Wentworth Point Marinas

The Foundation For A Future Community

Challenge

Ensuring that new, high-density developments have a self-sustaining community heart presents dynamic challenges in urban design, architecture and landscape architecture. Wentworth Point Marinas is a compact, connected town centre, for a peninsula community of more than 20,000 people. Now substantially complete after 15 years of urban design and architectural innovation, the master plan design harnessed dynamic market forces to provided social, community and transport infrastructure in tandem with the realisation of the development.

Insight

Scott Carver’s place thinking ensured that the quality of the architecture was controlled to harness its role in creating the scale and personality of streets. Diversity of architectural styles and types, vigorous public and private landscaping and the careful location of social amenities, all culminate in a vibrant new neighbourhood replete with civic amenity. Density is only defensible when facilitated by connectivity.

Solution

The Bennelong Bridge, for pedestrians, cycles and buses, underpins the financial and social feasibility of the whole town centre. A Voluntary Planning Agreement was used to increase the density of the town centre in order to finance the bridge so that it could be gifted to government. Through this process, infrastructure is ‘tuned to the moment and to the place’ using methods more nimble than government can deliver through long-term master planning, aloof from the trajectory of market behaviours. Wentworth Point Marinas is our little city, a new place in Sydney and an affirmation of the benefits of compact, connected living.

11
HA
9
City Blocks
12K
SQM Shopping Centre

Collaborators

Billbergia Developments

Awards

UDIA NSW's 'Excellence in High-Density Development,' 2018

Place Making

A clear street hierarchy through the formation of different scaled streets, together with a central public parkland, offers the initial legibility to place making.

Neighbourhood

Rather than buildings or blocks, the creation of street ‘neighbourhoods’ was prioritised. This set the framework for the future community to evolve, with each street becoming its own character.

Connectivity

Not only connecting Wentworth Point to the railway station at Rhodes, Bennelong Bridge also interconnects two communities such that people from each peninsula have somewhere else to visit, adding social complexity to each.

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Project Team

Director

Doug Southwell

Senior Associate | BIM Manager

George Hetreles

News & Media

Case Studies
Infrastructure
Mixed-Use
Public Domain

Creating Wentworth Point Town Centre: Urban Design

Ensuring that new, high-density developments have a self-sustaining community heart presents dynamic challenges in urban design, architecture and landscape architecture.

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