News & Developments: Bowden TOD

[AtD]

Well there's the Nexus centre proposed and the Hills HQ under construction just a stones throw away.

[Xaragmata]

Quite a large part of former Clipsal on Park Tce is for (short term?) lease:

http://www.realcommercial.com.au/commer ... te/5624243

http://www.realcommercial.com.au/commer ... te/5586113

[kenget]

Quite a large part of former Clipsal on Park Tce is for (short term?) lease:

http://www.realcommercial.com.au/commer ... te/5624243

http://www.realcommercial.com.au/commer ... te/5586113

I can see my old desk in one of the photo's

Sounds like they are leasing these offices just to bring in some cash until the TOD construction starts. It's funny though, these buildings were getting quite run down and the photos suggest that a fair bit of work has gone in to getting them cleaned up.

[how_good_is_he]

I am very surprised they are leasing these as most commercial tenants arent going to move in for just a 1 or 2 year lease but would want at least 5years if not longer. Seems like the next 5 years not much may happen except remediation and maybe a section for stage 1? Hope I am wrong but I havent heard any news for ages.

[Will]

From the Messenger:

Pressure on to get Bowden TOD right

Council15 Sep 10 @ 10:30am by Michelle Etheridge


THE success of Bowden Village is vital to winning community support for another 13 similar projects planned for Adelaide over the next three decades, planning experts say.

The State Government announced it would build a new transit oriented development (TOD) on the former Clipsal site in October 2008, but is yet to release plans for public scrutiny.

Planning Institute of Australia national vice-president Gary Mavrinac said the government would need to use Bowden as a “marketing tool”.

“If you can create something that’s going to be well accepted, the other sites will follow through quite easily,” he said. “If we don’t get Bowden right, the community perceptions will be negative and people will say ‘I don’t want that in my area’.”

TODs, which include high-density housing, offices and shops, are built next to major transport links and aim to reduce urban sprawl and the community’s reliance on cars.

Mr Mavrinac said the need to integrate the development with the local community and ensure buildings did not overshadow nearby residences were among challenges faced during the project.

Bowden Village is bordered by South Rd and Torrens roads, Park Tce, War Memorial Drive and the River Torrens, and will include about 2000 homes, cafes and open-space areas.

Property Council executive director Nathan Payne said affordable housing and high quality public spaces were needed.

He said Adelaide generally had a conservative view about medium to high-density living. “But with what I’ve seen in other TODs around the world being considered for Bowden Village, we can really show the community how good these developments can be,” he said.

Construction of the Bowden TOD the first in Adelaide is expected to begin next year.

About $1.1m has so far been spent on the project, including consultation, planning and demolition and remediation work on the former Clipsal site.

Other TODs are also planned at the St Clair Oval on Woodville Rd, and West Lakes.
]

[Waewick]

http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/sout ... 5967680423

BURIED tar which has reached the groundwater, gasworks waste and ash are among contaminants at Bowden which will cost $30 million to remediate.

Despite being touted two years ago as the state’s first transit oriented development (TOD), a clean-up of the Bowden Village site, on Park Tce, and its groundwater is yet to begin.

Wayne Gibbings, chief executive of the State Government’s Land Management Corporation, tole the Weekly Times Messenger that the 6ha Origin Energy site had been used for gas manufacturing since the late 1800s.

“Gasworks wastes were disposed on-site to infill low-lying areas and pugholes,” he said.

“The site has a number of tar pits all of which have impacted on the soils and groundwater.

Start of sidebar. Skip to end of sidebar.
End of sidebar. Return to start of sidebar.
“While the Origin site is extensively contaminated and requires significant remediation to enable it to be developed ... the EPA has advised there is no threat to human health.”

Read the full story and have your say at the Weekly Times Messenger.

ouch

[jk1237]

clean it up quickly as I wanna move here once its started

[Nathan]

clean it up quickly as I wanna move here once its started

Same!

[crawf]

I found this part very interesting

Meanwhile, plans to rezone Noarlunga Centre for a 6000-resident TOD are out for public consultation.

Sounds like it's going to be double the size of Bowden Village!. Wow

[SRW]

I found this part very interesting

Meanwhile, plans to rezone Noarlunga Centre for a 6000-resident TOD are out for public consultation.

Sounds like it's going to be double the size of Bowden Village!. Wow

New thread started here: Noarlunga Centre TOD

[Wayno]

This article is quite scathing of the TOD concept as appliedto SA, essentially calling it a rehash of similar failed ventures. I'm more optimistic, but do wonder if the State Govt has taken on board lessons learned from our own local past.

From the Indaily (Independent Weekly):

TODs and the Temple of Doom

In 2010 one of the biggest debates in Indaily’s pages has been the State Government development policy of Transit Oriented Developments (TODs). Business writer KEVIN NAUGHTON sees themes that have been a part of South Australia’s political history for more than 50 years. He reflects on the dreamers and believers and why he sees the TOD as odd.

SADLY, my friends, it’s nothing more than misplaced enthusiasm by those who see the dream and ignore the reality.

TODs – a world of tram lines, apartment towers and a residential nirvana where people walk, talk and love each other – is the latest folly in a long line of Government concepts that are doomed to failure.

They all have similar themes and similar faults.

From the satellite city of Elizabeth, to the mirage of Monarto, the stupidity of the Multi-Function Polis and the over-reaching ambition of the MATS Plan, we try so hard to be what we are not.

Consider for a moment this observation by architect Lionel Glendenning: “It’s going to be an urban city, a set of villages, the sort of place where you go around the corner to buy a cappuccino. It will be a slice of a city like Venice, Paris or parts of Sydney (with) people living above pastry shops. Now we are creating an urban experience that gives everybody the opportunity to gain access to the Arcadian dream.”

Lionel wasn’t talking about life in Bowden’s proposed TOD.

He was giving an interview in 1992 about another Government-inspired project, the Multi-Function Polis.

The MFP – a controversial proposal for a planned community first proposed in 1987 and abandoned in 1998 – was backed by Labor’s longest serving Premier John Bannon.

It was located 15km from the city centre at Gillman on land now owned by Defence SA. That piece of swamp sucked up tens of millions of dollars before its demise as an urban wonder.

It would later be resurrected by the Port Adelaide Maritime Corporation (now Defence SA) as the Port Adelaide Industrial Development Precinct.

Plans for that profit-making “subdivide and sell” venture went the same way as the MFP last week when Treasurer Kevin Foley quietly shelved it in a small note in the back pages of his Mid Year Budget Review.

It was dutifully reported in Indaily and dutifully ignored by almost all Adelaide media outlets some preferring to spruik rather than question.

The 1990s MFP was similarly spruiked.

At the time, interstate journalist Ben Hills from the Sydney Morning Herald, dug around the edges of South Australia’s latest political vision. He found John Harwood, a reader in English at the University of South Australia. He reported (to much local tut-tutting) that Harwood “believes the Gillman site is so irreparably polluted that the MFP will never be built”.

“The whole thing is a ridiculous con, but no-one wants to point out the fact that the emperor has no clothes,” Harwood told him.

Sound familiar?

Harwood, of course, would be proved right and the longest serving Labor Premier faded away without a visionary legacy.

Before the days of the MFP there was another urban dream – and another long serving Labor Premier, Don Dunstan.

Monarto it was called, after starting life briefly as Murray New Town.

It was to be the jewel in the crown of Dunstan’s population growth strategy of the early 1970s – a brand new city the (then) size of Canberra, 200,000 people living in a space-age technopolis, telecommuting to work from homes powered by the sun and the wind, travelling by driverless cabs on electronic pathways.

Sound familiar?

The aforementioned Ben Hills noted that some locals had nicknamed it Dunstangrad.

The land was acquired in the 1970s, trees were planted and plans made between 1973 and 1976 with the project receiving $10.5 million in Commonwealth funding.

The plan was eventually cancelled in 1980. In 1983 a section of it became the Monarto Zoo.

Let’s go back further – to the 1960s and another grand scheme called the MATS Plan.

In December 1964 the South Australian Government commissioned a two-year planning study on Adelaide’s transport needs. The study was designed and conducted by a firm of consultants from the US.

Sound familiar?

The ‘Metropolitan Adelaide Transportation Study’ (MATS) was released in August 1968 and recommended the construction of 100km of freeways, 33km of expressways, 55km of new arterial roads, the widening of 380km of existing arterial roads, a new bridge across the Port Adelaide River and 20 rail grade-separations. The estimated cost of land acquisition and construction was $436.5 million (1968).

It also recommended the closure of the Grange Railway Line and a $32.8 million rail subway underneath King William Street. The Noarlunga Railway Line was to be deviated between Edwardstown and Goodwood to connect to the King William Street subway.

In the years ahead most components of the plan were jettisoned and it was finally consigned to its grave in 1983.

The surviving parts are the O-Bahn (comprehensively bagged as a far too expensive form of public transport by today’s Transport Minister Pat Conlon) and a one-way expressway to Noarlunga.

Of all our State’s grand plans, perhaps the closest to success was Elizabeth.

It was established in 1955 as a master planned satellite town by the South Australian Housing Trust on 12sq km of rural land between the older towns of Salisbury and Smithfield.

The town planners of the day were dealing with the surge in migrant population and industrial demands.

Thousands of British migrants arrived to work at the nearby Holden plant and Weapons Research Establishment.

The longest serving Liberal Premier Tom Playford named it after our Queen.

The town’s subsequent problems with unemployment and crime resulted from the naivety of planners who had no experience with suburban sprawl, a post-World War II concept. But in its early days it provided Holden’s with a workforce and Australia with a raft of musical talent.

So here we are in 2010 and the tram is slowly wending its way down to Bowden where urban nirvana awaits.

Except there have been delays due to the contaminated sites in the once-industrial suburb.

And as we reported earlier this year, the wiser heads in town can see the fundamental flaw.

The State Government’s strategy to create urban developments alongside tramlines was questioned by high profile commercial property group Colliers International in its white paper report titled Transit Oriented Development.

It questioned the government’s strategy, pointing to its failure to understand the role of Adelaide’s CBD.

James Young, Collier’s state chief executive, said the State needed to recognise that Adelaide’s CBD is already a significant TOD.

“What we’ve had in the past few years is a lot of people gallivanting all round the world saying TODS are fantastic, let’s build one here and there, but no-one has mentioned the CBD,” he said.

“In the long term (in 15 to 20 years) there might be sufficient commercial demand for some of these projects, but there isn’t now.

“The developments from Portland and other US cities that are being shown to us as the way to go are not what suits Adelaide.

“It smacks too much of everyone else’s ideas and has nothing that is uniquely South Australian.

“The plan fails to understand what the key drivers are in Adelaide, what makes Adelaide work and why people live where they live.”

Mr Young pointed to the recent government decision to abandon Transport House at Walkerville and move staff back into the city as a contradiction of its own strategy.

“It’s the perfect example of what makes an area attractive as an employment location.

“People like to work in the city where the shops, restaurants and vibrant activity are. Adelaide’s white collar workers have no interest in working in Walkerville.

“Given that the Transport House experiment failed, why are we now trying to replicate it with TODS dotted along a tramline between Adelaide and Port Adelaide?”

The report acknowledged the potential of TODs in some areas and some circumstances, but suggested that those issues needed to be debated within the community.

In the debate that ensued in the pages of Indaily similar themes arose that have their root in the demise of Monarto, the MFP and the MATS Plan.

Adelaide doesn’t have the population, income, business type or industry to provide the demand that makes such projects work.

Other common themes among these plans are the will of political leaders to be attached to a grand vision, the tendency for community leaders to patriotically sing the same song and the failure of media to apply the scrutiny that publicly funded projects require.

This is not a case of Indaily being a Temple of Doom. It’s just that we’ve seen it all before.

[monotonehell]

tldr

[ricecrackers]

encouraging everyone to live in high rise apartments linked together by trams does have an element of collectivism about it
i think we need to be vigilant about protecting our lifestyle and putting humanity ahead of the state on such matters

[ynotsfables]

Does this mean we shouldn't dream anymore, I think the whole run down of our history's so called failures are a bit of a farce.
Lets start with the MATS project parts of that did happen eg the south eastern freeway, which i think we are better off with than without.
Then there's the MFP, Mawson lakes seems to be doing well it may not be at Gillman or to the original plan, but we are better off having it than not.
Elizabeth, Sailsburry they all seem to be evolving quite nicely people do stigmatise these two areas but they are home to thousands of people and its still growing.
To cut my argument short I'm still waiting for West Lakes to sink like it was meant to 20 years ago.
We need to dream otherwise we lose our ability to be creative.On a more positive note our dreams have lead to consequences so lets build these TOD's let them evolve.

[mattblack]

The next article this guy will write about is the unsustainability of Urban Sprawl. On another note he will probably write an article once the first building on the Bowden site is completed saying that the whole concept of TOD'S has failed. I would pay no attention to such an uneducated view.