Developers are putting nature-based and biophilic design on the agenda, but NSW’s aversion to height is holding them back.
This was the sentiment at a developer roundtable hosted by The Urban Developer in partnership with Nature Based Cities at Westpac’s Barangaroo offices.
Billbergia development director Rick Graf told the room that a frequent debate with planning authorities was over building higher.
“[Especially] with precincts, they have this irrational fear of height,” Graf said.
“But if you take eight of those buildings and stack them on top of each other, you wind up with a tall facade and a ground plane that you can do serious things with.”
Getting an adequate floor-space ratio can mean giving up deep soil areas and ground planes by digging deeper and deeper basements.
“In Brisbane, [developers] can put most of their parking above grade and sleeve it, and they get a great outcome,” Graf said.
“But in our case, if we put parking above grade to avoid doing 12 basements, you lose your height or you lose your floor space, and that’s a conundrum in New South Wales planning at the moment.”
Pushing buildings higher allows developers more to play with when it comes to ground plane, vertical and rooftop spaces, which could improve biophilic responses.
Graf said that Billbergia worked hard, especially on taller buildings, to incorporate green roofs. However, this also presented NSW developers with hurdles, Fiducia founder Ben Doyle said.
“One of the problems with dealing with many councils here is not being able to properly engage and utilise the rooftop,” he said.
“The amount of councils that reject you on that because of noise or other issues means you can’t even use it for garden space.
“Then you’ve got a dead rooftop with just plant equipment on top.”
Developers across the country are clearly interested in bringing nature into their developments, but how to do it with an eye on commerciality is a key consideration.
Nature Based Cities (NBC) was founded in 2022 by Paul Hameister and has undertaken research into the commercial benefits of incorporating nature into developments.
“There’s a clear premium financially on a rate per square metre. There’s a premium on sales velocity, there’s a premium on capital growth, and there’s a premium on rental growth, and it’s about future proofing projects, because this is coming,” Hameister said.
NBC has also developed a score card for developers to gauge their development’s accordance with these principles.
“We’ve created our own set of design guidelines for developers to give to their consultant team at the outset of a project,” Hameister said.
“It’s about providing an accreditation system that can be used in marketing collateral.
“Every render of every project at the moment is covered in green, but from a purchaser’s perspective, how do you actually know the developer is going to walk the talk?
“It’s a way of giving consumers some degree of confidence that this developer is serious.”
As the industry realises the financial benefits of nature-based design, some nature-based design principles are already in action.
Mulpha’s Norwest Quarter was a prime example of nature-based precincts, and was one of the first large scale residential developments to win Clean Energy Finance Corporation funding for its environmental credentials, Mulpha development director Andrew Nichols said.
It also shows what you can do with a good ground plane.
“On green open space at the ground plane, we have developed what we call a wild green area where we’re trying to increase the biodiversity of the area, trying to bring back fauna that was once there, and planting specific tree species to try and attract bees back,” Nichols said.
Elsewhere, Leamac Property Group is working on the 38.5ha Moore Park Precinct site in Liverpool (pictured top), earmarked for mixed use, according to Leamac senior adviser for planning and delivery Rachel Harrison.
“It’s a significant green space and the precinct revolves around that riverfront opening up,” Harrison said.
But it raised the issue of infill sites, which can often be more difficult to develop in a nature-focused way.
“It’s heavily contaminated and we have to remove a heap to get to that point and have that genuine blue-green intertwined space,” Harrison said.
However, developers are working with the sites they have and even NSW councils are getting on board, according to Fiducia’s Ben Doyle, whose experience with Sutherland Shire Council was exemplary.
“They made sure everything was specific, down to exactly what was in your landscape plans, what you were planting, which I’ve never seen before.
“I’ve never seen them care that much ... that it was going to be exactly the way that you said it would be.”
Hameister is also experimenting in elements of nature-based design in Hamton’s own development practice, including at its Hawthorn project.
“We’re only obliged to keep four of [the trees on the site], but we’re keeping 77, and it’s the first project where we’ve engaged an ecologist, which is kind of not even in the vernacular from the Melbourne development,” Hameister said.
“The other thing we’re doing at Hawthorn, which we’ve never done before and isn’t done much, is relocating trees that are in the way, trees that you would just have to remove in order to make a project viable.
“Give yourself a 12-month lead time, you can prepare the root balls [so] that you can relocate them on the site. These are 50-plus-year-old trees with a 95 per cent chance of success.
“It costs between $5,000 and $15,000 a tree to move them, which to some people sounds like a lot of money, but in terms of what that tree is and value that the residents place on it, it’s a no brainer.”
Including nature in developments didn’t come without cost, as Billbergia’s Rick Graf detailed.
“You’ve got the challenge of keeping your green facades alive … it’s adding $10,000 to $15,000 per unit cost to the strata fees to keep the vegetation alive.
“But we’re now doing three or four-storey pocketed, glazed indoor gardens that all the internal apartments have got access to. So it’s a garden in the sky.”
Other returns on investment were more difficult to calculate, Hameister said.
“What is the financial return of investing in canopy to reduce the urban heat island effect? How do we convert that conversation into dollars?”
But, he said, that the alternative options were proving more costly—including 60,000 tonnes of old solar panels going into landfill—and the benefits of including nature in developments were clear for the bottom line.
“At Moonee Valley Park, we’ve been achieving huge premiums relative to the local market, and we’ve been selling 10 apartments a month for the last two years in that project,” he said.
“It’s a great privilege to work in the property development industry.
“We get to shape cities in the future, generally, the shaping of the cities that future generations grow up in. But with that privilege comes a responsibility to think about what kind of legacy we want to leave.”
