Life After Carbon by Peter Plastrik & John Cleveland

Author:Peter Plastrik & John Cleveland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ARC010000 Architecture / Urban & Land Use Planning
Publisher: Island Press

Road Trip

When touring Melbourne with Ian Shears, it seems there’s a city-greening project around every corner. The city focuses heavily on converting roads into green space. “About 80 percent of our public jurisdiction is in roadways. That’s the space to play in,” Shears explains. “We’re repurposing the city.”

University Square is a residential area where the city, in financial partnership with Melbourne University, is expanding a small park by 40 percent by tearing up 160 parking spaces and closing off the ends of two streets: “We’re also working on putting green roofs on the university’s apartment buildings that border the park.”

On Errol Street in North Melbourne, where the city turned 5,300 square feet of roads into a 1.2-acre park, “we had a small island with three double-lane roads around it and a primary school nearby. So we went from what was a bit dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists down to a one-way road system.” The repurposed park cost about $1.5 million, but purchasing this much land for a similar-size park would have cost nearly ten times that amount.

About Royal Children’s Hospital, he says, “We did a lot of work with them when it was being designed. When doctors first meet kids coming in, it’s traditionally a difficult time for them to connect with the kids, to find a comfortable conversation space.” The new hospital site included a natural play area where these conversations happen: “You go out there on sunny days and you see kids on hospital trolleys with their drips, out in the landscape.” A new large playground next door has plantings designed to bloom during each of the Aboriginal culture’s seven seasons.

Shears points down one of Melbourne’s celebrated laneways, alleys lined with hole-in-the-wall cafes, restaurants, and bars: “We mapped all the laneways: the physical space needed for rubbish trucks, the sunlight they get, and which ones have capacity to green. We worked out that the whole city had 170 hectares [420 acres] of wall space available for greening, then put the map online and said, ‘Who wants to join with us to green the private realm?’ We had 800 nominations come back in two weeks and chose four of them. This is one of them. See the planters from which plants will grow up the outer wall? We’ve got a tree that will go in near where that blue rubbish bin is.”

Shears drives past a median in a street: “The pine trees are in poor condition. I’m busting to get hold of it and rejuvenate it, to rebuild the median. It’s ripe for storm water harvesting and capture.”

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