Transcript
Adam:
My name is Adam Gardner and this is Alix Smith and we’ll be your hosts this evening. We’re here at Hassell Studio in Melbourne, which is on the traditional land of the Wurundjeri Woiwurrung people of the Kulin nation. As we engage in tonight’s discussion, I’d like to recognise that for more than 65,000 years, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have been the original custodians of the lands and waterways across this entire continent. I want to recognise the privilege and the responsibility that we all have to design with and care for country. I’d like to take this moment to acknowledge the Wurundjeri people and pay my respect to Aboriginal elders past and present. I’d like to thank them for taking care of this land that we continue to work, live, and play on today. Now I’ll hand over to Alix, who will give an overview of what we’re talking about.
Alix:
Thanks, Adam. Tonight we want to take a deep dive into the potential of two key precincts, Parkville, which is home of one of the world’s leading biomedical innovation precincts in Arden, which is really sort of the next step in that innovation ecosystem, and we know there’s significant institutions developing to help catalyse and shape these precincts. There’s transport, health, research and education, and there’s also a substantial need for places for people to live and work to support these places. We are thrilled to have brought together a pretty remarkable and diverse panel to explore the threads and systems and in between spaces that we’ll really have the potential to hold these places together.
Adam:
As Alex mentioned, we’ve got a very special guest panel this evening, and I won’t steal their thunder and I’ll hand over to them to introduce themselves as well as their connection to Arden and Parkville and innovation precincts more generally.
Mena Kubba:
Thanks, Adam. I’m Mena Kubba, director of Kubba. We are a design practise that focuses on transport, public and cultural projects and my link to Parkville and Arden is that I was part of the design team for the stations with Hassell for over five years, so this was my home for a long time, so it’s lovely to be here.
Dan Hill:
I am Professor Dan Hill. I’m the director of Melbourne School of Design, which is the grad school in the Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne. My relationship is proximal from that thing on the right-hand side there, up at the top of that campus, the Melbourne Uni, a bit of it. My background is a designer and an urbanist and I’ve worked on innovation districts all over the place from Amsterdam to the Google campuses to Imperial College in London, Glasgow University, sidewalk Labs - lots of them anyway, so I’m really excited to be here and thanks for inviting me. Interested to see what we make of these two in particular.
Helen Day:
My name is Helen Day. I am a principal advisor in the Strategic Master Planning Unit in the health infrastructure branch in the Victorian Department of Health. My journey really started with Arden at the City of Melbourne. In fact, when I was leading the urban design team then and we embarked on the Arden McCauley strategic structure plan, and since that time I’ve had various involvements on that journey so I have sort of an appreciation of the great depth and effort that has gone into what is looking to be a really well shaped precinct with high innovation capability for Melbourne.
Currently the role that I perform in the Strategic Master Planning Unit is to, our team shapes the business cases to get the investment into the likes of Arden and Parkville, which fortunately we’ve been successful in doing, so you would’ve seen some announcements of some fairly significant hospital related infrastructure in those two precincts. Then from that is this really important work around the investment that those significant public investments attract into those precincts, which is a new emerging space.
Amy Hahs:
Hello, I’m Amy Hahs. I’m a senior lecturer in urban horticulture at the University of Melbourne. My background is urban biodiversity. I’ve spent a long time looking at how urban environments impact on plants and animals, but more excitingly, how do we bring that knowledge forward to actually shape how we design and manage and construct our urban environments for people and more than human? My connection with these precincts, I have a long connection with the Parkville campus of the University of Melbourne, but more specifically, I’ve looked at biodiversity distributions across both of these landscapes and the intervening spaces quite a lot, and I was involved in developing the living infrastructure plan for the Metro tunnel project and particularly trying to think about in a very constrained public realm for a major project what are the opportunities for bringing in more nature? I’ve kind of lost touch with where it is now, but I’m very excited to reconnect.
Sally Capp:
Hello, everybody. My name’s Sally Capp. I’m the Lord Mayor of Melbourne and I’m delighted to be here with you all this afternoon. Well, both precincts in our municipality, I think our connection is very direct in that sense, but of course when we look at these precincts, one which is well established and one which is to be established, there’s very much the sense of how do we achieve both the more immediate operational outcomes that we seek as a local government, but also those longer term strategic outcomes that we have across many of our policies and programmes. For us, these precincts are absolutely integral to what we’re doing today and how we shape the future. Thank you.
Alix:
Shall we kick off the discussion? Sally, we’ve got a question for you first. Could you explain a little bit about what the drivers are of implementation of these two precincts? I guess more specifically, what are the sort of levers and mechanisms that government can push to create value for the community beyond the borders of these two precincts?
Sally Capp:
Two huge questions to kick us off. Please excuse my daggy analogy here, but given that this is a biomedical innovation health precinct, I look at it as the way in which atoms come together to form a molecule and you want molecules to work well together so that they can create chemical reactions. What we want to see across these two precincts and the surrounding areas is the most incredible explosion that looks like a well coordinated, well-designed fireworks display and not something that disappoints. From our perspective, there are natural tensions, and I see them in some of the topics that are up on the screen. There are natural tensions that we are dealing with each and every day on what we want to achieve in our city. I mentioned some of them earlier, but we need more places for people to live. There’s a housing crisis.
We want to drive economic outcomes and the sense of job opportunities in the city through things like R&D and commercialisation, as well as key industries like medical, how do we deliver on the tensions that exist between those? We must in the context of the neighbourhoods surrounding these precincts make sure that we are juggling what the ongoing public infrastructure needs are as we support private development in these areas. There are always natural tensions there, which I’ll just keep saying good design can solve all of these issues so I’m all ears tonight, panellists. We are very mindful of the fact that the ambitions and aspirations we all have when we are looking at Brownfield sites like Arden or infield sites like Parkville is that we want to make sure it can deliver on what our locals need, so that functionality, but we want it to have global reputation where possible because that acts as a magnet for all of the resources, whether it’s ongoing investment or it’s talent attraction, for example, into the future. Those tensions also need to come together.
Key elements for us across those strategies I was talking about, we are driving economic revitalization, still aiming to those 150 billion city economy by 2031. That means an extra 100,000 jobs in our municipality with tens of thousands to be located here in these precincts around specialised sectors, which is exciting. We know that we’re expecting an extra 100,000 residents in our municipality to drive those outcomes, but within this housing crisis, governments need to play a really strong role on social and key worker affordable housing, and we think we have to be really ambitious in sites like Arden to achieve those outcomes. Transport, well, this precinct actually is very well serviced and fantastic investment in transport, but we need to make sure we are leveraging that. At the moment I think we feel a sense of frustration about how that timing is coming together and how we can actually accelerate to make sure we’re maximising that investment in transport.
But just on transport, apart from train stations and trams, it is active transport and making sure that these precincts remain accessible and porous in that way so that they are connected and engaged. I know I’m hitting all the highlights here. I guess that’s why I got this first question. I just wanted to also finish with sustainability. If it’s not at the core of everything that we are delivering now, there is absolutely no way we are going to reach our municipal milestones of 100% renewable energy by 2030, net-zero by 2040, but sustainable ways in which we can live and work and play together. For Parkville, that’s a retrofit question and how do we do more to electrify? I’m looking for people to help me with a viral video to that song. It’s electrifying. Any volunteers tonight would be well received. But in Arden we have an opportunity to do it well from the start.
Just to go back to that sense of explosion or that chemical reaction, it does come through tensions and when things collide and we’ve got all of that and more here. To bring back to design, design is absolutely fundamental to how we do that well and we’ve got examples here of how design can help us with retrofit in existing suburbs to achieve those competing agendas if you like, and also starting with something that’s a relatively blank canvas. I just want to say again, our community has very high not just aspirations, but expectations on what we can deliver here and there is the expertise and experience in this room to do that well. From a government perspective, how do we unleash more of that? You talked about implementation. I think from a state and local government, a little bit more of standing aside and how we do that well would be good to talk about. Then I can share it with all my colleagues. Thank you.
Adam:
Great. Thanks, Sally. To build on that, you mentioned that Parkville is recognised globally as a leading biomedical and research precinct, and then right next door we’ve got Arden, one of Melbourne’s biggest and most ambitious urban renewal projects. To open this question up to anyone on the panel, how do you envision the relationship between these two sites unfolding? Are they actually one connected symbiotic precinct that relies on each other or are they two distinctly different precincts?
Sally Capp:
Well, I think that can be both. Of course we want to know that each of these precincts has its own, we were saying earlier, characteristics. What are the quirks that will make it renowned, will give it personality, will attract the people that we seek? I think being thoughtful about that at the start is important. But as we know across our municipality, I mean we’ve divided ourselves into 11 neighbourhoods. They have their own distinctive elements, but the efficiencies and the brilliance of what we can achieve together comes with the ways that they complement, that they connect, but also in the ways that they collide. I think setting ourselves up well for that is important and it goes across those areas.
Dan Hill:
I like your analogy of the atoms and the transfer of the sort of brownian motion from one to the other and I think where we’re heading with innovation districts increasingly is moving away from the almost 1960s idea of ‘this is a specialised area here and it’s different to this one and this one’. ‘Fisherman’s Bend is industry, and that one is commerce and this bit is housing’ - that’s slowly leaving the system as a way of thinking in Melbourne hopefully, and therefore what we’re left with is both of these areas need to be good chunks, great bits of city. One might be flavoured a little bit more biomedical and the other one might be flavoured with something else, but they both need to have these basic outcomes. They both need to be super innovative.
But just like every other district in Melbourne, it will also be innovative. They all need to deliver social fabric. They all need to have elements of housing and commerce and all of these things. Sally, you did hit all of the things on the list. They all need to be effectively, ultimately, largely post car, active transport, mobility, heavy amount of biodiversity coming through, nature inclusive design. What you’re left with then is a set of conditions that any meaningful urban district is moving towards increasingly. As you said, in the room, there’s a pretty collective or shared understanding of what that might be.
Then it’s a case of then how do you let the characters of those places come through and evolve over time? That’s what people then do with that kit. We can make great streets in both of them, but what people decide to do in those streets, that should be up to them and that’s when we’ll get that diversity and the different flavouring of the place ultimately. You have this set of consistent conditions that are all super sustainable, they all need to generate health, they all need to generate nature and be incredibly participative so that they can find their own futures ultimately over time.
Amy Hahs:
From a biodiversity perspective, it’s really interesting the complementarity but also the distinctiveness. In Arden, it’s down in the floodplains connected to Moonee Ponds Creek Corridor, whereas Parkville is more upland traditionally a headwater of a catchment. I know that water and green space are a really key consideration in the designs and traditionally these different types of communities are distinct, but they grade into and out of each other. Like Royal Park, this area of Melbourne, there aren’t a lot of existing really strong biodiversity corridors, but there’s great opportunity in wide streets, big nature strips, in engaging and evolving community and kind of seeing an above ground connection between the two.
Helen Day:
I think just picking up on the nature of both those opening comments, I think everyone who works in precincts gets that full appreciation that they’re incredibly complex. To that point, I really do like the Brookings Institute’s framework for having a discussion about precincts and that is really consideration of those physical and spatial attributes, the networking and partnership attributes and then the economic attributes broadly. I think perhaps this is a bit agent provocateur and pointing to Sally’s the tension, I actually do think that with the health investments there is something very specific about the types of investment that governments need to pursue in terms of that broadly speaking life sciences or health tech space. I think there is a role I think for government in that, but that’s not to say that some of those other attributes won’t be forthcoming, and I think design has a really strong role to play in that.
So back to the question for Parkville, I think that the hospital and what is very interesting about that space in Parkville, it’s quite full. We are heading to a point where really it is full and we know that in a period of high awareness about sustainability, we can’t just keep pulling things down and pushing. I think Arden has that really important role of being the release valve to Parkville, but one question I think that would be really interesting for the panel, because I’ve walked it a number of times from Parkville to Arden, yes, the byline is it’s the two-minute rail commute, but that is a pretty interesting walk. If we consider it to be very similar to, say, Spring Street down to Elizabeth Street equivalent, which one would you want to be walking? Which one would you want to be cycling? Perhaps there is some work to be done if there is a sense that they need to be physically connected.
I’m not sure that they do because as you’re saying Dan, with the likes of some of the more lauded innovation districts, they actually are a lot more amorphic and it’s perhaps just to do with proximity and other attributes, important things like like-minded talent or family friendly, all sorts of other attributes coming to it as well. But I think as Sally said, they’re very distinctively different in some regards. From a health perspective, I find it actually very telling that we are investing such a big amount in a big new acute hospital on that same small footprint campus. So big decision to do that, highly contested real estate, really important in terms of what it brings to that broader precinct and vice versa.
Then Arden, the really important role of the hospital in being quite catalytic in not only bringing an early, could be earlier, critical mess of people, but also I think setting an agenda for the really important, truly specialist innovation economies and health advancements. I think that could be very unique to Melbourne. In the end we are in a sort of a global competition when it comes to seeking tenants on that site.
Alix:
Helen, I think you’ve sort of just touched upon it, but whether it’s the precincts have two identities or there’s one identity that we know. There’s the development of some major health institutions that will flavour both of these precincts. Could you explain in your role how you understand how a precinct could support the success of a hospital and how a hospital could likewise support the success of a precinct?
Helen Day:
I think with regards to the first question, how the precinct can support the hospital, I think the hospital will be very reliant and there is an issue at the moment around workforce attraction. I think if you have a good environment, which I think Parkville by world standards you would say is a very good environment, you’re more likely to attract workers to that precinct. We know that workers currently will be travelling from further afield, way further afield, bypassing a number of other public hospitals just so they can really work in that precinct for all sorts of reason. But one is that atmosphere if you like, and that quality of environment. I think that’s really key and I think hopefully with Arden, I’d like to think that the precinct with the hospital coming early, government can play a really important role in setting a standard for the quality of infrastructure that’s expected in that precinct.
Likewise, Parkville government will have a very important role in not only state-of-the-art built infrastructure, but also its connections into that precinct and reinforcing that really important mutual advantage that both the health infrastructure and the precinct can provide to each other. Then I think to your point, really important and probably a bit of a passion point of mine is that … and I think my colleagues say this, health traditionally hasn’t necessarily been very good at their outdoor and public realm and their biodiverse infrastructure and I’d like to think that these projects can really start to be much more out outward facing. We can really start to hit some of the important targets in terms of carbon emission decrease and so on through those projects. So really benchmarking best practise as well.
Dan Hill:
So there’s ‘health’ as in the hospital end of the problem, and then there’s the ‘health’ that’s generated in a place or diminished in a place. Arden and Parkville both have two places if we get them that make people healthier as a result of living there, just living there. That in a way hopefully preventing as many from possible or ending up at the hospital end of the problem. There’s kind of an interesting tension, to build on Sally’s word there, but that’s the good tension, isn’t it? Because when I worked in the Swedish government, 80% of the healthcare costs were coming basically from lifestyle related issues one way or another and 80% of them could be prevented - by changes of lifestyle if we enabled people to live in a way that was, again, producing health rather than diminishing it.
I’d be really interested in how do we not just have a great hospital and health tech sector and all of those things, that’s all fantastic, but then equally, how can both places be exemplars within Melbourne and beyond? How do we design places that make people healthier as a result of living there and then what is the relationship with the formal healthcare sector? That’s really interesting because got to make a healthy place and we’ve got to make a thriving hospital sector as well at the same time.
Helen Day:
I hope my graduate staff member is in the audience here because … hello, take note. I’ve just tasked him up and the smart graduates in government to undertake that very piece of work.
Dan Hill:
It gets down to really nitty-gritty stuff like access to biodiversity, green space, clean air, clean water, active transport, good building design with good materials in social convivial spaces. Again, the room knows what those things are probably, so it’s how do we enable it, how is it positioned as a key outcome of the site. It’s a healthier place in every sense of the word.
Amy Hahs:
Another aspect of it is I co-supervised a number of student projects looking at health and biodiversity and one of the projects was mapping green space on hospital campuses because working in hospitals is a very demanding job and there’s a lot of research to show there’s a lot of burnout, but also the benefits of restorative spaces and the benefits to patients, recovering families who are visiting all sorts of things. In Canada they’re proposing a 3−30−300 rule for hospital campuses about how many trees you see outside your window, how much green space is on the precinct, and then how close is the next big green space. We have an opportunity here to think about that and another student who was doing a medical degree, she looked at nature prescriptions and how do we actually operationalize?
We know there’s benefits from nature, we know that it would be great if doctors could prescribe something, but what are the really important elements of programmes that mean people take it up and follow through and get the benefits? I think the Arden space being new, there’s a real opportunity there to actually think about that aspect of it too.
Helen Day:
I think on that note, really importantly, the City of Melbourne are leading to the western flank of the Arden, let’s call it the innovation precinct where the hospital is between really gritty terrain, CityLink, Moonee Ponds Creek, flood zone, contaminated land, rail tracks, you name it, it’s all there.
Sally Capp:
It’s beautiful.
Helen Day:
But as always, the trailblazing city council have led on just an absolutely complimentary and brilliant piece of work about the rewilding of this space. Fairly compromised but absolutely transformational and I think back to your point, Sally, about where in government we can enable things I guess and then sort of stand back, it was a real light bulb moment when Department of Health spoke with the city of Melbourne and realised that this was something that we could really amplify together. So work on it together, something that maybe traditionally hasn’t been done as well as it could, but really not a difficult thing to do, but just required that sort of understanding interrelationship.
Then apart from the will, then just finding ways which we are, I think, yet to do. But I think there’s an appetite and that is just brilliant because that is literally outside patient windows, huge canopies, you can imagine birds and all the sort of insect and wildlife and all kinds of thing. It was interesting that meeting because I think the officers, with all due respect to them, they were a bit on … I was like, “That’s brilliant, absolutely brilliant.”
Sally Capp:
It helps with some of the flooding issues and other practical things that need to be addressed in the area as well, so that’s important.
Adam:
Building on that, understanding the public realm’s impact on health and wellbeing, Amy, maybe this one’s for you with your background in ecology and biodiversity, but how can the site’s natural systems and associated public realm influence the development and implementation of a innovation precinct or precincts?
Amy Hahs:
I think one clear opportunity to kind of demonstrate innovation is in the Arden precinct, being very close to a water body, artificial light at night, shining on paved surfaces gives a very similar signature to insects as a moonlight on water. So there’s a lot of and growing body of evidence that how we are lighting our cities at night really is impacting on what biodiversity we have and can be very detrimental. We know that light is really important for humans and our circadian rhythm, so there’s a real opportunity in the Arden precinct to think very innovatively about what does light in a city context look like. So that would be quite exciting.
But I think generally when I’m thinking about or in a project thinking about biodiversity, I think firstly about what’s there in that immediate landscape, not necessarily what’s the really common species, but what are the ones that aren’t only observed every now and then, but which could actually use a little bit more resource, a bit more habitat, a bit more opportunity, and they’re the ones that I think about in terms of bringing them into a design context and in that area thinking about what moves through trees, what flies, what sits along the ground, all the different taxa and not to make it really complicated, but get about 10 different examples of common functional groups and then how would you cater to each of those? They’ll be different in Arden than in Parkville, but there will be overlap and transition.
Alix:
Thanks, Amy. It’s fascinating thinking about the intricacies of the ecosystem and thinking about it with such care. Switching topics a little bit. Mena, this one’s for you. We know the two train stations out in Parkville, the big pieces of transport infrastructure that are key to catalysing these precincts, creating that five minute connection between the two, and it’s going to help people coming in and out of the city as well. But beyond just creating more efficient travel, how can we foster a sort of sense of community and belonging around these transport pieces?
Mena Kubba:
Thanks, Alix. In a room full of industry experts is probably 50% of the answer. We need to go out there and we need to be speaking to the community that’s part of that development. Stakeholders, the community that already lives there in the established precinct and the one that’s upcoming and have policies in place that can be agile and can be adaptable as development happens so that you take people on that journey so that they have that stewardship, that ownership of what’s happening within their community and within their areas and their neighbourhoods. I think also that day one activation, which I know we’ve spoken a lot around our transport projects, that day one activation of what happens before everybody comes and moves, especially in Arden, is it you build it and then they will come. What happens on that day one? How do you get the active transport, people walking, using the creek, et cetera, when the development hasn’t happened yet and it’s that timing that Sally was talking about?
So how do you get people to be part of the conversation and get them out there? It’s that day one activation. Then I think the physical aspects and attributes of the sites themselves, the precincts, they’re very different. One is established and the other one is emerging or developing. I think the physical attributes, the way that they connect and seamlessly blend with each other, but also the rest of Melbourne and that connection to the active transport is a big piece and to other modes of transport as well. We’ve got established tram lines within Parkville but not in Arden, and so how do people get in and out of the site and how are we going to make sure there’s no bottlenecks, et cetera, that you have in some of the emerging areas within Melbourne? Then physical constraint like what you have on the edge, the western edge, of Arden with the train lines, with the creek itself, those are physical barriers that need solutions or innovation to be able to blend them in with the rest of their surroundings.
Dan Hill:
I think there’s this thing we sometimes get stuck on in the built environment business, which, like the efficiency you mentioned, almost becomes a driver or an objective. I’d argue it really should never be anywhere near an objective to be honest, or at least a second or third order enabling thing. Like a train system has to be efficient, that’s fine, but people move to cities for things that are largely inefficient, to be honest. The point of cities is really actually about inefficiency in lots of ways. I might move to Melbourne to start a band or fall in love or write a book or become a famous doctor. These are all inefficient things. Or play football with my kid in the park. That’s the joy of living in a city, those sort of things, having access to them, diversity of things.
Now, there’s a bunch of systems that you want to make efficient to enable me to get to the park or have the park nearby, fantastic, but they’re not the point. To be really clear, we don’t make cities to make buildings, we don’t make cities to make infrastructure, we make cities to make community or culture or conviviality or commerce, whatever, they all begin with C in my head. We hold those things as objectives or we make it to make health now or biodiversity. Those are objectives outcomes and then we have a set of enablers that can get us there. We need buildings to enable us to produce culture or health, but as you know, we can often get it steered the wrong way round and when you’re in the middle of a project and somebody starts talking about value engineering or something, it gets very difficult to steer it away from those efficiency drivers.
Mena, your point about what do we start with is really powerful because if we said we want to start with a place that makes culture and commerce and conviviality or we need to increase the amount of birdsong because we know that birdsong is inversely proportional to traffic noise and if we reduce traffic noise, we increase diversity of birdsong, if we increase diversity of birdsong, people’s mental health improves, they recover from sickness quicker, so that’s a great thing to start with. How do we then start from day zero, day one, and we start talking about the community, the place, how we’re going to move around this, how do we see it from the point of view of the flora and fauna? Those are things we’ll be cracking on with now. The buildings will come, that’s not a problem, that will happen, but we start with these other richer objectives in that sense.
Mena Kubba:
I think the sequence of the type of buildings that come as well, what’s needed, whether it’s the amenity type, so other precincts in Melbourne, maybe you’re not familiar with them, didn’t have the right type of amenities on day one. Primary schools and things like that. So there’s the type of buildings that come first to attract people into the precinct, primary schools, high schools, healthcare, community hubs, places where the communities can come together, whether it’s indoor or outdoor, those type of amenities is what attracts people, and then it’s the other types of developments, maybe it’s commons and things like that.
Dan Hill:
I can think of one beginning with ‘D’…
Helen Day:
I do remember in the ‘D’, the Docklands, the day that the ANZ building opened completely changed Docklands, in that little piece of Docklands because suddenly 6,000 people were there and then “Oh, maybe I’ll set up a café and actually make some money. Oh, maybe I’ll run some more trams down Collins Street. Oh, maybe we’ll fast track Collins Street and build it out faster.” All those sorts of things, so there is something I think with Arden, the hospital there will create a necessary function which will really, if we like social engineering, plants and people there, which is really important. I think it’s a bit the both and I think there’s going to be some really heavy lifting to do in that space about temporary activation.
But more than that, I think if we think about an example like the New Zealand waterfront projects that were really successful in just getting the community exposed to the opportunity, engaged, that was really through a park project before anything really came on stream. That’s the kind of thing that I think will be really exciting and hopefully fairly rapidly some other significant bits of population and critical mass will be there in Arden. I think that’s when you’ll see the change.
Amy Hahs:
From an ecological perspective, we always try and understand how is the site currently being used by biodiversity and I think there’s an opportunity to kind of mirror that here. How are people actually currently moving through Arden already? There’ll be cyclists going up and down Moonee Ponds Creek. Is it worth putting in a little café and bike repair and just having it open on Saturday morning, but starting to develop a sense of “Well, we stop there and have a coffee and continue on.” That could be an alternative entry.
Dan Hill:
As you said, it is both. Melbourne should be the best cycling city in the world in my view and it’s not, despite many of our best efforts, including the City of Melbourne’s efforts. But it’s fantastic. It potentially, and I’d be saying all of those streets are cycle paths, not just Moonee Ponds. That’s what we need to think about, almost as the way the bird there sees the place is probably how I feel as a cyclist. You can move all the way through this in a quite complex way and that’s thinking we can start right now, mapping those things and building those infrastructures, and to your point about the ANZ building, I think, building on what Mena said, we know we can build kindergartens and schools in from day one as well.
I know you didn’t say this, but we don’t have to wait for the anchor tenant and then follow with the infrastructure. They can both go in parallel because we know we need them anyway, so it’s an investment in the future as opposed to a cost in that sense if we flip it around like that. We’ve known that for 50 years since. Amsterdam really got it wrong in the ’60s when they started building out their large scale things and there are pictures of these enormous social housing blocks and they didn’t have schools and they didn’t have cafes and they didn’t have kindergartens and cycle paths.
Now they’ve put them all in, of course. Amsterdam’s really good at that, but we’ve known this for such a long time. I think it’s a case of making sure we’re not asking the private developers to carry the weight fully. Again, you are not saying this, I know, but we can move across both types of informal/formal, top/down, bottom/up, big/small, distributed/hierarchical at the same time now, so the DNA of the place can then get it right from day one, I think.
From a total value point of view, for instance, again, if we made a really healthy place and we diminish the healthcare costs to the state by knowing again that most of the healthcare cost is linked to things that we could be preventing, then that’s part of your budget. Potentially anyway. We don’t see it as a separate budget to the development budget. We see those two things as connected system and that’s hard to do. I know for good and bad organisational reasons, but it’s shifting cost into investment in that way.
Adam:
Great. Building upon that, Dan, how do we ensure the design and delivery of these precincts respond to their distinctive context and ensure a connection to the place that can adapt most importantly over time?
Dan Hill:
I think building on what Mena’s been talking about, how do we do this in a genuinely participative way because then a place can adapt, as in it adapts around what people want to do with the city. They make the city, including the healthcare infrastructure as well as everyday citizens, and that takes a different kind of city making or city using sensibility from designers and policy makers and politicians to want to engage with people meaningfully as a partner in building a place like that. I think we can get there in Melbourne for sure. The other thing haven’t said, I think along with all that other stuff about getting the DNA right and starting from day zero and so on and the outcomes being things like community and culture, would be there is a certain type of infrastructure which is adaptable and then there’s some that isn’t.
It’s frankly easier to adapt an open-systems designed, let’s say, four to six story cross laminate timber modular building than it is a 60-story tower, which has been largely designed for a single tenant or a series of tenants with a very similar business function. The first one is more adaptable than the second one. A distributed energy network is more adaptable than a single point. What’s interesting now is a lot of our technologies, whether it’s renewable energy or stormwater capture or biodiversity stuff, seeing that as a kind of technology or modular fabrication, active transport, all of those things are heading towards more decentralised, adaptable, lightweight, actually cheaper as well. They don’t have big sunk capital costs. I know we also need metros, that’s fine. We need both of those systems, but these other systems are the really adaptable ones and you can’t get the metro wrong because you’re stuck with that for 150 years and it’s not adaptable.
It’s not really. We can’t say, “Oh, if only it had been four streets to the left”, it’s like - it is where it is. But all of those other things I just said you can, “Let’s try this here, it didn’t work, let’s move it here, let’s test this”, and that’s really amazing. We haven’t really been able to do that before much with cities at least in the last hundred years. There’s a kind of an adaptability we need to build in on the culture side and the design process and the organisation, but we also have a kit of parts which is now really malleable and that’s super interesting.
Alix:
I’ve got a question for everyone now on the panel. I guess because we’ve got such a broad cross section of the industry in the room here and noting Mena and Dan’s point that industry’s only 50% of the solution, but we’re all likely to be custodians of these precincts in one way or another for the next year, 10 years, 100 hundred years. How can we foster a sense of shared responsibility for the success of these places? Who wants to go first?
Sally Capp:
Well, I’ll start with a couple of things. Firstly, I think in the environment we’re in at the moment, it’s really not just about the shared responsibility but a real focus on risk and how do we actually manage risk together? We are seeing a lot of issues in commercial environments where really too much risk has been put on one party versus shared risk and I think that’s a really worthwhile conversation for us to have, particularly government and private sector and industry, but then across players, how do we do that better? There’s a lot of risk involved in what’s required here, just the scale of it alone. The second thing is, and I know Dan said let’s not start with efficiency at the top of what we’re trying to achieve here. I love the sound of birdsong being at the top of my objectives list, but the unfortunate reality is that economic feasibility is absolutely a number one consideration when we are looking at all of this.
Again, why coming into forums like this is interesting for government because we do have to maximise commercial returns to deliver public benefit. That’s unfortunately that tension and how can we do that better with industry and with design outcomes right at the start, how do we deliver more biodiversity even if we’ve got to commercialise more of the space? How did we build that in at the start? I think that as well is part of that sharing of risk, but I don’t want to be too much of a downer on my explosion. I started with a [inaudible] fireworks and now I’ve come back to reality.
But in capital constrained worlds that government’s in and I know industry is as well, this really is a time when we can push and shove each other to something better there. Look, the last thing I was going to say when we are looking at these two precincts is how do we leverage these for the benefit of the surrounding areas as well. In that part of our municipality are some of the most needy communities and we have an opportunity here to elevate them in so many ways and we can’t let these precincts have walls or backs to what is around them, so how do we integrate and actually focus on what those opportunities are? I really thought of that when Helen was talking about the opportunities that come from the hospital, knowing how many people are seeking job opportunities and career pathways in our social housing towers there. But we already have issues where they feel cut off just from one side of Alfred Street to the other or one side of Puckle Street to the other and we can’t let that happen as we look at the opportunities in these precincts.
Helen Day:
I think one thing that government really does need to do without unnecessarily curtailing initiatives from the private sector is just be clear about what it is wanting. I would say for Arden there has been a big journey and probably many people in this room have put their finger on forming what essentially is a really excellent policy piece covering off on many of those themes but with a really significant consultation backing it. I think it was the fastest, correct me if I’m wrong, exhibition rubber stamp phase because so much homework had been done and so much good work had been done. Equally I think with design, I think from the client side, do the good brief. There’s another person I was working with today on a brief and we both thought “That is a good government brief” and we both sort of reflected it’s easy not to do one.
“Oh, they’ll do a return brief, they’ll give us another return brief so it’s okay,” but we must, I think from a government perspective and City of Melbourne really does pack a punch in terms of the local government sphere, we need to just be clearer. So whether it’s really honing in on what those specialisations are in the innovation precincts, at least give the market that opportunity to understand cross government what the positions are. I think that would be helpful. Then equally coming from all those other good strands of policy, interdisciplinary values driven work, equally just I think step up particularly in this environment too that we’re in that Sally referred to.
I mean, the only other thing I think that is interesting is perhaps the assumption that used to be made about the private sector perhaps not performing to the sort of levels of design quality that government were perhaps wanting. I think I’m often questioning, “I think we are converging and converging more and more” and I think that could be a very interesting discussion with the audience that we have here. So from the private development sector, what are some of the conversations that are occurring being prioritised around that shared piece that’s been referred to?
Dan Hill:
I agree with both of those points. I do feel like I’ve become the voice of birdsong on the panel. I didn’t mean it to be, as much as I like birds. I’ve often worked on cities or public projects and so on, the two most commercial ones I’ve worked on in the last four years, one was by Alphabet, Google’s sidewalk labs looking at Sidewalk Toronto, and the other one was last year Toyota Woven City, which is outside Tokyo, which is a chunk of land that Toyota owned, their former manufacturing site. So imagine it’s a bit like Fishermans Bend but with Mount Fuji next to it, so not like Fishermans Bend at all. Nonetheless, it’s an amazing space that they’re building out a 6,000 person chunk of city and within that it’s all cross laminate timber buildings, full biodiversity, no cars whatsoever.
This is Toyota doing this. It’s all bikes, walking on autonomous shuttles, sort of trundling people around. We get birdsong out of that actually because there’s no cars and there’s tonnes of biodiversity, but it could not be more commercial. It’s led by Toyota. They’re not doing it for altruistic reasons necessarily. This is your point, I suppose, about public and private can converge on a set of really strong shared outcomes. Again, they’re drivers of health, sustainability, biodiversity because they know ultimately that there also, if there is value in that stuff, there is financial value in that stuff. That’s Toyota and Google talking. It’s not World Health Organisation or someone.
Helen Day:
Are some of these companies also being driven by the new workers who are probably highly values driven? So to attract those workers, sure that’s a commercial element, but it’s almost sort of voting with your feet really, which is a good thing.
Dan Hill:
It’s definitely there and the sustainable development goals and everything around us, but all companies are reorienting around them. I think it’s more that, again, they know the technologies are capable of it. This gives them a purpose, a sense of purpose and there’ll be value in that, but it’s remarkably similar. Let’s say it’s an urban development project to what’s also happening, say, in Berlin or Amsterdam. It’s the same kind of conditions emerging from all sides now. We’ve got to ask ourselves how do we get this better than that, ultimately? How do we lift this to be the Champions League level, if that stuff is Premier League? Sorry to use English football metaphors. Hopefully they translate.
Helen Day:
It’s from VFL to AFL?
Dan Hill:
I’m sure that’s right.
Amy Hahs:
As someone kind of a bit more distant from directly influencing and shaping these precincts, I think the challenge is that they’re presented as new, whereas the really activated parts of our cities are blend of old and new and all different stages in between. My family and I have just discovered Easy Street in McCauley Road in Arden Street and it’s just so fun to go there, all the different food. It already has its own kind of sense of community developing around it. I think finding those existing little activated sites and including them and maybe bringing them a bit further in to the precinct or similar initiatives is important. I think the other aspect I’ve observed is that often the project has the funding, the kind of operationalizing has much less and in some ways just from working with lots of different organisations, if you develop a strategy, that’s amazing, but it’s actually putting the budget behind the different delivery of the things that you said that actually means you deliver on your strategy.
I think thinking about how are you going to activate the space and what’s the kind of programme element that you’re bringing in, which has been part of this conversation in the kind of lead up and then carrying it through.
Audience member, Jeff, stands to ask a question:
Thanks for the great panel and great thoughts. The Arden precinct is largely going to be built out for a different climate than the climate we’ve had in Melbourne for when Dockland was done or even when the large development of the top end of Elizabeth Street was done. It’s going to be a much, much hotter climate and that’s going to affect the way in which people walk around in a walkable city and it’s also going to go and impact on the quality of the spaces that people are going to be in. I mean, I still look around on a lot of Zoom calls at the moment and there’s a lot of people in Melbourne wearing puffer jackets in the middle of winter, which says to me that we haven’t quite got our housing quality right.
My question to the panel is both from a biodiversity point of view and from a building quality point of view, how can we make Arden different to Docklands, different to the development that’s gone on before? Is the development market up for that or does there need to be some kind of incentives? What are your thoughts on that?
Mena Kubba:
We were just talking about increasing the bike paths, et cetera, but it’s actually really uncomfortable to be in Melbourne when it’s above 26 degrees. It’s actually horrible to walk around, use public transport, et cetera, and so that investment in canopy cover, tree canopy cover, from the beginning is really important. There is something about efficiencies in the way that we look at plans as a 2D drawing or a diagram, but actually the sustainability aspect of orientation and using sustainability fundamentals at that master planning stage is really important. It’s not just pattern making, it’s actually orientation, optimising passive ventilation into that process I think is really important, but that all depends on the efficiencies and what you can get out of plot sizes, et cetera.
Amy Hahs:
I guess I have two thoughts on that. One, from the biodiversity perspective, having the connection to the creek, having greater connection across the land provides biodiversity with an opportunity to move in response to those changes in climate. But also I think thinking about the complementarity of the built and the surrounding natural landscape and how do they actually work together, so what sits outside a window and what does the street scape look like relative to the buildings and how do they talk to each other?
Dan Hill:
That would be a great design driver, wouldn’t it, Jeff? Is sort of let’s think about the climate and understand that and feel it. Something you and I have talked about before, it’s probably going to be more humid as well as hotter so it’s not just that it’s getting hotter and it’s not getting necessarily more like a Middle Eastern climate. It’s actually more humid than Victorians are probably used to. That comes back to particular kinds of insulation, as you know full well, Passive House for instance, and related. We’ve built glorified tents for a long time and we need to do a lot better with our building style with direct health outcomes, therefore direct financial outcomes around those things as well.
Then the rest of it, as you said, it’s like how do we shift from a hard scape dominated environment to something far more soft, porous, green, reducing urban heat island effects. Then there are other things that can help as well. I cycle an e-bike and actually that massively helps. I cycled that in 35 degrees in Melbourne and still okay, right? It does change the game a bit, that kind of thing. Technology’s traditional natural approaches or recovering the nature which is there, and then really different building codes and planning guidelines ultimately. Sounds boring that last bit, but that’s absolutely fundamental.
Helen Day:
I think that’s key and the health sector is one of the highest emitters of carbon and that’s, as you can imagine, what kind of a machine that is, the hospital, and why it’s probably in some regards … if you like to think about lifesaving situations, it’s in that kind of vein. But I think suffice to say, fortunately state government has really elevated the targets and I think as you say, Dan, once that starts to hit the regulatory chain, that probably in the end is the proof in the pudding, but hopefully out of that comes the innovation as well. So just in terms of the things that I think quite a bit about, but it is important that government sets that agenda right at the top and it’s a stick, but hopefully with some carrots incentivizing and bringing forward innovative technologies and systems because I think in the end that systems approach is probably the key. I’m always interested in the governance around that too. That is the harder, but probably will be the most effective way.
Dan Hill:
There’s one system I’ve forgot in my list, which was social infrastructures in a heat context. There’s a great book by Eric Klinenberg, sociologist about the Chicago Heatwave in 1995, I think it’s called Heat Wave or Heat. A significant number of people died in the city, and he mapped why they died actually and they did a lot of research on that. It wasn’t whether they were rich or poor necessarily, it didn’t split easily. The thing they actually found was - did they have social infrastructures in their neighbourhoods? By social infrastructures I just mean a library, community centre, swimming pool, could be a café even. The neighbourhoods that did better in the heatwave were those where people could go and get help from there, or access or just solace or connection. Massively important, far more than actually the emergency response was the presence of those things. That’s again, where those kinds of things are equally part of the systemic approach.
Helen Day:
I think probably most people in this room will have clocked that the way forward with health will be not that, I guess, panacea of having to go to the hospital. I think that might be part of that approach as well. If you don’t need to be in the hospital, don’t be in the hospital, and that notion of health in the home might be part of that taking the pressure even off the energy systems in the hospital.
Amy Hahs:
The other thing, we’re all very familiar with the idea of ecosystem services, but I think thinking about the plants that are going to need to survive in this future climate, they’re going to be under additional challenges and so can we flip it and think about built environment services to ecosystems? So the shape of the housing, how does sunlight get into our street areas, does it actually shade and shelter during the most hottest parts of the day? I think that’s a real opportunity to kind of innovate.
Mena Kubba:
I think those things that are innovation, lots of other countries who have that climate already did that many, many, many years ago. It’s their vernacular, the way that they design and build, and to actually learn from that now and incorporate that into design as well as the innovation piece in the technology is the way that we will build that resilience into the precinct in the future.
Helen Day:
Look, the Arden structure plan is pretty advanced. I mean, you’ve got what? The 10% car only. So 90% active transport commitment. Now, that puts a challenge on a hospital because people come to hospitals in cars and go home from maternity hospitals in cars and so on. Anyway, that’s the tension point that needs resolution. You’ve got the fantastic water infrastructure, cooling, cleaning. I mean, really taking advantage of that place and space. Really good public realm at the outset, the amazing rewilding canopy and canopy right through. I think, Jeff, that has to be the opportunity, doesn’t it, to really benchmark something that’s pretty special and hopefully plays a little bit of a role in driving down some of the temperatures.
Alix:
I’ll take this note to wrap it up, so I’d really love to thank our wonderful panel, Sally, Amy, Helen, Dan and Mena. Thank you so much for your insight and time and just wonderful discussion tonight.
