URBANGROWTH’S ambitious East End revamp has been given the go-ahead, but not before the head of the independent planning body that approved it gave the city’s controversial planning laws an impassioned whack.
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A concept plan for the revised UrbanGrowth-GPT development, valued at more than $200 million and made up of three “towers” reaching as high as 12 storeys, was approved unanimously by the Joint Regional Planning Panel in a meeting at Newcastle’s City Hall on Thursday.
Program Director Michael Cassel said the approval was “very exciting news”.
“This development is going to give the East End the village feel we’ve been seeking, it’s going to improve Hunter Street significantly and turn it into a place people want to be,” he said.
UrbanGrowth will now begin looking for private sector investment to bring the project to life, a project that could take months. But whether it works with a private investor to develop the buildings or sells them outright is yet to be decided.
“We’ll start seeking to attract private investment,” Mr Cassel said.
“Exactly how that will look we still haven’t decided, but we’ve said from the outset that we aren’t builders, that’s something that will be done with the help of the private sector.”
Despite approving the project, Joint Regional Planning Panel chair Garry Fielding made passionate speech criticising the planning proposals that made it possible, describing the 2014 amendment to the Local Environment Plan that lifted city building heights as “flawed” and “regrettable”.
Last year UrbanGrowth agreed to significantly reduce the original building heights on the proposal, in some cases by more than 30 metres.
But Mr Fielding said the fact that the original heights were ever considered was a result of poor planning.
“There was a very strong emphasis on ensuring view corridors to the cathedral as if that was the principle urban design concern for future development in that eastern part of the CBD,” he said.
“What that did was ignore urban form considerations.
“The great attractive feature of the eastern precinct of the CBD and inner city is the urban form that has buildings stepping up the hill to the top of the hill where the hill is crowned by, I think we’d all agree, a most imposing cathedral.
“To then reach a conclusion [that the] urban form could be interrupted by up to three up to 20-storey buildings as I said I find completely flawed.”
Newcastle Inner-City Residents Alliance head Brian Ladd also spoke at the meeting, saying that while the group could live with the new building heights, it wanted them to be legislated.
“NICRA’s concern is that if the state government laws allow for a building height beyond [what is] approved by council and contained in the proposal before the JRPP today, developers will seek … to take advantage of the legislation as it currently stands,” he said.
During the meeting Mr Fielding was also critical of what he described as “facadism” within the plan, which refers to the practice of keeping the outer wall of an older heritage building while a new structure is built around, behind or on top of the existing facade.
Because the application was for a “concept plan” and not a specific architectural design, UrbanGrowth had pushed for a larger overall building envelope. But Mr Fielding referred to that as a “square box approach”.
“It’s an approach if you don’t mind me saying that was alive and well in the nineteen eighties [but] it’s not alive and well in 2016,” he said.
As a result, one of the conditions in the approval will force the developers to set back the street frontage of some of the developments, meaning the overall number of apartments could be reduced from 565 to about 500.
