The intensification of development that is required in established and occupied inner and middle suburban greyfield areas (retrofit) is the great challenge for our fast-growing Australian cities. The scale of urban regeneration required over the next 30 years has the potential to reduce carbon emissions, improve housing affordability and reduce urban sprawl.

Pressures for urban redevelopment are intensifying in all large cities. A new logic for urban development is required – green urbanism – that provides a spatial framework for directing population and investment inwards to brownfields and greyfields precincts, rather than outwards to the greenfields

In an era of smart cities, planning support systems (PSS) offer the potential to harness the power of urban big data and support land-use and transport planning. PSS encapsulate data-driven modelling approaches for envisioning alternative future cities scenarios. They are widely available but have limited adoption in the planning profession (Russo, Lanzilotti, Costabile, & Pettit, 2017).

This video introduces CRCLCL's projects exploring new instruments to engage stakeholders in redeveloping sustainable neighbourhoods. 

Australia’s cities face significant social, economic and environmental challenges, driven by population growth and rapid urbanisation. The pressure to increase housing availability will lead to greater levels of high-density and medium-density stock. However, there is enormous political and community pushback against this. One way to address this challenge is to encourage medium-density living solutions through “precinct” scale development.

Australia’s cities face significant social, economic and environmental challenges, driven by population growth and rapid urbanisation. The pressure to increase the availability of housing, including a move to a more compact urban form, will lead to greater levels of high-density and medium-density stock. This research is attentive to the lack of medium-density dwellings and associated planning instruments to support and encourage increased medium-density living.

Cities are comprised of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of small parcels of individually owned land. The fractured nature of these tenures, combined with the network of administrative and infrastructural bodies governing them, makes any form of significant and coordinated planning change incredibly complicated, if not untenable. This plurality, of both ownership and regulation, necessitates that stakeholder negotiation across the range of stakeholder groups is required to affect any meaningful change; particularly in an urban context.

Australian cities, especially the four big ones, are growing rapidly. Their growth enables many agglomeration benefits and creates many social and environmental impacts. This report examines new approaches to resolving how we can grow to create new opportunities for our children and grandchildren but at the same time manage the social and environmental issues associated with such growth. The use of digital tools in planning is shown to be on the cusp of providing new ways to resolve the growth vers impacts debate, but will require some new directions if they are to be mainstreamed.

The Greening the Greyfields project is developing tools to apply spatial information to urban planning decision-making, for improved economic, social and environmental outcomes. 
The project is informing urban planning decisions related to the redevelopment of the middle suburbs, in particular those precincts characterised as ‘greyfields’ which provide unique considerations for planning, such as

Metropolitan planning and development of Australia’s cities has been strongly influenced by what could be termed the “North American model” of low-density, car-dependent suburban development on greenfield master-planned housing estates. But this is all set to change.