The New Approach : A New Model to Develop a Plan Proposal. North Strathfield, Australia

Abstract: This diploma work is carried through in Australia on a site in North Strathfield in the Sydney region. The whole work is built up around the idea to do four plan proposals that are optimized from different aspects. These aspects are chosen because we believe they are the most important issues in planning. Our four approaches are transportation, commercial, environmental and social aspects which will be joined into one final plan proposal. For each approach we have chosen what to focus on to delimitate the work. Our site in North Strathfield is triangularly shaped and surrounded by infrastructure; a railway and two motorways. Within our site there are two train stations which take you to Sydney CBD in 20 minutes. North Strathfield’s residential stock consists today of mostly low density housing from the beginning of the 1900s. At some places on the site, especially along the railway, new high density developments have been built. Centrally in the site there are big green areas for recreation and sports. The three biggest plots belong to Energy Australia, Mason Park Electrical Substation and an outlet shopping centre. The theoretical framework chapter concludes the literature we have read which form what our focus will be through the following chapters: • The transportation aspect focuses on street structure and promoting walking, cycling and public transportation. • The commercial aspect focuses on mixed use, location and scale. • The environmental aspect focuses on the suburb morphology, the street structure and spaciousness. • The social aspect focuses on life by activities, street as a place and on the physical structure. Two subjects we found ourselves talking about in each approach were street structure and density. Each analysis result in challenges which are given conceptual answers in the concept chapter, the challenges and the concepts are: • For the transportation aspect: o Enable people to take the shortest route to their destinations outside the site by improving the connections to its surroundings. o Improve the possibilities to take alternative routes within the area by supplying better connections within the site. o Increase the orientation ability within the area by strengthens different characters of the streets. o Increase the number of people travelling with public transportation by providing park and ride facilities, by increasing the density of buildings and people and by making the stations, and the way to them, more visible. o Make more people walk and cycle when doing short trips by prioritize the pedestrians and cyclists in the street environment. • For the commercial aspect: o Have more people on a smaller area by raising the density of housing and people. o Get a lively and long-lived commercial area by using the location of nearby major roads, by establishing centre in the most connected place and by dividing blocks into smaller sizes. • For the environmental aspect: o Get a more walkable suburb by dividing blocks into smaller sizes and by improving the permeability within the neighborhood. o Make it easier to find and use the green by networking the street structure, by integrating the green into the street network, by establishing a connected green structure in the area and by improving connections to other, surrounding, more spacious areas. • For the social aspect: o Improve the number of social meetings by increasing the density of people, by creating small blocks so people walk the short distances and by improving the building structure to provide better environments for people to meet. o Improve the recognisation between people living in the same block by increase the number of semi-private spaces where neighbors can spend time together. o Increase the accessibility to public spaces and potential meeting places by centralizing their location and by increasing their visibility. In chapter 6 Plan Proposals, we present the transportation, commercial, environmental and social plan proposal which show how we implement the concepts. The following discussion present that it is not hard to make a plan proposal when only focusing on one aspect, no compromises have to be done. The biggest similarities are the new street structures and the streets pointed out as main streets due to all of the aspects being about movement of people. The biggest differences are densities and land-use. Each aspect has its own reasons to why there should be different densities at different locations and the correlations between the four proposals are not big. The final plan proposal is a compromise where we experience that many good ideas came up, ideas that might not have arisen if not developing the plan proposal after this model. At the same time some questions might have been forgotten when choosing to only focus on four aspects. We think we will use this model in the future though doing the four proposals on a sketch level as it requires too much time to do them each fully.