The next our next speaker is Professor Josh Byrne who's Dean of Sustainable Futures at Curtin University. Josh is an environmental scientist, landscape designer, author, research academic and avid gardener and is well known for his role as WA presenter on ABC TV's gardening Australia program now his expertise includes sustainable Urban Development and tonight Josh will address how medium density infill and nature can coexist covering Urban graining and canopy.

Thanks thank you so it might seem an unusual pairing medium density development and and nature in urban spaces and continuing from Peter's theme of rejuvenation and regeneration this is I guess the framing that I want to put forward for for this presentation Peter shared a photo of him in his early years and mentioned what inspired his career so I I was fortunate to get a glimpse of Peter's slides last night so I thought I'd be cheaty in put a photo of me as a younger man in my natural habitat which is up a malee tree in my student rental garden in Circe Circle in Dalkeith so this is my old haunt as well out of Interest who remembers my infamous garden in Circe Circle in Dalkeith. I thought there'd be a few the first permaculture garden in the open garden scheme back in the day and of course where I got my first gig with ABC gardening Australia now nearly 25 years ago would you believe but for me there are moments like Peter where things really influence your life so look I I found a deep passion for gardening as a as a teenager I was a a closet gardener back then because it wasn't the coolest thing I I came out in my early 20s when I was studying environmental science and sustainability at Murdoch University and it's when I also met Peter so a couple of key things happened for me being someone who grew up in the western suburbs with plenty of space to garden and a a sense that larger spaces were the norm when I was in that student garden and I must say I was able to rent that house for 6 and 1 half years with the same group of bachelors during our our our student heyday for $200 a week that's for the whole house for a quarter acre block in Circe Circle in Dalkeith and it came with a key to the Dalkeith Primary School pool across the road so things were pretty good back in the mid90s so space and and rent accommodation it wasn't really really an issue but what did happen was we had major droughts during the mid to late 90s and we saw the introduction of the first water restrictions for Perth gardeners that made a big impact on me the other thing that made a big impact was meeting Peter Newman as an undergraduate student and hearing his lectures on transport planning and how to do cities better so Peter and I developed a wonderful working relationship pretty much from that moment on and it did inform my direction I ended up doing a PhD with Peter as one of my supervisors looking at urban landscapes and how we can manage those with declining availability of water of course alongside this developing a career in the media through gardening Australia setting up a consulting practice with a team of landscape architects and urban designers and then ultimately again with a lot of encouragement and guidance from Peter ending up in academia as a dean and a professor of all things but still very much a gardener at heart and a couple of things still drive my passion for what I do across all of these fields which I still continue to practice in and that is how do we do cities better and how the green spaces get incorporated into cities that we can design better denser smarter and much more efficient so with that as a bit of framing I thought I would just touch on some of the benefit of urban green spaces just in case you weren't already convinced so the the topic of tonight's presentation is how does nature and denser or urban infill coexist. My reframing of that really is the only way we can do developments well at all is by ensuring that green spaces are properly integrated into the planning design delivery and maintenance of our habitat keeping in mind that cities now are the major habitat for humanity including in this country so we know that urban green spaces provide support for biodiversity I'll tap into that a bit further shortly but it also provides opportunities for better storm water infiltration provides noise buffering improves air quality and there is an overwhelming evidence base for all of these key benefits of urban greening when done well also helps with climate change mitigation and by that we're talking about how we can reduce energy use reduce emissions and it's done in several ways firstly through strategic shading how do we landscape in such ways where we improve the thermal performance of the buildings that we live and work in how do we cool high thermal mass spaces around our buildings to reduce cooling loads particularly in a warming climate we know also through extensive studies that high amenity spaces shaded walkways and the like means less use of private cars because people are happier to walk and ride certainly locally and more and more use e-mobility devices as well and there's also a growing body of work around how can we actually calculate the carbon sequestration opportunities within urban green spaces challenging because it's not yet supported under the national carbon offsetting accounting schemes but we know through good science and management there may be possibilities there but urban greening also helps with climate change adaption and so moving on from mitigation it's recognising that we are seeing climate change and even with the most aspirational transition to a low carbon future we are seeing the impacts of climate change now and adaption is how do we build resilience into our lives our livelihoods and our lifestyles so firstly urban greening helps reduce the impact of heat wave so we are seeing increased numbers of days in the high 30s and low 40s and higher night-time temperatures which is the real risk because the homes aren't cooling down so by having good green spaces we provide localised urban cooling reducing a flash flooding through localised storm with infiltration providing critical biodiversity linkages to reduce the likelihood of genetic stranding and this is really important so it's about how do we ensure the flow of genetics of plants but particularly flora and fauna that can't get up and fly away but is only able to move through physically connected corridors rather than having genetic stranding in small isolated areas and also green spaces can provide opportunities for local food production which increases resilience too and if that's not enough guess what we've also got a huge body of evidence that tells us that gardening is really good for us green spaces are really good for us just spending time in urban green spaces whether it's private gardens parks reduces stress increases attention levels and aids with mental restoration so it begs a question why wouldn't you? Thankfully there is also leadership and you're probably picking up a tone of Peter Newman optimism here in my presentation because there's lots of really dumb stuff being done too but we know about that let's focus on the good stuff and make change so what kind of leadership are we seeing locally in this space for urban greening well we are seeing leadership by the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage the design WA suite of guiding documents for precincts and for apartments the original version of the medium density design code was fantastic unfortunately it's watered down so let's push for getting the original one back and I'll touch more on that as we move through also the the urban greeting strategy which is currently in a stakeholder engagement phase led by DPL is also very promising let's make sure we get something it's really useful and not just another document but there's the potential for this to be a leadership document we're seeing great leadership from local government and Walga as the West Australian local government association being advocates for urban forest strategies and action plans Water Corporation an unlikely bed fellow bed in this space like many water utilities around Australia you know 10 odd years ago started to really get behind working with industry helping gardeners transition to low water gardening and recognising that you know what just turning the water off and paving is not a good outcome and that through good guidance on plant selection gardening practices and even going so far as helping to promote verge gardening and and my team and I were very involved in developing the water wise verge program policies and guidance documents which Water Corporation have championed and now every local government in Perth and Peel have policies that support people gardening on their verge and in fact the Water Corporation required local governments to do this if they were going to be able to access annual Grant schemes for subsidising verge plantings and we've gone one step further and also worked with Water Corporation to deliver the waterwise streetcape guidelines which is getting people who think beyond just their verge and seeing how can we take take a neighborhood scale approach to this also their drainage for livability program which is about how they can better utilise their green infrastructure around main drains for improved biodiversity and I'll show a case study towards the end and then finally the real heroes are within the community and we are seeing that through urban bushland groups who have been the champions of often underfunded bushland and wetland care the participation in the development of the urban forest strategies and action plans within local governments and also advocates like the WA Tree Canopy Advocacy Group who are showing amazing leadership to help raise the importance of how do we preserve if not increase entry canopies there's also lots of innovation happening in this space guess what gardening and aviculture horiculture are not static things we're seeing lots of innovation and improved practices sometimes starting at a pretty low bar but we are seeing things move in the right direction we're seeing a great deal of increase in agricultural expertise here in Western Australia within industry we're seeing much better nursery practices and adoption of national standards to make sure that the plant stock that is growing particularly trees are growing well to be good long-term specimens we're seeing a lot of development and expertise in green infrastructure including podium gardens so that's rooftops and above structures like car parks and so forth and we're seeing an enormous amount of improvements in design creativity and a willingness for industry to want to do more this is all positive how about a couple of case studies so I'll start with an urban residential infill project now apologies if some of these are slightly Fremantle centric so I know we're slightly out of Curtin but that's where I live now so it's always nice to find projects to work on that are near my practice in my home so this is a project led by our state government development agency development wa 115 Hamilton Hill on the former Hamilton Senior High School site which closed down in 2018 and merged with South Fremantle College to become Fremantle College and the site was ear marked for residential infill development to help meet the states infill development target so in 2021 the stage one civil works were completed and now stage one housing construction is just about done this project is a significant leadership project across a range of sustainability areas I'll focus mainly on the urban greeny aspects but it is a net zero urban development and it is all electric no fossil. Gas design guidelines require all the homes to operate at minimum 7.5 star NES generate more power than they use over the course of the year in see the old school there that was actually deconstructed processed on site with a 96% resource recovery on site with materials going back into build all of the civil works and landscape infrastructure including road base and drainage rock with all of the valuable materials used in in higher order purposes across the site and in doing so avoided 1,000 truck movements through the local neighborhood to get rid of that material to stop piling and to bring new material back so there's a whole range of ways we can do things better but I'll focus on the urban greening so the first thing we did here fortunately is the landscape architects and sustainability consultants for the project and in due course this will become another research project for Curtin to assess the efficacy of the initiatives that have been put in place the first thing we do is look at regional connectivity so there's no point doing urban greening initiatives for biodiversity benefits on an ad hoc basis we need to zoom up understand what those connections are as it turns out this site back right on to the former Roe 8 and Roe 9 road reserve that was destined for clearing in fact when we were planning it the clearing of that site had just started under the the the former state government thankfully change of government happened it stopped and now that's being moved across to be a regional reserve but we've tapped into that site to go okay what are the opportunities to connect to that local context and local ecology so we do that by firstly retaining the trees recognising that the trees have enormous amenity value but also have habitat value but beyond that we need to build a number story and we need to connect these spaces so the overall public realm or development scale in initiatives here were around being very clear that we wanted to provide quality amenity mitigate urban heat this part of Hamilton Hill is in a identified urban heat risk area because of the nature of the surrounding landscape lower tree canopy and poor housing stock and demographic so mitigating urban heat was important and then providing habitat so there's a range of things we do building on the tree retention retaining land form to enable the trees to be retained allocating 17% open space above the the standard 10% but making sure that this is distributed and connected so there's plenty of playing reserves and large scale kickout spaces in the area this is about local neighborhood greening for for connectivity which is so well attuned to medium density infill setting a tree canopy target of 30% at maturity which is double the pre-development amount and that's spread 20% within public realm and 10% within private realm water sensitive urban design for the storm water management so trying to get water to infiltrate near where at falls to hydrate the landscape to hydrate the root zone to ensure long-term water availability to plants to increase transporation and urban cooling putting in a community bore scheme which provides groundwater not only to the public level landscapes but actually articulates that to all the houses as well and because of the localised storm water capture we've demonstrated that we can do that on a sustainable basis for less cost and a lot less emissions than the alternative which was to rely on scheme water for all of the private irrigation of course native plant pallet and habitat structures incorporated through all of the pocket parks and POS's and these habitat structures range from things like nesting boxes for different target species black cockatoos, owls also microbats and even quenda tunnels across all the roads so the quenda can move from the vegetated street scapes into into private gardens as well so that's the public real but how about the private space how do we deal with the private space well we do that through a local development plan and good design guidelines and both the LDP and the DGS were modeled off guess what the ill fated medium density code and we we actually prepared this cuz that the MDC was in in in in consultation for way too long and I was fortunate to be involved in some of that consultation process and they are very very good some very smart people worked on those and so we said okay Development WA let's let's use these as the basis of the design guidelines for 115 to test industry's willingness to use them and to see how they're received and broadly speaking very well so the design guidelines require check offs in planning and pre-building and then at completion to make sure that a range of sustainability initiatives across energy and water and materials are covered but I'll focus here primarily on the landscaping items so these guidelines require some pretty sensible things to be met so the objectives are to minimise heat gain and storage within private gardens to increase store water infiltration and to provide shade and create habitat and we do that by setting limits on the amount of hardstand so we ensure that there's room for for infiltration by ensuring that there's a limit on how much of that hardstand is unshaded so we don't get these local hit island areas because this is not just a private issue it's a neighborhood issue ensuring that at least that there's a limit set rather on the on the amount of lawn to encourage shrubs and trees and ground covers and perennial vegetation and that 25% of the outdoor area not just the garden beds of the area is set aside for deep root zone so we can maintain healthy tree canopies into the future and there's guidance on the right types of trees, deciduous trees on the northern side for example evergreens elsewhere and issues like overshadowing are all considered and of course no artificial turf on verges now you think that would be a no-brainer that people still like to do it so that's an example of a residential medium density infill project multi typology so in stage one there are detached lots there are attached lots there's group housing there are split level lots there's terrace homes so 70 dwellings all up well under construction and and now we're moving into stage two design but let's move to WGV here and have a quick look at what happens when we start to use spaces that are otherwise underutilised more effectively so this is the sump on Hope Street in WGV the building there is a 12 unit building for it's a social housing or affordable housing project for artists and creatives behind it on the corner of the site was a classic 1950s engineering solution to managing storm water a big sump so as part of the project to help leverage off the density and soften the area that was redesigned to have the storm water going through gross pollutant traps into underground infiltration storage and then that that sump was then landscaped so what was previously fenced off full of environmental weeds and very unsightly is now an accessible piece of green space open to the community and you can see now the trees are establishing on that southside elevation eventually the tuarts and the flood gums that are in there will grow up and screen that building and people are looking out into tree canopy and so that's a 2,000 cubic metre storage basin with half of that water now under underground and only extreme events as it bubbles up So to finish off how do we then tackle serious green infrastructure and serious storm water drainage infrastructure so this is Wolf Street Basin I mentioned briefly the drainage for livability program that Water Corporation runs so this is one of the storm water assets that they manage takes storm water from a surrounding regional catchment and it drains into the Canning River and this basin is again about a 60 to 70 year old engineering asset which is a compensation basin so unlike the local city of Fremantle example which is a dry basin that only gets wet when it rains heavily this is full year round because it intersects with the groundwater this was fenced off since it was built it was very poor water quality low habitat value unfortunately a lot of social issues in and around there and look at the urban development adjacent to it all turning its back on it the reason it's so valuable one there's water in a dry Place let's make the most of that, two it's on the edge of the City of Canning's future city center master plan area so Water Corporation partnered with the Department of Water and Environmental Regulation the Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions, all who have different jurisdictional considerations over this site but it was led by City of Canning local government to actually beautify that we're very fortunate my team were appointed as the landscape architects to redesign this and now it's a wonderful piece of public open space with connection from one side of the street across to the other across the wetland right into this the future city centre site for pedestrians and bike riders tens of thousands of rushes and sedges, hundreds of trees that will eventually be at full canopy and designed to show that these often unloved forgotten spaces will be the heroes of our denser cities so yes we need to look at how we do public realm and private landscaping better but there is so much underutilised forgotten space that becomes viable through the economics of good quality urban infill so let's not just think about the bad stuff let's get creative and see how we can do it better thank you very much