Yarralumla, originally titled Westlake by Walter Griffin, was once a ‘workers’ suburb that was largely out of sight and out of mind. Then came the lake and it has since become a very desirable lakeside suburb. The majority of residences have lush gardens with ample space for bushes and shade trees. Sadly many recent houses are much bigger than the originals and have diminished the greenery and tree cover. In amongst all of this, the very attractive ambience of Yarralumla has been maintained with many wide streets, generous green verges and an abundance of trees and parklands.
In 2005 the ACTPLA Yarralumla Neighbourhood Plan (A sustainable future for Yarralumla) there is this statement: “The Government has made the commitment to the Yarralumla community that any additional housing in the precinct would be limited to approximately 25 dwellings”.
How things have changed. The new 2015 development proposals for the precinct around the Brickworks, if implemented, would eventually deliver 1800 new dwellings.
The main site in question is presently a tree-lined ridge that serves as a windbreak and is a visually pleasing edge to the suburb. The trees are often visited by flocks of yellow-tailed black cockatoos, the ground cover includes several batches of native bluebells (the floral emblem for Canberra) but alas, I have not spotted any endangered weird frog species that may delay developments.
The government has done a praiseworthy job of uploading useful planning documents for comment. This is a conceptual stage designed to get the community to sign off on broad statements of intent. I recommend that excessive time and energy should not be concentrated on the details of these master plans. Experience has shown that these will be ignored later, as they are not linked to actual legislation.
Far more attention needs to be given to the legislative planning requirements that ACTPLA employs to allow the developers to maximize their investment. Developers will push the requirements to their limits and ACTPLA has a history of bending restrictions to ensure developments proceed. Given the history of recent major developments, the ACTPLA requirements will most likely deliver bland-box badly designed buildings and nothing to match Yarralumla’s character and ambience.
Several desirable elements are promoted heavily in the present marketing. These are the standard minimal assets as supplied by any local government. They include parklands, footpaths, water retention for street trees, cycle paths and nearness to bus stops. What are not mentioned are the requirements for a real tree canopy, being impossible given the density of the buildings, and requirements for solar power, climate adaptation measures, and rain water re-use.
The ACTPLA requirements for parking remain out of sync with the realities of the number of people end up occupying such estates. It is guaranteed that many residents will need to park on the streets and on the verges as they continue to do in the inner suburbs where apartments have been introduced. The street trees will be the first casualties.
The present Land Development Agency concepts are akin to being a Trojan Horse. If accepted by the community, the land will be sold and developers will then appear with development applications that meet the inadequate ACTPLA requirements. Developers will be sanctioned to plonk on this significant site structures that are below acceptable urban standards for the second decade of the 21st Century.
I predict that this estate will end up like many you see around country towns. The buildings will be bland in style, will be subject to heat island effects and bear no resemblance to the well established nearby residences.
The Chief Minister is the Minister for Urban Renewal. Unfortunately to date he has shown little interest in aesthetics, in enhancing the green infrastructure, in addressing climate change through urban developments and has tended to regard residents, who generally do not oppose change but desperately wish for better, as NIMBYS.
The challenge now is to change the ACT’s planning legislation to require developments to incorporate climate adaptation measures (no green wash please!). This would require that the landscape (the planet) is to be considered first and that buildings are designed to be aesthetically attractive and to enhance the green infrastructure, not to diminish it.
It is not too late. We can do better.
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rubaiyat said :
The current plan is for the bus stop to go in the middle under the Kent Street Bridge with a lift down to the bus stop. Unfortunately, under the current plan, the bus stop will be located past the exit ramp to the Cotter Road when returning from the city, so the buses going to Weston Creek/ Molonglo would need to reverse along Adelaide Avenue after picking up passengers.
Keijidosha said :
Yes I had a look at the overbridge and came to the same conclusion. Should be a beautifully bleak location to hang out any time of day or night, particularly in cold windswept mid-winter!
Side bus stops will be impossible due to the double exits and high speed traffic on the south side. This means stairs down from the overhead bridge and waiting in the middle of the Freeway for your bus. That kind of nastiness is real L.A. style. Also the stairs will be an accessibility problem which I hope doesn’t lead to a stupid elevator in the middle of the road.
All in all a really stupid, unpleasant and terribly inconvenient solution, unlikely to be patronised by anyone not desperate enough. All to excuse an inappropriate development in the wrong location, to make money for a few influential individuals and a government hooked on land speculation.
Back to Plan B, due to bad planning, everyone drives again.
rubaiyat said :
Bus stops can be placed in the median area, utilising the existing centre bus lanes. See the the M2 in Sydney (specifically Barclay Road and Oakes Road interchanges) for examples.
Where is the light rail?
Getting to these bus stops on Adelaide Ave will render the centre bus lanes obsolete.
They’ll have to move the bus lanes to the outer lanes and the cars to the inner lanes. An arrangement that they should have used in the first place.
The awkwardly bad and ineffective past design of the planners is exactly why I have no confidence in anything they do in the future. To break the bad culture we really need to scrap the existing Planners and start over, putting people with ability and purpose, and not beholden to the developers, in charge.
TheYRA said :
Where exactly are they planning on siting that and how do you cross Adelaide Ave on the return leg?
The current LDA proposal (2015 Version) comprises mainly 1 bedroom apartments, is designed for traffic congestion in and out and within the suburb, provides no easy access to the local shops unless new residents call the Curtin shops their local shops and provides no plans for efficient transport links unless a 1km steep walk to the proposed future bus stop on Adelaide Avenue fits your idea of efficient transport links.
fritzmacgritz said :
rosscoact said :
Yeah, I’ve got to agree. It’s not an either or situation. Both of those areas will clearly be developed for housing at some stage.
Acton said :
I agree with you with one minor change. Develop the Brickworks and the horse paddocks too. That would make better use of all the extra infrastructure required. Another 3000-5000 dwellings in that precinct would also fund the restoration of the brickworks precinct and would be great for everyone concerned.
Well done.
I’m not against new developments in sleepy old Yarralumla, I’ve always wanted the Government to do something with Yarralumla Bay and the empty paddock behind it.
I wasn’t even really against the Brickworks redevelopment but this proposal is a shocker and all “money at all costs” whilst short changing both the new and old residents on the infrastucture and planning upgrade that should accompany it.
All of which ignores the obvious growth should be around the urban centres and offer the most for those who want proximity and a more hip urban environment.
Plunking a large number people an obligatory drive from work fixes nothing. That’s just more of the same old Tuggeranong, Belconnen, Gungahlin, Jerrabombera bad ideas. Design workable transport corridors that don’t rely on cars, then increase the density along those and we can have most of what we want without the usual pain.
Why do we have to engage in endless conflict over this fundamentally flawed housing development near the Brickworks when there are better options? Moving some, most or all of the planned housing a short distance across the Cotter Road to the adjacent horse paddocks area is possible. The mostly empty horse paddocks are infrequently used by residents, ecologically less significant, yet still central and spacious.
Spreading or sharing the development lessens traffic congestion, allows more housing diversity and design flexibility, preserves existing woodland walking trails and GSM habitat, funds restoration of the Brickworks and allows the release of nearby land for appropriate development by the building industry to benefit the wider community. A shared development reduces the adverse impact on any one suburb and still achieves infill goals and benefits. Most viable solutions are compromises in one form or another. It might even be a win-win solution for all parties. What do you think?
chewy14 said :
There appears to be room for approximately 200 traditional yarralumna style house and land packages as an alternative. However that said they would be frightfully expensive. Based on ACT development costs, each house and land package would retail in the vicinity of 9 million dollars each. At that price i really cannot envisage a strong market for sales. I think the market would be more forgiving with the 1800 units which would retail from 1.1 million to 3 million or there abouts dependant on size, location and car parking.
Acton said :
Thanks. The sunmoth habitat provides some constraints for them and their environmental plans then. That’s interesting.
As I said before though, the opposite of “minimise development costs and maximising profits”, is maximising development costs and minimising profits. To do “better” will neccessitate much more expensive housing in the area which partly defeat the purpose of developments like this.
Of course we don’t want them to build future slums in the area but there also has to be a realisation from current residents that they can’t hoard their inner city way of life and expect others to live in ridiculously expensive dwellings on the ever sprawling outskirts of the city.
rubaiyat said :
Isn’t that what the Kent St and Cotter Rd connections to the development would be for? If you densify the development in the whole area, dedicated buses to there from Civic and Woden would make perfect sense whereas currently they don’t have the critical mass of people to justify them?
And I like your description of the public transport and the area, are you trying to make it sound like Siberia? It should be prime residential land.
Chewy14 asked: “If there is sunmoth habitat there, the development would need federal approval under the EPBC act no? Can you link some of these surveys?”
There will be a referral under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act because this project development is on a habitat of a critically endangered species. Various surveys have been done and links to a couple are below:
“The grassed area adjacent to Dudley Street and extending through to Denman Street has been identified as having significant ecological value in the Canberra context.”
Yarralumla Brickworks & Environs Planning Review – Susan Conroy & Munns Sly Architects March 2005, p36; http://www.actpla.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0018/2826/BrickworksReview.pdf
“The very large GSM population (up to 685 individuals) at Dudley Street is highly significant for the ACT.”
Report on Community Monitoring of Golden Sun Moths in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), November 2009 (assisted by FoG) p31; http://www.fog.org.au/advocacy.htm#submissions
The alternative to doing better is to do worse. Here is what Tony Powell, former head of the NCDC said of this development:
“It is a throwback to the kind of subdivision layouts that cheap developers favoured prior to the introduction of statutory zoning in the mid-20th century, commonly known as “slicing and dicing” within an encompassing gridiron pattern of principal streets, the aim of which was to produce as many narrow-fronted allotments and dwelling units as possible in order to minimise development costs and maximise profits. “
Urban infill is not incompatible with a garden city, but must be more creative than simply cramming as many people as possible, into as little space as possible, wherever possible. Unless you have a preference for recreating some of the ugly apartment dominated suburbs of Sydney.
chewy14 said :
They are going to do nothing of the kind.
The densification is not happening where a natural flow of public transport is possible, and I’ll put money that once the high rise goes in whatever inadequate public transport is there, gets pulled anyway.
Put yourself in the position of a commuter having to take a long walk and wait for the slow and circuitious local bus, or to a nasty remote bus stop in the cold windswept shadow of the Adelaide Avenue cutting with cars screaming past you on a dark cold Canberra winter morning.
I am still unclear what happens when you return from the city in the evening and are on the wrong side of Adelaide Avenue.
rubaiyat said :
That you still need a car?
Isn’t that the whole reason for densification along these transport corridors? So it makes regular and frequent public transport options far more viable?
watto23 said :
chewy14 said :
Completely agree. I note on the plan they have fixed the cotter road crossing and the traffic concerns, which was a valid concern.
A lot of the other initial complaints I read came across as Nimbyism. Like they picked up every little thing they could find to stop the development.
I’m happy for developers to be kept in check though, but not at the expense of making this city better and rather than pushing the population out further, increasing the sparse population of the inner areas, seems to be the best way to go, because it will cost less to provide services when needed.