Developers and the design team for a housing project at Dubbo, about five hours north west of Sydney, undertook community consultation before even putting pen to paper. It shaved years off the expected timeframe for approval. Here’s how it happened.
Design for climate resilience and social value can deliver density, speed to market and reduced risks if the conventional development pathway is altered, the team behind a major new community at Dubbo has demonstrated.
The project, Gunyah, at Dubbo in Wiradjuri Country, Western New South Wales, has plans for between 5500 and 6000 dwellings across eight typologies, including 30 per cent accessible, affordable or social dwellings, plus a commercial hub, seniors living, parks, a site for a primary school and a medical centre.
The 375-hectare site is partly owned by the local council and partly by private interests that purchased and consolidated a number of rural lots. Marra + Yeh Architects, in collaboration with LatStudios, have led the masterplan design, integrating holistic sustainability and climate resilience.
Marra + Yeh principal Carol Marra says that a masterplan of this scale could traditionally take between five years and a decade or more to gain development consent, but the process that was embarked on meant it took just 14 months from initial design to consent.
A key reason for this was that developers and the design team undertook community consultation before even putting pen to paper.
Local conversations, local needs
Brett Anderson, chief executive of developer North-West Precinct Community Pty Ltd, tells The Fifth Estate he used a “kitchen table” approach for consultation with groups including First Nations people, community groups, businesses and others.
Everyone was asked what they wanted and needed from the new neighbourhood. This also gave the design and planning team a clear picture of the types of housing that might be needed and some of the important social and community infrastructure aspects.
For example, Anderson says the design ensures people who have lost their driver’s licence can access facilities including shopping, healthcare, libraries and work.
There will be a mix of housing that includes one- and two-bedroom options for people working in the region for just a few years or for people who are downsizing.
As the region’s economy includes significant infrastructure, construction and mining projects, there could potentially be a “horizontal hotel” concept, which uses technology enabled booking systems to provide short-stay accommodation.
Meeting needs
Accessible, social and affordable housing is also a priority. NWPC will partner with community housing providers to achieve between five and 10 per cent affordable housing, recognising that Dubbo has a rapidly growing homeless population.
This is something new for the region, Anderson says, and it is caused both by the shortage of affordable housing and the growth in the general population. He says around 600 rental dwellings are needed immediately, so build-to-rent properties are likely to be part of the mix.
Accessible housing is also a priority. Anderson says they are collaborating with NDIS providers to understand what form of special needs housing should be delivered.
Infrastructure innovations
Innovations being considered include solar powered streetlights, to reduce the embodied carbon, civil works and future risks associated with traditional mains-cabled lighting. A digital twin on the neighbourhood could also be a possibility, which Anderson says could be a real advantage in terms of providing hard data around travel patterns, personal safety, sustainability and local microclimate.
Dubbo is already having a pilot for an autonomous electric vehicle, and the streets of Gunyah are being designed to be suitable for rollout of the travel technology. As the city is part of the state’s first Renewable Energy Zone, utilising electric power and solar power to its fullest extent is something Anderson sees as logical.
The vision is a new neighbourhood that includes “all demographics, different ages, different cultures, genders and socioeconomic backgrounds.”
UN Sustainable Development Goals framework
From a sustainability perspective, the primary driver is the concept of “stewardship” and expressing and enacting that through the UN Sustainable Development Goals as a framework.
“It’s a commonsense approach,” he says.
NWPC will be communicating transparently about its progress, through an online triple bottom line dashboard report that is made publicly available.
Merging blue and green infrastructure
As part of the early planning, a consultant undertook modelling on subsurface hydrology, to map the subterranean water flows. Marra explains that planning for the open space, linear parks and green infrastructure in the landscape design by Lat Studios placed the green areas over the mapped subterranean water.
By aligning green infrastructure and blue infrastructure, the vegetation becomes more climate resilient and more likely to thrive. It also reduces risks, because “a dead tree is an expensive tree” for a developer, Marra says.
The integration of permeable areas within the landscape design also supports improved water management and contributes to local cooling. Marra says another plus of this approach was also being able to deliver greater density, while still having every dwelling within 400 metres of open green space.
The system hasn’t evolved
While the consultation showed the community had an appetite for a range of housing types, green space, climate resilience and sustainability, Marra says some of the “legacy systems” such as the financial and mortgage system have not changed significantly since the 1940s and 1950s.
Finding a way for the community’s needs and aspirations to come together with those legacy systems is the challenge.
“We’re in that kind of flux space where people realise that the change needs to happen, but we also have the legacy that we need to accommodate, or we need to actually confront and deal with,” Marra says.
The engagement first approach also overturns a legacy system of more oppositional approaches that Marra says are higher risk.
From engaging the design team through to council endorsed masterplan was a period of no more than 14 months.
“So if you look at the savings in time, like an equivalent project in Sydney or Melbourne, we normally take something between three to five years, maybe more … there are projects that take a decade to get to that stage, and it’s partly because you’re constantly approaching the community as an adversary, as opposed to approaching the community as an ally.”
Climate resilient design
The masterplan is also utilising research Marra undertook as part of a Churchill Fellowship and published as a book, Design for Climate, Design for Change.
The practice had previously undertaken a significant number of projects across Southeast Asia, so for her fellowship, Marra investigated the vernacular architecture in communities exposed to climate risks. Her focus was on low tech approaches that can accommodate impacts over time.
The published work examines design strategies for built forms, site orientation and landscape to adapt to and manage risks from heat, storms, bushfire and floods, and also delivering for flexibility and adaptability, privacy and community. Case studies include buildings in the Philippines, Japan, China, Spain and approaches used by First Nations in Australia.
“I think my interest in (climate resilience) was really just an extension of an approach to architecture which came from a sustainability background,” she says.
“I just found that the term sustainability, or the way sustainability was applied in the built environment, was very narrow. It was primarily about energy efficiency, which is not to say it doesn’t matter, but it left out a huge range of concerns.”
Another important aspect of navigating the climate crisis is the social side in the form of local knowledge.
This is another element of the knowledge gathering from the community at Dubbo.
“First Nations people, farmers and people like National Parks staff have an intimate relationship with the land and weather patterns; they notice things. That input is crucial to developing solutions that are climate resilient,” Marra says.
“You can’t extract that knowledge just from data. We have an over-abundance of data in our world, but it misses nuance.”
Scaling resilience to de-risk development
In terms of resilience, Marra says it is very important to work with it at the larger, masterplan scale.
It can be hard for people to grasp what it means, for example, the multiple impacts that are likely for development in a floodplain. But a good masterplan can bring all the elements of good design into a set of principles that can be used at a precinct scale, or a neighbourhood scale, whether it is 300 lots or 3000 lots.
“It is about creating places that can sustain life and human activity regardless of the impact of climate in 2030 or 2040. It is not a luxury to be doing this, it’s a way of de-risking development,” Marra says.
“The bank de-risking the people it’s lending to. The developer is de-risking the product offering to market, and if you are a homeowner, you won’t suffer the consequences you possibly would otherwise.
“There’s really no downside. We can make places that are beautiful, practical and functional, while avoiding stress. It is a de-risking exercise all round.”