[+] Northshore Announced as Testbed for ‘Australian-First’ Planning Project

The Northshore urban renewal precinct has been targeted for a research project on how to plan Australian cities for a less car-intensive future. The agreement between Economic Development Queensland, which oversees the development of the priority development area, Toyota Mobility Foundation and MIT will explore urban planning for micro mobility neighbourhoods. Speaking at the Suburban Futures conference this month, Economic Development Queensland chief executive Debbie McNamara said the state’s land developer had inked a memorandum of understanding “to do a piece of research with two entities that are absolute leaders in their field”. “It will be a first for Australia,” McNamara said. “We’re now entering into a partnership to look at how we can consider and explore the opportunity to apply those new forms of mobility into the urban planning landscape at Northshore Hamilton. “That’s pretty exciting for us and for Northshore.” The 304ha parcel of land at Hamilton’s Northshore area with 3km of river frontage was identified for urban renewal in 2008 and will be home to the Brisbane 2032 Olympic Games athletes village. ▲ There are already about 3000 homes in the Hamilton Northshore precinct—a further 201 social and affordable homes were announced this week for the area, which the Brisbane Housing Company will deliver. Once the Northshore vision is realised it will be Queensland’s biggest waterfront urban renewal precinct, home to 24,500 residents, 25,000 employees, 14,000 homes, 10ha of parkland and about 800,000sq m of commercial space. But just how those residents and workers get around the Northshore of the future is under the microscope as part of the study, McNamara says. “This for me is a perfect example of [innovation], where we’ve made some great new partners and we look forward to exploring that opportunity and over time sharing those learnings,” she says. “We work across housing outcomes, we work across job outcomes and we work across place outcomes, and those three things intersecting I think is what is fundamental to this project and working with our partners.” According to EDQ’s vision for the urban renewal precinct, the walkable masterplan would feature smart road design that combines active travel and micro mobility. But the study will take that thinking further to explore what an urban fabric looks like with less road infrastructure and greater micro mobility. Professor Alan Berger from the Massachesetts Institute of Technology will be involved in the partnership, which will likely draw on his planning framework Next Optimised Generation of Autonomous Suburbs (NOGAS). Berger says there is significant upside to masterplanned communities that are not centred around cars and road infrastructure. “There are distinct sustainability and environmental advantages if we can capture this change in the suburban form to take advantage of the new mobility technologies coming online,” Berger says. “We’re focused very heavily on micro mobility and getting people out of their car and getting them in closer proximity to mixed use so that every household trip isn’t in a car. “That’s greatly environmentally important.” ▲ Northshore at Hamilton could follow in the footsteps of The Sustainable City in Dubai, which eschews cars and provides pedestrianised connections through residential clusters. The NOGAS framework is a toolkit that Berger says can “help cities in this transition to be able to envision and walk through parametric modelling”. But it’s not a quick transition, he warns. Suburban areas are home to a big proportion of the global population, and according to Berger, modelling indicates the next generation of metropolitan growth will continue outside of “urban cores”. Berger says this reinforces the car-based development patterns that have been the norm for more than a century. But the rise of autonomous transport and on-demand micro mobility can create a paradigm shift that requires new planning and design considerations with the significant reduction in paved areas (roads). “We can build more, in smarter and better ways, around the autonomous future. In almost all of the models we ran, if you design a new suburban environment that’s mixed use at a large scale, you can reduce paving up to 40 per cent every time, which is a major input in [costs],” he says. “In the future with autonomous technology, you don’t need driveways, you don’t need garages, you have shared fleet, you have pick up and drop off. “Arguably what is most important to me is it allows cities to focus where they want mass transit. Instead of trying to put it everywhere, they can put it in strategic areas where there are micro mobility hubs.” ▲ Last-mile delivery robots are being piloted in The Sustainable City to deliver goods from restaurants and shops. Berger says the planning toolkit has been applied to projects in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas. The Toyota Mobility Foundation is also involved in the research project at Hamilton’s Northshore precinct to help drive innovation around personal and micro mobility in the emerging waterfront precinct. Northshore could follow in the footsteps of other innovative development precincts such as The Sustainable City in Dubai. The precinct is fully pedestrianised and car-free within the residential clusters of development, which proponents say makes the community future-ready to adopt autonomous solutions. It has recently piloted last-mile delivery robots that provide home delivery services for restaurants and shops in the area. You are currently experiencing The Urban Developer Plus (TUD+), our premium membership for property professionals. Click here to learn more.

[+] Northshore Announced as Testbed for ‘Australian-First’ Planning Project

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