Peter Newman receives an investment from the National Research Center for Sustainable Built Environment. Peter is the IPCC’s lead and transport coordinator.
Giles Thomson receives investment from KK-stiftesen, Sweden; and won an investment from the CRC for Low Carbon Living and the National Center for Sustainable Built Environment Research (sBEnrc).
Peter Newton won an investment from AHURI, CRC for Spatial Information, CRC for Low Carbon Living and the federal Smart Cities and Suburbs program for Greening the Greyfields.
Stephen Glackin won an investment from the Centers for Cooperative Research on Spatial Information and Low Carbon Life (CRCSI, CRCLCL).
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Our aging cities are in dire need of regeneration. Many established residential areas, the “gray areas”, are becoming physically, technologically and ecologically obsolete. of the twentieth century.
Compared to the great crown, this average crown is in services, apparatus and jobs. But grey spaces also constitute economically obsolete, defective or undercapitalized real estate assets. Their location has made them the medium of infill development of suburban gardens.
Unfortunately, the existing technique usually cuts down all the trees and creates more car traffic as the number of citizens increases. A new type of urban regeneration at the neighborhood level, lot by lot, is needed to reshape the gray spaces. in more livable and sustainable suburbs. It requires a technique of collaboration between federal, state and local governments.
Our new loose eBook, Greening the Greyfields, explains how to do this. It is based on ten years that have resulted in a new style of urban development.
This integrates two objectives of urban research:
End dependence on the car caused by a disconnect between land use, planning, and transportation.
Accelerate the construction of more sustainable medium-density backfill housing to update the existing dysfunctional style of urban regeneration.
Greening gray spaces will make our cities transition to net zero emissions.
We want to reduce the unsustainable urban and ecological footprints of “suburban” cities. Neighborhoods want to be more resilient, sustainable, livable, and equitable for their residents.
Urban regeneration will also have to allow for the COVID-induced restructuring of the work-housing relationship for city dwellers. It is about relocating urban spaces so that they are more autonomous as “20-minute neighborhoods”. Its citizens will have access to the maximum of the facilities they want through low-emission bicycles and pedestrians, as well as public transport.
Current attempts to increase residential density and restrict expansion in most Australian cities tend to focus on overall zoning in certain developing areas. The resulting garden filling reaches a few small houses, which is all that is allowed in each block. Density is built only marginally, so there are still very few housing features for citizens who want to be close to the city and opportunities.
The redevelopment of fragmentary landfill degrades the quality of our suburbs. Tree loss and construction on hard surfaces exacerbate urban heat island effects and the threat of flooding. And the lack of convenient transportation features for other citizens reinforces dependence on the car.
We want more strategic models of suburban regeneration.
Urban regeneration is addressed at the neighborhood level. These are the building blocks of cities: green wastelands continue to develop and former commercial vacant lots are being redeveloped, on this scale.
Design-driven regeneration of the entire neighborhood can maximize the coordination of facets of urban life through redevelopment gradually from lot to lot. Think of local school and fitness services, small businesses, social housing, pedestrian open spaces, public transportation, and even regenerated biodiversity.
Model neighborhoods like WGV, in a grey suburb of Fremantle, have shown with wonderful luck how regeneration can produce high-quality, medium-density housing and net results. they want to mix individual blocks in one site throughout the enclosure. There were also no citizens who had to worry: WGV has become very popular due to its architecture and wooded green spaces.
Greyfield regeneration has two submodels: location-enabled and transit-enabled. A location-activated community can shorten distances for citizens by offering facilities and services, but in itself it does not build public transportation. For transit-enabled communities, the smart public transportation increases the price of land, making those regenerated gray spaces even more attractive.
Mid-level transit, such as railless streetcars, is ideal for allowing for breakthroughs in neighborhoods along major road corridors. Local governments recognise this across Australia.
Regenerating gray spaces can start with a neighborhood greening strategy. Redlining is an American planning tool for excluding other people of color from a neighborhood. Greenlining is quite the opposite: it’s about the whole network in greening your neighborhood.
This strategic procedure would identify neighborhoods that want next-generation infrastructure. Projects of this type require a vision and a plan from all speakers.
The state and municipality can do this work. This would include:
physical infrastructure: energy, water, waste and transport
social infrastructure and education
green infrastructure: the nature-based one we get by planting and maintaining trees and enabling open spaces and landscaped streets.
The city of Maroondah in Victoria has provided a first demonstration of how this can happen. He has produced a series of manuals to show how other municipalities, property developers and landowners can reflect the process.
Greening gray spaces will provide the many benefits related to more sustainable and livable communities. However, those effects have more comprehensive, design-oriented and built-in land use and transportation plans.
Landowners, town halls, developers and financiers will have to paint in combination much stronger and better than what happens with the same old technique of fragmented filling of small lots, which fails miserably. New laws and regulations will be needed to replace this technique.
Neighborhood-based projects will offer a net-zero progression style for our cities.
The regeneration of Greyfield is a widespread and urgent challenge for our cities. It urges all levels of government to think about a strategic response.
We recommend a Better Cities 2. 0 program, led by the federal government, to identify the gray domain regeneration government in major cities and identify partnerships with all major urban stakeholders. This would put us on the path to greening the grey domains.