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Green Grid Key to Sydney’s Future December 20th, 2016

Daniel Bennett

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Sydney’s population is forecast to increase by 80 per cent by 2054, with an additional three million people living and working in the metropolitan area.

As population density increases, our challenge is to shape the built environment so as to ensure that Sydney remains one of the world’s most distinctive and liveable cities.

In acknowledging that green space is a key hallmark of liveability, the Office of the Government Architect (OGA) proposed the creation and consolidation of a network of high-quality green areas that connect town centres, public transport networks and major residential areas. Now known as the Sydney Green Grid and regarded as an integral part of the Metro Strategy and most recent District Plans for Sydney, this

network aims to anchor sustainable development while maximising quality of life and well-being.

Although Sydney has many green and water enriched spaces, what is missing – and this is the aim of this project – is an overarching schema that approaches them in a connected way. Success in doing so will ensure that their contribution to our quality of life, the environment and the economy are maximised, rendering a working-whole that is far greater than the sum of its parts.

Some places are already well served, and here the task is making sure it remains of high quality and is managed effectively. Other places suffer from a lack of green space, and here we need to extend the current network and create new open space where it is lacking.

Green infrastructure

The Green Grid is a green infrastructure, design-led strategy that includes the full range of open spaces from national, regional and local parks through the harbour, ocean beaches, wetlands, rivers and creeks, to playgrounds, playing fields, golf courses and cemeteries.

Interconnected linkages are fostered within the wider public realm through enhancing creek corridors, transport routes, suburban streets, footpaths and cycleways. The Green Grid is therefore an open-space interconnecting network that will keep the city cool, encourage healthy lifestyles, enhance biodiversity and ensure ecological resilience.

When we see green infrastructure as an asset, as integral to Sydney’s metabolism as its roads, rail lines and storm water pipes, and valued for the whole range of social, health, environmental, economic and educational benefits it brings to Sydney, the importance of an integrated approach to management, enhancement and extension becomes

paramount. It's an infrastructure asset that requires the same kind of protection, investment and innovation we afford more familiar types of built infrastructure.

Green infrastructure has an increasingly important role to play as we face the challenges of population and urban growth on the one hand and climate change on the other. Well-designed and planned green infrastructure will help absorb flood water, cool the urban environment, clean the air, provide space for local food production and ensure the survival of Sydney’s fauna and flora as well as providing space for recreation, sport and leisure.

The Sydney Green Grid underscores the value of green and open space as pivotal to the choices we make when promoting economic growth, health and well-being. As a network, it will provide links and connections between places, encourage walking and cycling, highlight landscape and heritage, and support local economies. By providing informal places for people to visit and interact, social capital is both created and enhanced. Future investment in parks and recreation will play a vital role in Sydney’s ability to attract business and create jobs.

How was the Green Grid initiated?

Inspired by the All London Green Grid, the OGA undertook a pilot project in Parramatta to assess the provision of open space at regional, district and local levels. The OGA interrogated open space deficiencies and determined where additional open space was required in order to ensure equity of access. In so doing, the office proposed an interconnected network of open space for Parramatta.

The OGA looked at the creek corridors and illustrated how this network could be used for flood management as well as for walking and cycling. Furthermore, the office examined the street networks and potential infrastructure corridors such as

light rail, and suggested how the unique heritage components of the city could be integrated into the living experience of Parramatta.

The office then demonstrated the value of applying this thinking at the subregional and metropolitan scale. Close collaboration with the NSW Department of Planning & Environment and the Greater Sydney Commission helped to create an evidence-based, open-space audit across Metropolitan Sydney as a baseline for exploring opportunities to create an interconnected Metropolitan network that will support the projected population, housing and employment targets.

The Green Grid posits an economic case for investment in green infrastructure beyond the provision of open space for recreation alone. Consequently, it is now understood by many arms of urban planning and design in both the public and private realm as a value proposition, where benefit outweighs cost by raising the overall quality of investment in both the open space and investment alike.

As similar initiatives are happening around the globe, the OGA benchmarked its ideas against thinking from around the world, where the benefits for example from reduced flood risk, improved health outcomes and increased ecological resilience are being quantified and where the concept of green infrastructure is becoming mainstream.

In Chicago, for example, greening only a small percentage of the city’s rooftops has significantly reduced air pollution. Chicago estimates that this investment could result in avoided health costs of $29 million to $111 million annually.

In 2011, Philadelphia created the Green City Clean Waters program - a 25-year, $2.5 billion plan to protect and enhance the city’s catchments by managing storm water with innovative green infrastructure. The city estimates that using green

infrastructure in lieu of traditional approaches could save $8 billion over the life of the program.

Based on Sydney’s unique character, the OGA aims to articulate a clear and compelling economic rationale for future investment in green infrastructure. The research uncovered a number of cost/benefit analyses, but as they are limited in scope and although well intended, the implementation is fragmented.

Sydney’s current parks and open spaces and other green features such as street trees are managed by over 42 different public authorities and agencies. This results in an approach to planning and management of a suite of assets that does not fully realise the potential that could be harnessed by a more integrated approach. To successfully create green infrastructure at the landscape scale, we must transcend conventional ‘silo’ modes of thinking within government and pursue an approach to planning, design and implementation where key agencies work together to support a common goal.

The Greater Sydney Commission is actively promoting and advocating the Green Grid across government, influencing planning strategies, local government open space network plans, and urban transformation precincts. This strategy needs to be owned by many.

The delivery of the Sydney Green Grid vision will be a complex and challenging task. It is a long-term, evolutionary process that will require bipartisan support at all levels of government – national, regional and local. It is important that the strategic Green Grid projects identified in the District Plans can be delivered through the planning and development process, beginning with appropriate policies by local government in their Local Environment Plans.

The Green Grid envisions green infrastructure as a three-dimensional envelope that surrounds, connects and infuses

buildings, streets and utilities. The concept of landscape as green infrastructure provides a potent framework for integrating the work of designers, planners, developers, policy makers and others, and leveraging this collaboration to achieve larger metropolitan goals.

The awareness of landscape as both a vital resource needing protection and a countervailing force that can be used to positively shape city and subregional development patterns has seen this initiative included as a key policy directive in the most recent Metropolitan Plan A Plan for Growing Sydney and District Plans wherein implementing the Sydney Green Grid is designated a primary action.

Investing in a comprehensive and well-managed green grid will provide the living thread that binds sustainable communities together and contributes to the future economic, social and environmental success of our city.

BARCELONA - SPAIN

]Barcelona green infrastructure and biodiversity plan 2020.pdf

235,000 trees

in the urban area

17.71 m2

green/hab

54 new spaces

of natural interest in the city center

Aims

1st

To preserve and enhance the natural heritage of the city and avoid the loss of species and habitats.

2nd

To make the most from green surface and work on their connectivity through green corridors.

3rd

To maximize environmental and social services from green and biodiversity and to enhance the value

which society assigns to them.

4th

To make the city more resilient to emerging challenges such as climate change.

Cities Resilient cities

Superblocks to the rescue: Barcelona’s plan to give streets back to residents The Catalan capital’s radical new strategy will restrict traffic to a number of big roads, drastically reducing pollution and turning secondary streets into ‘citizen spaces’ for culture, leisure and the community

Nine blocks in Barcelona’s Eixample district will make up a ‘superblock’, the city’s new strategy for sustainability. Photograph: Alamy Cities is supported by

About this content Marta Bausells

@martabausells

Tuesday 17 May 2016 20.37 AESTLast modified on Friday 20 May 2016 20.57 AEST

In the latest attempt from a big city to move away from car hegemony, Barcelona has ambitious plans. Currently faced with excessive pollution and noise levels, the city has come up with a new mobility plan to reduce traffic by 21%. And it comes with something extra: freeing up nearly 60% of streets currently used by cars to turn them into so-called “citizen spaces”. The plan is based around the idea of superilles (superblocks) – mini neighbourhoods around which traffic will flow, and in which spaces will be repurposed to “fill our city with life”, as its tagline says.

This plan will start in the famous gridded neighbourhood of Eixample. That revolutionary design, engineered by Ildefons Cerdà in the late 19th century, had at its core the idea that the city should breathe and – for both ideological and public health reasons – planned for the population to be spread out equally, as well as providing green spaces within each block. Reality and urban development have, however, got the best of it, and as the grid lines became choked with cars, the city’s pollution and noise levels have skyrocketed. What was once a design to make Barcelona healthier, now has to be dramatically rethought for the same reasons.

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According to several studies, air pollution alone causes 3,500 premature deaths a year in Barcelona’s metropolitan area (with a population of 3.2 million), as well as having severe effects on local ecosystems and agriculture. Barcelona and the 35 municipalities in its surrounding area have persistently failed to meet EU-established air quality targets.

A study from the local Environmental Epidemiology Agency determined that 1,200 deaths could be prevented in the city yearly just by reaching EU-mandated levels for nitrogen dioxide levels (this would mean a five-month rise in life expectancy). Add to that an estimated 18,700 fewer asthma attacks, 12,100 fewer cases of acute bronchitis and 600 fewer cardiovascular-related hospitalisations, and the problem becomes apparent for a city with a population of 1.6 million. Traffic is also the first cause for noise pollution in the city; 61% of its residents live with noise levels higher than those deemed healthy by legislation.

The council also cites road accidents (9,095 last year, 27 of which were fatal), sedentary lifestyles (one in five kids in Barcelona are overweight or at risk of reaching that state), and the lack of green spaces as reasons driving the plan. The city has only 6.6 sq metres of green space per inhabitant (with the figures standing at just 1.85 in Eixample and 3.15 in Gràcia), closer to Tokyo’s three than to London’s 27, or Amsterdam’s staggering 87.5. The World Health Organisation suggests every city should have at least 9 sq metres per capita.

Barcelona’s new plan consists of creating big superilles through a series of gradual interventions that will repurpose existing infrastructure, starting with traffic management through to changing road signs and bus routes. Superblocks will be smaller than neighbourhoods, but bigger than actual blocks. This will first be applied to Eixample neighbourhood and others like Sant Martí, which largely follows the same grid pattern.

In Eixample, a superblock will consist of nine existing blocks of the grid. Car, scooter, lorry and bus traffic will then be restricted to just the roads in the superblock perimeters, and they will only be allowed in the streets in between if they are residents or providing local businesses, and at a greatly

reduced speed of 10km/h (typically the speed limit across the city is 50km/h, and 30km/h in specific areas).

FacebookTwitterPinterest Black routes allow public transport and cars at 50km/h, while green routes only allow private vehicles at 10km/h to prioritise pedestrians and cycling. Illustration: BCNecologia

The objectives are ambitious; by implementing these strategies at once, the city wants to reduce car use by 21% over the next two years and increase mobility by foot, bike and public transport. Superblocks will be complemented by the introduction of 300km of new cycling lanes (there are currently around 100km), as well as an orthogonal bus network that has already been put in place, whereby buses only navigate a series of main thoroughfares. This will ensure, says Salvador Rueda, director of the city’s urban ecology agency and one of the drivers of the superblocks idea, that “anyone will be less than 300 metres from a bus stop at any time – and average waiting times will be of five minutes anywhere in the city [current averages stand at 14]”. In addition, “it would be an equitable network in which one could go from any point A to point B with just one transfer in 95% of the cases. Like in a game of Battleship”.

Our objective is for Barcelona to be a city in which to live Janet Sanz

“It’s no surprise that this concept was born here,” said mobility city councillor Mercedes Vidal in the public presentation of the plan this month. “In a city as dense as ours, it’s all the more necessary to re-conquer spaces.” If all goes as planned, around seven of the 13.8 million sq metres now dedicated to motorised traffic will be freed up.

Private vehicles account for just 20% of total movements in the city today and yet they occupy 60% of roads. “We need to win the street back,” says Janet Sanz, city councillor for ecology, urbanism and mobility, who emphasised the need to encourage social cohesion, coexistence and human exchanges. Recently, she remembered the spirit of Jane Jacobs and her activism for the right to the city on the 100th anniversary of the writer and urbanist’s birth: “She proposed giving the street back to the neighbours. Today we work for that objective.”

FacebookTwitterPinterest A pedestrian-friendly street in the Gràcia neighbourhood. Photograph: BCNecologia

“This plan sums up the essence of urban ecology,” Sanz adds. “Our objective is for Barcelona to be a city in which to live. Also, as a Mediterranean city, its residents spend a long time on the streets – those streets need to be second homes, or extensions of one’s residence, at all times … Public spaces need to be spaces to play, where green is not an anecdote – where the neighbourhood’s history and local life have a presence.”

“We want these public spaces to be areas where one can exercise all citizen rights: exchange, expression and participation, culture and knowledge, the right to leisure,” Rueda says.

The entire process is being conducted in nine areas at a different pace, through what Sanz called “tactical urbanism” – a gradual trial and error method of sorts, with initial measures such as changing road signs – and with an initial budget of €10m (£7.9m). Now it is time to “go from theory to action”, she says.

The superblocks idea was first outlined in 1987, after noise mapping revealed that levels were too high, and the first superblock was tested in 2003 in Gràcia. Many experiments, like car-free days, have also been conducted in districts like Sant Martí, which will act as the main guinea pig for superblocks. Its city councillor, Josep Maria Montaner, says it has been done in close consultation with groups of neighbours “and it will continue to be so. Neighbours need to experiment it and try the new spaces, little by little – and we hope many of the ideas for how to use them will come from them”.

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Rueda says superblocks go back to Cerdà’s philosophy and take it to the next level, to the modern world, by making it live with and for the ecosystem. “We have, as a base [for the plan], Cerdà’s Eixample, which was undermined by greed. What was green in the plan was slowly overtaken

and built on. And then, when cars arrived, they slowly overtook more and more space ... We want to reclaim those green spaces and that can only be done through a drastic mobility change.”

An Eixample superblock of about 400 x 400 metres, Rueda says, would be inhabited by between 5,000 and 6,000 people. That is “the same as many small towns. Everything we need to consider to face the challenges of this turn of a century – construction, economy, water, residues, metabolisms, social cohesion – should be captured in these superblocks.”

“Every superblock is like a small city with its own character,” the plan suggests. “Imagine what could be done. An Eixample intersection is as big as a Gràcia square,” says Rueda, and he highlights that this new city structure will free up 160 intersections. “I’m already fantasising with neighbourhood-organised inflatable swimming pools in the summer,” he jokes.

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