Tuxedo Cat, 200 North Terrace.

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The state’s ‘Best Place’ to be named

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outh Australian planning professionals will gather at the Sebel Playford Ballroom in Adelaide on Friday, November 9 to find out which of their planning projects will be recognised as excellent and who will be named ‘Planner of the Year’.

Dubbed ‘The Big Night Out’ for planners, this is when the Planning Institute of Australia (PIA) announces the 2012 PIA South Australia Awards for Planning Excellence. Planning projects created in the past year are submitted to the awards program and the work by planners and other professionals in the planning and development industry is judged in a number of categories.

PIA South Australian President Iris Iwanicki said this year’s search for the best planning projects in the state has been extremely fruitful.

“Some great planning projects have been submitted this year and the judges often found it difficult to arrive at a decision,” Ms Iwanicki said.

“We received nominations from PIA members, non-member planners, planning consultancies, public sector agencies and community groups.”

The Awards for Planning Excellence program called for nominations in a number of categories including the Best Planning Ideas Award and the Public Engagement and Community Planning Award. The different categories allow for a broad range of projects to be nominated and among the categories is the Great Place Award.

Last year’s Great Place Award went to Adelaide’s Central Market Precinct. This year a number of nominations have been received from within the city and regional areas. A Great Place in a neighbourhood or a city setting is important for communities to make connections with their surroundings as a place to be proud of and use as part of their lifestyle. The Planning Institute will this year name a Great Place that all of South Australians would be proud of.

“Planning is about creating places and spaces that people feel good about. Places that offer all the right facilities for the specific location. It’s about achieving economically, environmentally and socially sustainable places and projects for the future. The motivation behind the awards program is to promote and encourage the best

that planning can offer.

“On Friday night, November 9, we will showcase the very latest in excellent planning projects which not only show industry stakeholders what their peers are achieving but also promotes the value of good planning to the wider community.”

Winning projects announced on the night will then go on to be judged against winning projects from other states and territories as they all compete for national recognition at the PIA National Awards for Planning Excellence in March 2013.

The annual PIA Awards for Excellence program has been running for 26 years and PIA believes its value has a greater significance as the world faces ever increasing challenges.

Communities the world over are facing rapid population growth, volatile markets, fragile economies and a number of other issues contributing to a seemingly uncertain future.

PIA believes good planning in all its forms is the solution to these modern challenges. Governments, politicians, leaders of industry and the community need to recognise that good evidence based planning systems deliver visions for the future and desired outcomes socially, environmentally and economically wherever they are used.

Ms Iwanicki said it’s for all these reasons a national planning awards program is essential.

“If we are to aspire to better public spaces, healthy sustainable places where people want to live work and relax, we need to continue the search for better ideas. That’s what this awards program is all about – the ultimate improvement in our lifestyle.

“The creation and delivery of a challenging project, and the cooperation, collaboration and coordination among the people involved are all things considered by the judges.

“It’s not just about looking for the best big development. It’s about a great planning idea, project or program.”

Details of the winners of the 2012 PIA Awards for Planning excellence will be published in the December issue of The Adelaide Review.

planning.org.au/sa

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Thinking big, acting small: A few possibilities for our urban design futures Danny Brookes

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he recent International Urban Design Conference in Melbourne revealed a wave of interesting ideas, which I think might offer some clues for designers, entrepreneurs and policy makers to help us achieve more intelligent living environments.

On a day-to-day basis, we’re all exposed to a range of historical styles of urban design. Our rather beautiful boulevards, such as North Terrace or King William Rd, have strong parallels with the late 19th Century City Beautiful movement, rooted in the formalities of the Renaissance and the Baroque. The mid-20th century modernisation of cities and the relentless pursuit of efficient transportation perhaps illustrates why our green centre, Victoria Square, is today about 40 percent bitumen. And we can also see the consequences of our unrelenting urban sprawl, generated by the suburban design model stemming from post-WWII Levittown, New York.

These models are suggestive of quite formal approaches to design, and they are by no means the only way to create liveable places. In fact for our long-term benefit, some of the ways we currently design need to change.

There were some fantastic speakers at this year’s conference, and a range of thought-provoking ideas about how urban designers can respond to changing societal and environmental needs.

Some of the more interesting ideas at the conference promoted the use and revitalisation of often-decrepit parts of the city. There were approaches toward encouraging more organic day-to-day use in all of our city and suburban spaces; how buildings and their landscapes can be sculpted to better consider the outdoor public experience; and how thinking beyond property and ownership boundaries can help us rethink the interactions between buildings, whereby otherwise-wasted space, water and heat energy might be made use of for public benefit.

Marcus Westbury, a young entrepreneur and founder of the highly successful Renew Newcastle model, spoke of non-confrontational strategies in which opportunities can be made for young people to inhabit and revitalise disused building stock.

Having influenced the Renew Adelaide model currently operating in our own city, Westbury was quite critical of overregulation in the design and building sector, noting “initiative is more important than infrastructure…. cities are experiments”.

In a slightly similar vein, RMIT University Landscape Architecture academic Dr Marieluise Jonas also spoke on methods for informal design, relating student-led experiments in Melbourne to her earlier research in Tokyo. Referencing the theoretical writings of Ignasi de Sola-Morales Rubió on Terrain Vague, Jonas reminds us that there are ways we can reconsider the perceived boundaries that exist between properties, landscapes and hard edged buildings, instead seeking to maximise our use of space in intelligent and harmonious ways.

As one example, the owner of a temporarily vacant lot in Tokyo’s Itabashi district gave permission for the community to use the space as an informal local market. The gradual popularity of this public gathering affected the site owner so profoundly that he is now reconsidering how he builds on the land, with the intention of including an open public gallery on ground level. It’s a great example of property owners and community working together for everyone’s benefit.

Another fascinating presentation was by Donald Bates, an internationally-renowned architect and now Chair of Architectural Design at the University of Melbourne. Bates presented a collaborative design concept for an experimental, yet nonetheless highly

considered, urban scheme for Melbourne. Within the context of a rapidly expanding and rather densely configured city, Bates identifies a need for renewed public infrastructure. He has sought to address this through a sophisticated outdoor public swimming pool design on the edge of the Yarra River.

Interestingly, the pool is designed to run on waste rainwater collected from disused neighbouring apartment and hotel water tanks, heated by waste energy from the nearby Casino complex and Aquarium, and finally filtered (postuse) via a proposed reed bed garden embedded in the parkland. Visualised, engineered and proposed to local government completely probono, Bates’ innovative and rather generous scheme may offer us several clues toward achieving more creative, integrated and efficient ways of organising city infrastructure that can simultaneously produce delightful results for public benefit. Let’s just hope it gets funded!

Danny Brookes is the president of SONA Australia

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Take Your Place As part of the spring art, architecture and design celebration Place 2012, an initiative to involve children and young people, Take Your Place, brings the next generation into the conversation about their sense of place.

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imply, Take Your Place allows young people to make a three-minute video about their favourite place (it could be their backyard, a street, a park etc), which is then uploaded to Take Your Place’s Facebook page (facebook.com/ TakeYour Place). The outstanding entries may then attract one of four people’s choice awards and be screened at a finale event. Australian Institute of Architects (AIA) chapter councillor Angelique Edmonds says Take Your Place is about promoting an intergenerational conversation, as “places are meaningful for different people for different reasons at different ages”.

“The idea for this is to create a platform for people of different ages to talk about what’s important and to allow a different conversation,” she says. “It could be anywhere, it could be a cubby house, could be the beach, it could be their backyard, a public space, anywhere that’s meaningful to them.”

“The concept of doing a video was a really exciting way to give all sorts of people the opportunity to capture the place that’s important and explain how they feel about it,” fellow AIA chapter councillor Sally Bolton continues. “With just their phones basically.”

“There’s certainly something very powerful about the individual having the platform to present themselves and their place,” Edmonds says. “They’re not waiting for someone else to make their film and someone to choose their camera angles and how to frame it. They are actually fully in control of the message they want to send about this place.”

Take Your Place is just one of the events happening as part of the three-month festival of art, architecture and design, Place 2012. This spring celebration, which is a collaboration between the Integrated Design Commission,

Arts SA, the Australia Institute of Architects and many more design bodies and councils, allows South Australians to register an activity that discusses the question – what makes a great place? Check place2012.com.au for a list of Place 2012 events.

Place 2012 runs until the end of November.

Registrations for Take Your Place close on Monday, November 19 place2012.com.au

Winner of the branding competition for “Take your Place 2012” Yvonne Ashby, Habitat

Take Your Place Artwork - String City By Design Lilly Blue and Jo Pollitt of bigkidsmagazine.com

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