Future Brisbane: Designing a more sustainable city

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The aim is to really improve or encourage a significant improvement in the quality of environmental performance in buildings

City-shaping specialists Urbis were behind the award-winning Buildings That Breathe advisory document adopted this year by Brisbane City Council.

Urbis national director James Tuma said it was about making buildings more suited to Brisbane’s climate and lifestyle.

“The aim is to really improve or encourage a significant improvement in the quality of environmental performance in buildings,” Mr Tuma said.

“It has already started showing, not just in the CBD, and I definitely think we will see a lot more of it from now onwards.”

Picture busy Albert St, Mr Tuma said, with ferns growing off high-rise buildings designed to cool their occupants and the pedestrians below them.

With fewer and autonomous cars, pedestrians walk to the busway through the centre of the street.

Mr Tuma said the private sector had reacted positively to the push for buildings to be cooler and more environmentally friendly.

“There is also the image benefit, it is a cool image that shows what we want to be,” he said.

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Urbis’ City Stitch proposed a dramatic repurposing of the Centenary Place space connecting the CBD to Fortitude Valley.

RPS regional technical director for landscape architecture Andrew Green predicted inner-city Brisbane would be unrecognisable in 10 years.

“For a long time we all lived on the fringes of the city because they were green and lush, but the next generation can’t afford that and we’ve run out of land,” he said.

“There is a huge interest now living close to town and work. “The challenge for the council and for landscape architects is to create an environment for people to enjoy.”

Mr Green said developers were coming up with creative ways to include more public space on their sites.

One hypothetical example was Urbis’ City Stitch an award-winning entry to a design competition which proposed a dramatic repurposing of the Centenary Place space connecting the CBD to Fortitude Valley.

Urbis Associate Director Nicholas Stevenson said the design was a layered urban garden that provided 200 per cent more open space. “It is a design for very much a mixed-use development,” Mr Stevenson said.

“We reinterpreted the space as a forest with open space at different levels and green spaces within the building.”

It won’t be built, but the plan is “100 per cent realistic”, Mr Stevenson said.

See the full article on The Courier Mail here.