City: | Brimbank |
Country: | Australia |
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* This case study was written by the city and has not been edited by AIPH
Sunvale Community Park is the result of Brimbank City Council and Greener Spaces Better Places (GSBP), engaging with the community to transform a dormant 1.1-hectare area of land into a resilient, inclusive and community-led park.
The site was a school which closed in 2009. Brimbank purchased the land in 2014 which was key action in Council’s Creating Better Parks Policy and Plan (CBP) which highlighted a lack of open space in this part of Sunshine. Council was determined that it would once again be place for public use and to bring a community together again on this site.
GSBP, a national initiative to increase plants and trees in urban areas, identified the area as ‘Place Type 3’ or Urban, Spacious and Low Rainfall (Where Will All The Trees Be, 2020). Being highly built up with low rainfall has a unique set of challenges. Brimbank has the third lowest canopy coverage, and the third highest growth in ‘grey cover’ (i.e. hard surface to support population growth; shopping centres, roads, carparks, etc).
GSBP gave Brimbank a ‘Challenge Rating’ of Very High, indicating that the Council would face very high challenges in maintaining and growing green cover over the next decade.
The park is the result of four years of community advocacy, engagement and design. It is enthusiastically embraced by locals and offers a lively, busy green space. Users of the park span all cultures, ages and abilities and it has provided residents with strong social, recreational and ecological outcomes.
From the 548 ideas submitted by the community for the site, Council distilled these into a design that shaped the park. The result of this 360 degree design process is a park guided by community attachment for the old school site, and the ambitions of residents for a new space for their community to gather.
Examples of community consultation informing the design include the resurrection of a cricket pitch, with the previous site containing a pitch that was popular with refugees, and residents asking for the inclusion of the Wurundjeri people, whose deep connection with the landscape was important to recognise. This resulted in Council engaging indigenous artists to design and build a sculpture walk within the park.
Sunvale Community Park was the 100th park upgrade under CBP and won three Park of The Year awards in 2020. It has been celebrated by GSBP as a successful example of a project completed under the ‘Very High’ challenge rating with the park has been showcased nationally.
It includes many sustainable features, with an integrated blue-green infrastructure, making the 1.1-hectare space water neutral. Surrounding stormwater is directed to a network of rain gardens and biofiltration ponds with additional UV filtration, the water produced is suitable for irrigation. With this system the park can harvest 100,000 litres of water via underground tanks during the wetter months.
Additionally, the community requested a communal garden, and the park includes an edible garden with figs, olives, pomegranate and herbs, free to be enjoyed by all.
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Sunvale Community Park won three Park of the Year awards in 2020
As Sunvale’s landscape matures, it will increase its capacity to cool the surrounding area and support liveability. The increased wellbeing, surface temperature reduction and water retention attributes of the park affect citizens, businesses and wildlife in a positive way and make the area more resilient to the devastating impacts of heatwaves.
There’s a growing body of evidence to the many and varied benefits to green cover in our cities: they help clean the air, make us happier, healthier and more productive. Other studies have confirmed that living near green space can make us sleep better and even improve children’s intelligence and behaviour – despite socioeconomic determinants like wealth and education of parents. Green cover can even influence the price of your home and make for safer neighbourhoods.
Trees and shrubs help to combat rising temperatures and other climate change impacts. A tried and tested strategy is the introduction of more trees and green roofs in urban spaces, reducing surface temperatures by up to 40 per cent.
Urban birds such as Honeyeaters, Magpies, Swallows are now establishing themselves at this reserve and raptors such as the Little Falcon, are now seen regularly flying over this park on their daily flight paths.
As new townhouse development is nearing completion alongside Sunvale and these residents will move into townhouse that front this reserve. This will provide those living in such circumstance all of the above benefits while users of the reserve will benefit from passive surveillance which supports positive perceptions of safety.
The bushfires that occurred in the hills surround Melbourne in 2009 directly claimed the lives of 173 people in Melbourne, with an additional 374 people dying in the heatwave leading to the bushfire. Many of these people lived in the north and west of Melbourne and one reason attributed to this death rate is the lack of tree canopy cover.
Council is an active member of Greening The West (GTW) initiative which is a partnership of local governments in the west of Melbourne partnering to collectively increase tree canopy cover, biodiversity and water sensitive urban design to support liveability and deal with the impacts of heatwaves.
Sunvale is a demonstration of how parks can delivery on all three GTW objectives by reinventing public space and/or infrastructure with natural systems that support humans, fauna and flora.
Greener Spaces Better Places has also given Brimbank a “Challenge Rating” of VERY HIGH, based on Brimbank’s baseline of green cover and growth momentum. This means that over the next decade, Brimbank will face very high challenges to maintain or grow green cover (Where Will All the Trees Be? p.13, 2020).
Australian bushfires in 2009 directly claimed the lives of 173 people in Melbourne, with an additional 374 people dying in the heatwave leading to the bushfire. Many of these people lived in the north and west of Melbourne and one reason attributed to this death rate is the lack of tree canopy cover.
Sunvale Community Park has an integrated blue/green infrastructure system that treats stormwater water from surrounding streets and an adjacent townhouse development. All the stormwater is directed to raingardens, treated and then stored underground in a 100,000-litre tank. This water is used for irrigation and to keep the park cool during heatwaves. Council can turn the irrigation before or during a heatwave to create a cool park.
This approach to designing parks that are green and cool forms part of a Council initiative called Oasis Parks where plants and water are integrated to create places of biodiversity and refuge for people and nature.
Council has also planted plants from warmer climates north of Melbourne such as Morton Bay Figs which are expected to grow well as the climate changes in Melbourne during this century. The tree canopy cover is expected at Sunvale to be at least 60% which exceeds Council’s Urban Forest Strategy that seeks a 30% canopy cover overall across Brimbank.
Plants are a vital component of the design of Sunvale as per the following breakdown:
As part of the community consultation, there was a strong desire for a Botanical Garden experience. The planting palette and design have sought to create this experience through a selection of indigenous, native and exotic plants. The following benefits will increasing develop overtime as the blue/green infrastructure evolves at Sunvale:
Sunvale Community Park is classified as a Flagship Park in Council’s Creating Better Parks Policy and Plan and therefore receives the highest levels of maintenance. Operational staff from Parks Services and Building Maintenance attend the site weekly to ensure that it is clean, safe and well maintained.
Council’s Creating Better Parks Policy and Plan recommended that the disused school be purchased for open space. When the State government announced, they were going to sell the vacant land, Council and the community advocated together with Council succeeded in buying two thirds of the disused site.
From this Council created a visionary master plan that incorporated all community ideas and were able to use this masterplan to advocate for funding from the State government. This was successful and resulted in around $3.6M funding from the State to implement the whole masterplan.
The design of Sunvale sought to ensure that the park caters for multiple and diverse users and the expected increase in housing density for the Sunshine Priority Precinct. As a Flagship Park and Oasis Park, Sunvale has functions that cater for:
Sunvale has been restructured to ensure that the connection to the local community that started with the primary school now continues as a key public realm destination for the local community to meet, be active and to assist in the liveability of Sunshine.
Brimbank City Councils Urban Design Department lead the development of the masterplan (co-funded by the State of Victoria), design and construction for this park. This project required the involvement of many other professionals to ensure quality outcomes were achieved. Within Council the following professionals were involved:
The following external professionals were engaged:
Sunvale Community Park has been recognised as a great exemplar of a contemporary park winning two state and one national industry awards for Park of The Year in 2020 from the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects and from Parks and Leisure Australia.
Sunvale Community Park was chosen as a site to conduct an interview with Adrian Gray, Chair of Greening The West and Manager of Urban Design at Brimbank City Council to discuss the role that nature play has for children. Sunvale has natural play elements that include plants, logs, water, rocks, sand and musical objects.
The Sunshine Library conducts reading events in the park with the local community and during National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee (NAIDOC) week, events and discussions have taken place at Sunvale linked to the indigenous sculptural pieces designed by local First Nations People title, The Five Elements.
At the opening of Sunvale, a key community member who advocated for this school to become a park and who was very passionate about the community having a say in how the park should be developed, gave a speech. He mentioned that he had never seen the wishes of the community included as extensively as the master plan for Sunvale envisioned. He congratulated Council and Council staff from the Urban Design Department who led the community engagement, master planning, and design and construction phases for this project.
Sunvale Community Park has been embraced by the local community as is in constant use. During COVID-19 restrictions, it became a hub and activity allowing the community to engage in a myriad of exercise activities or just enjoy spending time in a green space. This park contributed to the resilience of the local community in dealing with the many lockdowns associated with COVID -19.
Given the VERY HIGH challenge ranking for Brimbank, Greener Spaces Better Place has celebrated and featured Brimbanks’ positive collaboration with their community to deliver Sunvale Community Park in Brimbank (VIC), featuring this initiative in Where Will All the Trees Be? p.65, 2020, showcasing this model nationally.
Sunvale Community Park was the first passive park to install integrated blue/green infrastructure.
Since then, Council has adopted an approach to key parks where they are treated as Oasis Parks. This approach is underpinned by assessing a park’s current and future functionality and the potential for using nearby stormwater.
Council has an Integrated Water Management Team (IWMT) that oversees this approach with staff from Engineering, Environment, Urban Design, Assets and Parks. The most recent example of this is the Dempster Park Oasis Upgrade where a blue/green infrastructure system has been installed to treat and harvest local stormwater with the capacity to store 1,000,000 litres of water underground. Sunvale stores 100,000litre.]
Council’s IWMT was successful in obtaining $2,000,000 from Melbourne Water and Greater Western Water to fund and deliver Dempster Park project. Brimbank City Council is leading the way in retrofitting parks with blue/green infrastructure to ensure parks are green, cool and functional as the climate warms into this century.
In seeking to make parks sustainable and resilient and to utilise stormwater to make cities more liveable, Sunvale Community Park offers a model for how to achieve this, especially disused 20th century public infrastructure.
From a local government perspective, its vital do have the appropriate design professionals, such as landscape architects delivering policy documents that seek to create quality park/public spaces that deal with climatic and cultural issues on the 21st century. In the 20th century it was given that engineers were embedded in local governments. For the 21st century landscape architect and urban design should be the norm to ensure natural systems are embedded in the way a city functions.
When public assets like schools become obsolete, the state government should not dispose of land to the private sector but assist local governments in repurposing’s these sites for community benefit and for reintroduction of natural systems into cities.
Integrated blue/green infrastructure can ensure that parks become a network of green places that mitigate heatwaves, minimise flooding, create ‘Soak Cities’ and to develop ecological based infrastructure for the well-being of people, plants and associated fauna.
To start the transformation of old public infrastructure, it’s important to start with the community and to use their ideas in creating the vision. Sunvale Community Park has successfully achieved this with the incorporation of over 250 ideas.
The blue-green infrastructure methodology used within the park consists of natural and semi-natural systems implemented to mitigate climate change impacts in urban areas, including elevated air temperatures and flooding.
Designed as a walkable/cyclable precinct, the park has been designed as an active/low carbon transport area. The design of Sunvale encourages people to walk or cycle to this park and it is located near Sunshine Station so that children from across the municipality can catch a train to Sunshine then ride, walk, skate or scoot to Sunvale Community Park to meet up.
With the expected increase in population density of Sunshine, Sunvale will offer a great place for the local community so that they don’t need to drive to another park as all their needs can meet at this fantastic park.
Whilst concrete and other hard materials have been used they have been designed for durability to avoid a short lifespan which assists in minimising the future carbon footprint of Council.
Climate change impacts include increased bushfire and heatwave events in many parts of Australia. Taking this into consideration was very important to the Council and the community and was reflected strongly in the community engagement process. As such, the blue-green infrastructure was implemented to mitigate climate change impacts such as elevated air temperatures, flooding and increased bushfire events. The blue-green infrastructure includes raingardens and biofiltration ponds to ensure access to high-quality water for irrigating the diverse plants.
The raingarden system was funded wholly by Melbourne Water, a state level water authority, who provides funds for local governments to deliver water sensitive urban design infrastructure that manages stormwater treatment at the source and for reuse thus decreasing reliance on potable water.
Tree canopy cover will reach 60% overtime which is double that of Council’s overall Urban Forest Strategy aim which seeks 30% canopy cover across the municipality. Parks are sites where tree canopy can be maximised, and Council is committed to delivering this level of canopy cover in all parks across the municipality through the implementation the Urban Forest Strategy. The irrigation system will support the establishment of a robust and diverse urban forest, without reliance on potable water.
Additionally, community gardens were planted in an edible garden walk with figs, olives, pomegranate, herbs, lily pilly and chocolate lilies amongst other plants available for community harvest. This increases community engagement with urban agriculture and localised food systems – key to developing climate resilient communities.
Sunvale has been designed to capture, treat and store stormwater for use as irrigation. The irrigation system is subsurface, so this reduces evaporation, and it operates overnight.
A water play feature has been installed that required users to engage with various play objects to pump water into the space. This uses potable water and all the water used drains into the raingarden system and storage for reuse in irrigation.
All the plants chosen are plants that are adaptable to the local clay soils. The only imported soils were used in the raingardens which require free draining material and plants that grow in this type of soil profile.
All shelters and hard surfaces have been designed to drain stormwater into adjacent garden beds to further assist in the retention and use of stormwater within the site.
In developing the Sunvale Community Park Master Plan, the aspirations of the local community were collected and used to drive a vision for the future.
In addition to this, Council has undertaken feasibility studies to determine the likely increase in population within the Sunshine Priority Precinct, where Sunvale Community Park is located. This state significant activity centre in the west of Melbourne, will become denser as apartment buildings are built so the design of Sunvale had to robust while offering an array public realm experience as follows:
The capacity for more people to use Sunvale was carefully considered in the design, layout and functional components.
In designing Sunvale, Council has classified this park as Flagship Park as highlighted in Council’s award winning Creating Better Parks Policy & Plan. This plan has received 10 industry awards for the vision, implementation and transformation of parks across Brimbank to support people, nature and liveability.
As a Flagship Park, Sunvale will receive a high level of maintenance and Parks Services have factored this into their ongoing levels of maintenance for Sunvale Community Park.
Sunvale Community Park is now monitored by Council Operation staff to ensure that all aspects of the park’s functions are maintained to a Flagship Park standard and to the community’s expectation. This requires weekly actions and site inspections by Council’s Parks Services and Building Maintenance teams.
The functionality of Sunvale Community Park is ongoing to ensure that the blue/green infrastructure delivers what it is intended to do while all other park assets are monitored regularly to maintain their functionality and safety for the park users.