Central to Eveleigh consultations

View from Cleveland Street along railway corridor (Photo: Geoff Turnbull)

UrbanGrowth will now make recommendations to Government on how to proceed with the planning of the corridor regeneration. A comprehensive ongoing engagement program is expected to commence in 2014.

One workshop included government agencies, the two universities and other major landholders around the site. A second workshop was made up of randomly selected community members from the inner-Sydney area. The third was made up of representatives from key community based organisations and groups from the local area including most of the surrounding residents groups.

The community meetings were day-long workshops facilitated by Wendy Stamp from consultants KJA. Associate Professor Roberta Ryan from UTS provided input on the area surrounding the corridor while UrbanGrowth’s Project Director Tim Poole provided input on the Sydney planning context. Michael Harrison from Architectus who undertook the background study presented on the regeneration potential. The randomly selected group also received a bus tour around the site.

The aim of the workshops was to understand the important objectives and principles that should drive regeneration of the Central to Eveleigh corridor. Questions explored included: the kind of place Central to Eveleigh could be and what should guide planning for buildings, transport and infrastructure, and what is most important about the stakeholder engagement process.

The Architectus background study will be made available in the next couple of weeks on the UrbanGrowth NSW website along with the workshop inputs and reports from each of the workshops. This will allow the community to see what came out of the workshops and to provide any feedback to UrbanGrowth.

While the UrbanGrowth focus for these sessions was on the long term, there is a short-term element too. On October 31 UrbanGrowth announced a Registration of Interest process for the three undeveloped commercial sites at the Australian Technology Park. While the ad specifies the size of the sites, a media release issued on the same day by the Minister states the NSW Government is “open to ideas that would expand the current gross floor area footprint”. At the moment, heights on the current car park sites would allow up to 11 storeys.