Better Planning Tools

In cities across Australia and New Zealand, housing affordability has become a major issue.

The Greening the Greyfields project has created an online urban planning toolkit to help address this issue and combat urban sprawl and sub-optimal land developments. The toolkit brings landowners, developers and planners together to design more sustainable, liveable and economically viable cities. It is an out-of-the-box solution, meaning it can be used with minimal preparation or training, and in a fraction of the time of existing tools. ENVISION, one of our new tools, uses a combination of open and proprietary data sets to assist planning experts identify areas of high redevelopment potential at a municipality wide and individual property level. The tool can then rapidly explore different development possibilities. In addition to technical tools, the project has worked from state level policy down to the landowner’s kitchen table to create a planning process and framework that allows landholders to work together to achieve better financial, community and environmental outcomes.

This process has been recognised within local council strategic planning documents in Victoria, Christchurch, Perth and Sydney. At a state level, the Greyfields development approach has been included as the only alternative to business as usual development in the Plan Melbourne strategic planning document for future housing development in Melbourne.