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AUSTRALIA: A Brilliant Plan To Turn Parking Garages Into Rooftop Gardens

Industry News

Sourced from Fast Company

There are more than 41,000 parking spaces in the central business district of Melbourne, Australia. Many of them could be put to better use, says Julian Anderson, a director at the large Australian architecture firm Bates Smart.

“It’s the third-largest land use in the city,” he says. Community space, on the other hand, ranks dead last. Bates Smart crunched the numbers and found that, in total, parking takes up nearly 1,200 acres of space, or more space than New York’s Central Park. And if it’s not bad enough that these parking spaces take up so much space and encourage more driving, they also sit empty most of the time. “You think, my god, there’s one and a half times Central Park wrapped up in car parking in central Melbourne,” Anderson says. “What can we do to unlock this?”

One potential solution, he says, is to convert some of that parking into much-needed community space such as playgrounds, community gardens, and rooftop parks. And with a new mechanism his firm is developing in consultation with the city government, there may be a way to incentivize the owners of these parking spaces to make that happen.

Anderson says there are at least 20 standalone parking garages in central Melbourne that would be good candidates for reuse. Bates Smart has developed concepts for a few garages to serve as models for how this conversion could work, with some minor structural revision. One, located near the city’s main sports stadium, imagines the space converted into a series of playgrounds and gymnasia, with basketball courts and other recreational spaces. Another, in the city’s Chinatown, uses the ground floor as a market space and the rooftop as an outdoor eatery with open-air cinema. Anderson calls these potential projects a new kind of “vertical urban space.”

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Source:https://www.fastcompany.com/90579163/a-brilliant-plan-to-turn-parking-garages-into-rooftop-gardens

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