The Market Street Park saw the modification of an inner-city road into the first new public park in Melbourne’s CBD since the 1980s.

The project delivered added value, targeting specific strategies and features identified by local government as priorities for new developments. These cumulative actions result in greater value than site-based actions alone and contribute to a deliberate city-wide ecological enhancement approach. A biophilia plan was developed incorporating Nature’s patterns throughout the design, as well as lush and diverse planting, giving sufficient opportunities for human-nature interactions. Our approach enabled enhanced ecological value to be awarded Green Star points to a site constrained in terms of available landscaped area, but still offered significant potential to enhance ecology through features which tie into surrounding ecosystems and local ecological priorities.

If this same approach were to be adopted across several urban sites, it would provide significant ecological enhancement via targeted use of ecological features to enhance the local ecology, and would provide significant ecological improvement to urban landscaping, and would also improve knowledge and awareness regarding ecological value and local ecology within the industry.

Photography by Trevor Mein and OCULUS