I have written on this topic for My Liveable City previously (Oct-Dec 2016 and April-June 2019), so this article is an update on the state of play in Australia with efforts to maintain and enhance the vegetation within Australian settlements of all scales.
In Australia, urban greening is increasingly accepted to have benefits including physical and mental health, aesthetics, recreation, biodiversity, social interaction, cooling, climate change mitigation and increased property values. While these benefits are widely recognised, they are not easily quantified in a manner that can allow them to be compared to other infrastructure investments like the construction of a freeway, or a power station. Australia is fortunate to have considerable areas of natural (pre-settlement) vegetation and settlements that generally provide accessible open spaces and street trees.
As cities grow on their perimeter and increase density in centres and middle ring suburbs through redevelopment, pressure is put on open spaces and established landscapes. This is happening in spite of the new recognition of the value of landscape to human health. Excessive heat events are already taking lives and this will increase under climate change. Climate change is also causing increased bush fire events, as became very clear during the 2019/20 Australian summer. Living in natural bushland on the urban fringe and in small towns is becoming increasingly risky for residents, not to mention the loss to biodiversity that results from the new mega bush fire events.
A green infrastructure overview
The horticultural industry under the 202020 Vision programme has been monitoring urban vegetation by local government area and promoting a 20% canopy cover increase by 2020.
This group surveyed vegetation across Australia’s urbanised local government areas using image sensing technology reported in Where are all the trees? (2014). This was followed up by the report Where should all the trees go? (2017) produced by the renamed organisation ‘Greener Spaces Better Places’. This report evaluated change in tree canopy vegetation and paved surfaces since 2009, which showed a mixed picture. The report also made a good attempt to measure health vulnerability based on heat mapping and socio-demographic data. The aim of this second report was to target areas most in need of urban greening efforts. The organisation continues to assist greening efforts by sharing knowledge and best practice examples.
Growth Areas in Australian Cities
New suburban development
Australian towns and cities continue to be developed by expansion into surrounding green fields with suburbia. This type of development is resulting in rapidly expanding larger cities, especially Melbourne and Sydney. Suburban growth in Australian cities remains car based and low in density, with subdivisions planned and developed in detail by land developers who are required to construct roads, services and provide for open space, schools, shops etc. Typically, lots are then marketed and standardised project homes constructed by builders. This form of development raises issues because of its very low density, car dependence and the poor siting, design and environmental performance of project homes.
In order to deliver economical housing, lots are reducing in size while project houses get larger. This creates very limited outdoor private garden space and streets that are mostly hard paved, giving street trees limited access to soil, oxygen and water. Their short term development and long-term survival are often compromised.
Redevelopment of older suburbia
Many sites within existing suburbs are being redeveloped to increase density and optimize use of existing facilities and the public transport system. Much of this is small scale redevelopment of units or larger houses on single residential blocks. This usually leads to loss of green space and vegetation on private land because new developments have higher site coverage and hard paved areas for vehicles. Larger, or amalgamated sites often accommodate higher density development and have potential for urban greening, but this is not always delivered. These suburbs tend to be more affluent with councils that are able to enhance streetscapes and open space for growing populations. Space for car circulation and parking are often in competition with the need for canopy trees and usable open space.
Central city areas
These areas, especially in the larger cities of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane, and coastal resort cities like the Gold Coast, are undergoing a rapid transformation for the first time in the history of Australian cities with the development of often very high density residential and mixed use buildings. These developments introduce significant residential populations to the central business districts where few lived before. This increases pressure on streets and open spaces that suddenly need to deal with more people and cars. These areas, and surrounding inner suburbs, are just starting to find ways to recover space previously occupied by parked cars to create valuable greening. More recently, an increasing number of new developments are providing gardens on roof tops and green walls and balconies.
Australian towns and cities have largely been developed in the era of the car and with abundant available space; the challenge now is to refit them to be more efficient and liveable.
Greening needs to be a high priority in all renewal.
Landscape as an infrastructure class
Funding of city-shaping infrastructure in Australia comes from federal and state governments including transport projects like roads, freeways, ports and rail. Services like desalination plants and water and waste systems also get funded based on their cost benefit to the community. Many of these projects involve greening, but it is usually an ‘optional extra’ that gets limited funds. Greening has demonstrable benefits so the landscape architecture profession has raised the possibility of urban greening programmes being considered and funded as stand-alone city shaping infrastructure projects that deserve serious community investment.
Infrastructure Australia, the national approval authority, has recently broadened its horizon to embrace social infrastructure as a major category along with energy, transport, telecommunications and waste. Social infrastructure includes health and aged care, education, green space, blue space and recreation, arts and culture, social housing, and justice and emergency services. As yet there are few projects in this category being prioritised. State governments have similar project prioritisation processes.
Green infrastructure planning in New South Wales (NSW)
Sydney has developed a greening plan that shows how greening can be planned and implemented across local government boundaries in a systematic manner that could be funded by federal or state government alongside other city shaping infrastructure projects.
The Sydney Green Grid is a plan that was completed in 2017 for the NSW government that promotes the creation of a network of high quality open spaces that support recreation, biodiversity and waterway health. It aims to be a network of green spaces with pedestrian and bike paths that connects strategic district centres, public transport nodes and residential areas.
The plan has been incorporated and expanded within Greener Places, establishing an urban Green Infrastructure Policy for NSW to cover all settlements in New South Wales. This document was produced in 2018 and the policy is embedded in local plans with a pathway for funding of prioritised projects often delivered through local government. It is early days yet, but it seems that this has set a comprehensive philosophy and framework for developing green infrastructure in all cities and towns in the state.
Implementation so far has involved the appointment of a dedicated State Minister for Open Spaces and a $340 million Open Spaces and Greener Sydney funding package. Within this structure, the new minister has initiated a plan to plant one million trees by 2022 across Sydney, focussing on suburbs with reduced canopy.
This programme will continue to deliver five million trees by 2030, as well as create new parks within reasonable walking distance to all residents.
Canberra
The ACT Government produced Canberra’s living infrastructure plan: Cooling the City 2019, which is a similar document in intent to those produced for NSW. Canberra is a small but fast growing city and this document identifies options and opportunities to improve the green infrastructure within the city. Canberra has a mature urban landscape in older areas from its early period of development with many avenues of trees that will need renewal in the coming years. Canberra is also a ‘city in the bush’ and needs to deal with the increasing threat of bushfires as climate change takes effect.
The plan lists 15 actions all required to start in 2020 or 2021. The living infrastructure targets include achieving 30% canopy cover and 30% permeable surfaces within Canberra’s urban footprint by 2045.
Melbourne and greening
Melbourne continues to grow rapidly and is scheduled to overtake Sydney with a population of eight million by 2051.
In 2019, Resilient Melbourne and The Nature Conservancy produced Living Melbourne: Our Metropolitan Urban Forest, a report that was supported by the 100 Resilient Cities programme. It was endorsed by all relevant State Government departments and 29 local councils within the Greater Melbourne area.
The report documents the need for the strategy, and the issues and opportunities. Six generic actions were outlined that covered habitat protection and enhancement, setting targets and monitoring performance as well as the need for collaboration, skill development and funding. While this report is consistent with current Greater Melbourne planning objectives, funding commitment is so far quite limited and detailed design and prioritisation of projects is yet to happen.
City of Melbourne, the central local government area, has developed an Urban Forest Strategy and is leading the way with developed precinct plans that detail greening opportunities within the public realm. These works are budgeted and are being systematically implemented, setting a template for other councils that are less advanced in the urban forest planning process. 70,000 trees in the City of Melbourne have been surveyed. Their ID number, species and life expectancy are available on the City of Melbourne Urban Forest Visual together with precinct plans for additional and replacement trees.
Errol Street Park, North Melbourne
A small example of a City of Melbourne project is the expansion of Errol Street Reserve, which was once a small island of landscape at a road intersection in an inner city residential and mixed use neighbourhood.
Removal of excessive road pavement enabled the reserve to grow from a 530 m2 plantation to a 5000 m2 local park with 28 extra trees, paths and other amenities.
The reconfiguration of surrounding oversized roads also enabled storm water harvesting and treatment to support the vegetation. Local access and some parking were retained and the areas made safer for pedestrians and cyclists.
This was a relatively small, low cost, project that has achieved clear benefits in terms of community health, biodiversity, urban cooling and storm water management. Cities have a myriad such opportunities, but similar projects are still rare. They require detailed planning, funding, implementation and on-going maintenance. Projects like this have a relatively short carbon payback time because of the reduced hard pavements, water capture and extra vegetation. They substantially reduce urban heat in extreme weather and add to the physical health and psychological well-being of their communities.
Conclusion
The aim of this article has been to summarise the current state of play of greening in Australian cities and towns. Australian cities face considerable challenges if they are to retain or enhance their liveability in the face of population growth, the climate emergency and now COVID-19.
There has certainly been some good strategic thinking and planning done in the last few years as well as many exemplar projects. On the other hand, progress with systematic implementation is limited and the way forward really depends on governments of all levels allocating serious resources in terms of funds, co-ordination and skill development, if all Australian communities are going to benefit from green infrastructure in the future.
Similar thinking and efforts are emerging across the developed world, but they too seem to be marginal in their current effect.
A key next step could be to encourage the national and state infrastructure funding bodies to include significant area-wide greening projects on the agenda where they can be evaluated on cost-benefit performance against other major infrastructure projects. In the absence of this type of funding it seems likely that there will be very slow progress with less well-resourced local councils struggling to conceive, fund, implement and maintain urban greening projects.
Green infrastructure is a valuable response to the climate emergency. Perhaps the economic recovery from COVID-19 could include employment programmes that rolled out green infrastructure in our cities as a way of creating employment opportunities as happened in Australia following past periods of economic depression.
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