Breathing Space
Delivering the air we breathe and food we eat, essential to our physical and mental health, providing habitat and ecological value and contributing to the resilience of our urban environments, landscape is something we literally cannot live without. As density increases providing this crucial resource – our cities breathing space – is still a challenge.
At this stage in the evolution of our cities and the densification of our urban environments there should be no need to explain why green, open spaces, trees and vegetation are important. By way of reminder landscape offers many benefits:
Improving our health: Access to green space increases physical activity, improves mental health and provides places for social connectivity.
Improving Climate Comfort: Vegetation reduces the impacts of urban heat island effect through evapotranspiration and shading to provide cooler surfaces thus reducing surface and air temperatures.
Shade trees and turf areas can reduce surface and air temperature and while the impacts vary in different conditions this can mean a reduction of around 15°C for surface temperatures, and up to 24°C and around 1-2°C. (Low Carbon Living CRC, 2017)
Increased Urban Resilience: Reduces risk of flooding by reducing & slowing run-off.
Reduced Energy Consumption: Studies have indicated that planting vegetation for shade can reduce a buildings’ energy consumption by as much as 25% annually. Green roofs provide insulation reducing energy consumption through the need for heating and cooling and improves the efficiency of collocated PV Cells by up to 25%.
Biophilic design can reduce stress, enhance creativity and clarity of thought, improve our well-being and expedite healing (Terrapin Bright Green LLC, 2014)
Enhanced Ecological Value: Biodiversity can be enhanced through expanded green networks, areas of endemic planting and offering habitat.
Mitigating Pollutants: Trees and vegetation improve water quality through filtration, sequester carbon, filter the air and covert C02 to Oxygen thus improving air quality.
Potential for Urban Farming: For local food production to meet growing demand and reduce the impacts of food transportation.
Despite landscape traditionally taking a back seat to other infrastructure, roads, services and buildings, there is now widening recognition of its contribution to creating livable, resilient places for our future as we move to ever denser urban environments.
While a great deal is being done by governments at all levels here and around the globe - many may argue this progress has been too little and too slowly.
In NSW there is a State Government target to increase urban canopy cover to 40% from 19%. This initiative is supported by the Sydney Commission’s Objective 30 and Objective 32 which detail the delivery of the Sydney Green Grid, connecting our network of open spaces and waterways. This however is mainly reliant on public land to be achieved.
Importantly, as noted in the Greening Sydney Plan 2012, 62% of the land area of Sydney’s City is privately owned and 42% of the existing canopy cover is within this private land. While still difficult, it is somewhat more straight forward to influence outcomes on public land but what can be done for the significant proportion in private ownership?
Of course, this is where planning policy comes in to regulate the provision of landscape and open space, an area we have seen significant gains in over recent years. State Environmental Planning Policies including SEPP 65 and the associated Apartment Design Guide, sets targets for development including quantum of deep soil and landscaped areas.
While it could be argued that targets such as “25% Communal Open Space in residential apartment developments” are still low by international best practice standards, with 50% being more typical best practice and 100% being applied in places like Singapore, metric requirements have definitely seen increased provision of landscape areas. Further increasing the provision is local council DCPs and guidelines that often set requirements beyond the state policies.
Despite this, significant opportunities are being missed. This is not because developers aren’t interested in delivering more extensive landscape areas, contrarily - astute developers see landscape as a relatively cost-effective way to define brand and offer amenity to their customers in turn increasing sales rates and prices – a particularly important edge in an increasingly competitive market.
It is at least in part the tightness of our planning regulations, those with the intent of producing the best possible outcomes - more landscape, less overshadowing, reasonable scale etc - that are stymieing the delivery of more landscaped space.
Through, at times, potentially legitimate concern that developers will try to make the most of any leeway in the controls to force in additional area and height, our controls are written very tightly, providing very little room within envelopes to provide relief - to provide breathing space. This includes, often with unfortunate results, limited potential for building articulation, what we get just fits the box.
We see in a great many of our projects, particularly in the most high-density and thus critical areas of our cities, that potential areas for landscape go underutilised.
We have seen recent projects where Council's have placed ambitious targets on landscape provision however other stringent controls have negated the ability to meet these and making it hard to deliver even the minimum standards. Height controls are particularly restrictive and can mean that areas go unused as a lift or stair to access it can not be provided. In other examples planting locations are restricted as the provision of a planter to form a parapet would break the height plane.
While these non-conformances seem minor and perhaps something that could be accepted as part of improving the outcome both for residents and the environment, authority’s reticence to set any precedent around additional height means this cannot be entertained.
The remedy for these challenges is relatively straight forward: some minor changes in planning will result in a stepped improvement. In addition - specific exemptions and incentives being offered (as we are seeing elsewhere around the world) could provide further improvements.
Firstly, and most simply, would be a height exemption for lifts and stairs for access to a rooftop for use as communal or public space.
Where necessary this could be qualified by demonstrating no significant overshadowing to any particularly sensitive receptor.
Secondly, to make the spaces provided more useful, additional exemption for unenclosed shade structures could be provided, perhaps if they are not visible from the public domain, and further still minor exemptions for GFA to provide usable indoor communal space could be contemplated.
In Singapore, a country leading the way in the provision of landscape and greening in private development, up to 50m2 can be provided of additional GFA in apartment development and 50% or 200m2 (whichever is less) of any outdoor recreation space in a commercial development can be enclosed as bonus to GFA.
Thirdly, further opportunities could be unlocked through the provision of more expansive incentives.
As we are doing here, jurisdictions in many countries including London, Toronto, Stockholm, and Paris are aiming to generate an additional 100 hectares of greenery by 2020, with mandating landscape rooftops an important step towards achieving that. Some are also implementing a variety of incentives including variations on Tax or Services Credits, Government Grants, GFA Bonuses and Additional Height.
While many of these controls are relatively new in planning and implementation terms, and as such it is hard to establish the relative success of the different methods, what can be seen is that the uptake is variable and in most cases is not meeting the desired targets.
While monetary incentives may well assist they are potentially harder to implement and manage. Controls like New York’s tax abatement and grant programs have not had significant uptake.
Singapore is one example where the controls set are succeeding as a result of their system relying on planning controls rather than financial incentives. While there is a perhaps a whole other discussion related to the sustainability of green buildings in various locations, let’s assume it is not just their climate that has driven the successful uptake of private landscape provision in Singapore.
The provisions in Singapore provide for both slight area uplift to enhance amenity but more significantly allow proportional height increases for the provision of ‘sky terraces’. These provisions allow and encourage terraces to not only be provided on rooftops, but also at intermediate levels of a building increasing amenity and accessibility.
Predominant Sky Terrace Storeys (PSTS) are floors where the sky terrace occupies more than 60% of the floor plate. Such floors may be allowed a floor-to-floor height of 5.0m. If the sky terrace occupies less than 60% of the floor plate, the floor-to-floor height shall comply with a 3.6m floor-to-floor height. More generally it should be noted that the envelopes allow more capacity for flexibility in achieving the FSR further allowing these levels to be opened up.
If the proposed number of storeys in the development is more than 7 storeys, flats and condominiums with PSTS may be allowed additional building height depending on the number of storeys. Both the 5.0m floor-to-floor height for PSTS and the additional building height may only be distributed to the sky terrace floors within the development.
Further to the delivery of significant landscape area, many of the recently completed and conceived buildings for Singapore present an exciting vision for future high-density environments. Places for people and plants. Places that arguably offer a vision for the future with a better balance between people’s needs and the development of functional buildings with the provision of landscape integral to achieving this.
We believe in the important role landscape and greening plays in our cities, and we see every day that more should and could be done. The reason for proposing this here is in the hope that by sharing what we see with those of you who may be part of preparing the controls, we might all achieve what we are aiming for. The benefits achieved through this would be not only be for those who use and inhabit the developments, but also for the broad environment of our cities in the future.
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