Our role is increasingly to facilitate development by the private sector and demonstrate the social and environmental dividends of high-quality, sustainable design.
 

The Landcom Guidelines
Creating well-designed, sustainable neighbourhoods that work well and feel good depends on putting all the pieces together in the right way and at the right time. To this end, during the year we launched the Landcom Guidelines. These provide design advice on built form, universal housing, streets, street trees, open space, public art and community centres. The Guidelines were launched by the Minister for Planning at the Sustainability and Policy Conference in July. The theme of the conference was “Making Great Places – Putting the Pieces Together”. This highly successful event was attended by 250 local and State Government representatives, development partners and industry consultants.

Following this success, we decided to roll out a program of regional seminars to further promote the Guidelines. The first, at the Casula Powerhouse, was organised specifically for our stakeholders from Sydney’s southwest, and included presentations on each of the seven guidelines by the design and planning consultants who helped us prepare them. This was followed with regional seminars at Newcastle, the Rouse Hill Town Centre (for northwest Sydney), and a seminar for our central Sydney stakeholders at the new Prince Henry Community Centre. The seminar series attracted around 300 delegates, mostly from local government. Feedback from participants was universally positive.

A further indicator of our success was the number of visits to Landcom’s website during the year. For example, visits to the Guidelines section of Landcom’s website totalled around 1,300, with a marked increase recorded from the start of the seminar series.

Water Sensitive Urban Design
Landcom first introduced strategies for water sensitive urban design (WSUD) in 1999 at Victoria Park, then one of our most strategic urban redevelopments. Following their success we formulated a WSUD policy, mandated that all projects incorporate a WSUD strategy into the early design process and produced a set of guidelines in the form of three booklets. Ten years on, we have gained considerable knowledge and experience from monitoring our projects and applying WSUD to urban renewal and greenfield sites.

During the year we updated the guidelines – and the popular series of booklets that promote them – to incorporate the changes in technology that have occurred, and to take into account the new water quality targets we have set as part of our sustainability indicator review.

We also took the opportunity to include a fourth booklet on maintenance issues to address concerns raised by local government about the long-term costs involved in using new technologies. The guidelines were reviewed and updated in collaboration with local government and included a DVD to be used as an educational tool for elected representatives and the general public.

The guidelines were launched at an international WSUD conference held in Perth in May and have generated wide interest across New South Wales and interstate.

Public Art
We received an international request by Public Art South West to include our Public Art Guidelines on its website. Public Art South West is a globally recognised public art development agency for the southwest region of the United Kingdom and is viewed internationally as a resource for the best and most innovative practice in public art. Its website receives over a million page views per year.

Disabled Access
Acting on a complaint about the lack of disabled access to display homes, we found that many of our own sales offices were not user friendly for visitors with disabilities. As a result, we carried out an independent audit of all sales offices and, wherever possible, undertook to retrofit them with disabled access. We also changed our contractual arrangements with display home builders to ensure display homes are fully compliant in future.

Rouse Hill
Landcom continued to lead site tours of the Rouse Hill regional centre, believing the best way to encourage good design is to let our projects do the talking.

Awards
Landcom’s approach to high quality, sustainable design was vindicated during the year when we won two of the industry’s most prestigious awards for our developments as well as a range of other design awards, details of which can be found on Page 8 and 9 of this report.