Vancouver planner Brent Toderian has been in Sydney promoting the Vancouver approach to density with high-rise towers balanced by mid-rise apartments (condos). His main message is that density is good if it is done well. He likes slim towers with space between them, good street edges and good amenities.
As Sydney moves towards more apartment living with recent approvals running at 75 per cent of all residential, clearly towers must be in the mix. The concern I have, however, is that many Sydney council planners are fixated on Paris and Barcelona as urban models with six-to-eight-storey buildings. These European cities were built before lifts and steel framing enabled higher buildings to be constructed. New York championed the high-rise tower with the 1931 Empire State Building at 103 storeys. The advantage of towers is they take up less land and provide views for residents. What Sydney needs is a mix of towers and medium-rise apartments to provide more interesting urban forms and better amenities. A classic example is the Rhodes Peninsula that was planned to be all six-to-eight-storey buildings but Canada Bay council and land owners developed a new masterplan to incorporate some high-rises. The gain was three hectares of extra open space balanced by four to five towers up to 25 storeys. The view across the water of Rhodes now looks much more interesting than the original same-heights proposal. The small number of towers creates a more dynamic skyline.
With growing demand for apartment living, we need to balance the planners' preference for European-style medium-rise buildings with taller towers to give better urban forms. This will be particularly so at transport nodes and in town centres. We can learn from Vancouver; its approach to city-making celebrates height as well as public amenity. One way to get a balance of medium-rise (Paris) apartment buildings and high-rise (Vancouver) would be to give planning preference to the mid-rise by making apartments up to 25 metres code-assessable. This would be through a change to the NSW housing codes to set standards to be complied with leading to faster approvals. Tower buildings would go through a merit-based assessment process.
Chris Johnson is the chief executive of the Urban Taskforce.
