Future Parks: Bundling Biodiversity and Mobility from North Melbourne to Kensington
Year: 2019
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Competition Entry: The Future Park Design Ideas Competition
Team: Conor O’Shea, Grant Penfield Haugen, Lin Jiang, Zhengge Jiang, and Michael O’Shea
This proposal acknowledges Australia’s Aboriginal peoples and that the Greater Melbourne Metropolitan area sits on the traditional territory of three peoples of the Kulin nation: Wurundjeri, Boonwurrung, and Wathaurong.
Future Parks is an urban development prototype that hybridizes the natural plant and animal communities of Melbourne’s ecoregional context with emerging mobility systems, thereby helping accommodate Melbourne’s projected population increase and unforeseen climate change impacts.
This proposal combines the following:
Strategies to reduce urban heat island effect and storm events due to climate change
Urban flora and fauna biodiversity
Acknowledgement of aboriginal claims to the land
Emerging and future personal and freight mobility systems
Anticipated increase in resident and worker populations
The proposal includes the Kensington Connector and the Riverside Connector, which together form a two-kilometer-long pedestrian, micromobilty, and biodiversity corridor connecting the new North Melbourne Metro station on the east to the Maribyrnong River Trail on the west. They stitch existing open space and mobility networks together as they intersect with the Moonee Ponds Creek Trail, Moonee Ponds Creek, South Kensington train station, Riverside Park, and Maribyrnong River Trail. The fourteen-hectare area surrounding the new North Melbourne Metro station is imagined as Hub 3.0, a combination of small-scale mixed use development, resilient plant and animal communities, regional passenger droneport, and vertical freight warehouse. Finally, the existing streets in an eight-hectare area to the east are transformed into Surface Labs, a personal automobile-free zone that prioritizes pedestrian movement and micromobility vehicles such as scooters, bicycles, and small-scale delivery vans.
Future Parks builds upon existing municipal and state strategies, including Arden Vision, Climate Change Adaptation Strategy Refresh (2017), Draft Moonee Ponds Creek Strategic Opportunities Plan, Nature in the City, City of Melbourne Open Space Strategy, Plan Melbourne 2017-2050, and the Urban Forest Strategy.
The mixed-use development surrounding the new North Melbourne metro station feature the following elements: underground cisterns that collect storm water runoff for reuse; plant and animal communities derived from the Southeast Australia Temperate Forest Ecoregion that will increase tree diversity; over 50,000 square meters of two-to-three-story small-lot mixed-use developments; a droneport with local and regional passenger connections, and a vertical warehouse serving as a delivery hub for existing and new residents and workers in the community; and a large earthen berm made from excavated soil from Metro Tunnel construction that absorbs noise from the nearby elevated highway and frames views. Signage in all areas acknowledge aboriginal claims to the land, and public spaces are designed to prioritize inclusive community programming.
