CIVIC PLANTING
Traditional Owners and Ongoing Custodians - Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Country
Client – City of Yarra Council
Optimising biodiversity within highly active public streetscape upgrades on Victoria Street, Wellington Street and Bridge Road in Richmond required a strategic planting approach to ensure vegetation survival and minimal maintenance.
The planting outcomes highlight the opportunity to increase the presence of local plant species and communities within our everyday urban civic spaces, extending the biodiversity of the local landscape and the associated habitat value within the urban environment.
Through consultation with landscape managers of successful local reserves, the process identified some key species missing from the existing urban landscape that would be both resilient and adaptable to a civic context. This research contributed to the development of a planting palette that integrated local indigenous tube stock with more resilient staple plant species to enable increased biodiversity in urban areas. These planting palettes have been embraced and adapted and continued in other civic spaces.
The studio also provided services in site and design analysis to demonstrate the role and value of environmental amenity within the municipality’s urban civic realms. This work includes a range of studies, such as heat, shade, street and urban design analyses to identify risks and challenges and explore available opportunities in mitigation within design responses.
Through this process, the practice has continued to develop in-house analysis tools, applied to assess the existing and proposed cumulative solar access of a site, informing key design decisions from master planning, to tree shade canopy strategies and the development of planting design species selection.