City Futures Research Centre has been awarded the Planning Institute of Australia National Award for Planning Excellence for their work on ‘Renewing the Compact City: Economically viable and socially sustainable approaches to urban redevelopment in a complex multi-stakeholder environment’.
The 2017 Award for Planning Excellence was for the ‘Cutting Edge Research and Teaching’ category.
The
research focused on a key challenge facing city planners in Australia - how to renew older areas of multi-unit housing in the coming decades in order to accommodate population growth, without exacerbating social
inequalities and collateral social disruption. The research therefore
addresses questions of both feasibility and equity regarding the
termination and renewal of strata schemes.
The replacement of
older strata blocks has been largely ignored as a planning issue. This
is changing with strata blocks now able to be terminated on a 75%
majority vote of lot owners. In many areas now targeted for renewal,
replacing existing multi-unit housing presents a complex challenge and
poses significant issues of equity, displacement and erosion of
affordable housing stock.
Renewing the Compact City is the
first systematic research in the world to explore how strata
redevelopment can be achieved that is both economically viable and
socially fair. While the project focused on Sydney, its findings are
relevant to other jurisdictions grappling with similar challenges.
Working
with community, government and industry partners, this research project
represents an exemplary piece of forward looking applied urban planning
research, with far reaching implications for the longer term renewal of
our urban areas.