In Sydney’s Inner West, the housing plan needs to deliver to both the community and commercial interests

LOCAL GOVERNMENT SUMMIT: As multiple and more complex debates on housing explode around the country, one of the biggest hot spots is in Sydney’s Inner West. At our local government event in early September, the planner behind the Inner West Council’s Fairer Future housing plan, Hassell principal David Tickle, shared the thinking, strategy and research that underpinned the document. Following is a detailed report on his presentation.

For someone who’s actually leading a global design team Hassell principal Urban Design Sector Leader David Tickle says he spends a lot of time working on Sydney projects. It’s understandable. Sydney is going through enormous growing pains, both for its status as a global city and from the financial and resource constraints that have hammered the housing market in so many areas around the globe.

At TFE’s Local Government, Net Zero and Sustainable Communities Summit on 10 September, Tickle shared rare insights into the process that created the plan.

He kicked off his session with a look at the plan his team delivered for Pyrmont on the CBD’s edge, conceived five years ago. Both places have a lot in common, in terms of challenges and desired outcomes, he said.

“The world’s best places are ones that form a connection with people, make them feel good about being in the space of building a neighbourhood and really bringing measurable benefit to individuals as well as to communities,” he said.

That’s the ambition. The big question is always how?

Tickle ranged through the methodologies his team used, with a design process that starts with thorough research, identifies the “full opportunity of a project”, and then tests the different design solutions. It required considerations around sustainability, including carbon and resource use, social impact and social value and systems-based thinking”.

Similarities between the Pyrmont and the Inner West include urban regeneration, deep cultural and community history, important heritage fabric, topography, and landscape character, “which is really complex and layered”.

 Both had strong involvement from the state and local government.

Among the desired outcomes at Pyrmont were “intensifying existing economic clusters”, leveraging investment in public transport, such as the Metro and investment in Central Station nearby, as well as ways to unlock catalyst sites across the peninsula.

“We looked at some of the positive attributes of the peninsula, things to build on, like cultural hotspots, public spaces, employment clusters, and looking at those things holistically led us to kind of quite a simple four layer spatial framework for the peninsula.”

The work involved providing for a “continuous, generous waterfront parkland”, movement systems that emphasised the fine grain of laneway streets, small spaces and the “interchange between all of those different transport modes”.

There was also historic considerations to incorporate such as the Harris Street ridge top and an historic village character.

The Inner West

At the Inner West the team took a similar approach, but with a “very different context and very different set of drivers”.

Key mandates included delivering more housing – around 31,000 new homes – for essential workers, renters and younger residents in the inner west, Tickle said. [A subsequent announcement by the state government and the Inner West Council added plans for another 8000 homes along Parramatta Road.)

The work was in response to the state government’s call for TOD (transport-oriented developments) approach with development clustered close to train stations.

But the work led by Tickle expanded the concept to a more “place-based” approach.

“So instead of that top down one-size-fits-all approach that the state government had applied, this was really thinking about how you could create something that was much more place responsive, much more respectful of the character of the community.”

So, how to build a “healthy and more sustainable, connected neighbourhood for people, considering equitable access to transport, public space, affordable housing infrastructure, which in many ways reflect what is really a much more progressive community.”

Like Pyrmont, the area is a “very complex, layered place, with established communities, established businesses, and diversity of architectural character”.

The work considered designing with Country and close collaboration with experts in sustainability, heritage, transport, development, feasibility and, importantly, “very close collaboration with the council team”.

The result was a “huge amount” of talent, skill, commitment and local knowledge fed into the process.

Constraints

Constraints included heritage conservation areas, heritage items, strata owned lots, industrial lands, flood zones, gas pipelines and flight path restrictions from the airport.

“We thought it was also important to look at the opportunities here, to put a positive lens on things as well, and to think about how the attributes that you work with can amplify and integrate into the master plan.

“So we looked at things like established activity nodes, main streets, proximity to parks to schools, cycle and bus networks as well as rail stations.

“We looked at things like areas where there’s a focus of larger lots, which will allow development. We thought about how these things cluster and how that could help to form a bit of a different approach to the master plan.”

The work showed that housing opportunity didn’t need to “just sit around the two stations that sat in this area as state government approach suggested.

“We saw that there would be key opportunity along streets like Illawarra Road, new Canterbury Road, along the light rail greenway.”

The master plan avoided heritage conservation areas, small lots and constrained sites in favour of “a kind of circuit of change, rather than two concentric circles at each of the stations”.

The results

In Tickle’s view the structure provides for a “complex kind of neighbourhood – one where people are attracted to live here for all sorts of different reasons, not because they’re close to a train station, but because they’re near a school, they’re near a business or a cafe or a park that they might sort of again, reflects that kind of richness of what this place is about.

“We zoomed in and tested this overarching approach at a neighbourhood scale. We talked about what the desired future character of each of these neighbourhoods would be. We talked about principles around different space connectivity, density and higher objectives, and then in some more block-by-block testing. This is really critical to, I think, proving up not only the feasibility of development, but the actual ability to deliver on the biggest strategies.”

Overshadowing and visual impact were considered as well as integrating council policies such as affordable housing, rising to 5 per cent over time and more for “faith based” land.

The result was to deliver more housing that the state government asked for, thanks to the place based approach that the team took with “the deep analysis, the mapping, the learning from local stakeholders and local communities”.

I might be a bit too much on the optimistic side, he said, but there really should be “no tension between commercial outcomes and community outcomes. And in fact, if we plan and design properly, the two work together.”

Density, parking and open space

Among questions from the floor were issues of parking and open space, echoing concerns from local residents that have also focused on the number of proposed new dwellings,

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• Despite the uproar in Marrickville on housing targets, did the local council get it right?
• Letter to the editor: response to Philip Bull
• On why the housing crisis will make for a heated meeting this Sunday at Marrickville in Labor heartland

Tickle said parking was a perennial problem in most locations and that it was possible to create better access to available open space by getting it to “work a lot harder” by making it more accessible.

“I agree, yes, unlocking access to open space is critical, and upgrading it is important. Some of the work we did, as well as I mentioned briefly, was actually about Council investing and acquiring land for open space, but also committing some of their own land to create new pieces of open space as well.”

This might include “opening up some of those bigger networks for cycling and walking and you can actually access quite generous pieces of open space not too far away as well.”