PARKLANDS & URBAN PUBLIC REALM

SYDNEY OLYMPIC PARK, HOMEBUSH BAY

The design of Sydney Olympic Park for the 2000 Olympics encompasses a total site area of approximately 750 hectares, including the central sporting venue zone of Olympic park and surrounding 450 hectares of open public parklands. It involved the remediation of degraded and contaminated urban land, the incorporation of sustainability principles and a comprehensive multi-national collaborative design process.

Landscape Principles in Practice:

• Value Our Landscape:  Respect for landscape value via comprehensive site analysis underpins all major project design decisions, with landscape forming the primary connective framework of the site layout from the central plaza out to the surrounding parklands. 
• Protect – Enhance – Regenerate:  Decision-making hierarchy places functional landscape capacity at the forefront of planning, design and management strategies, to protect, enhance and regenerate ecosystem services provision across a range of landscape scales.
• Design with Respect: Design sensitively integrates existing landscape context and environmental values with the requirements for major public zone spatial composition & functionality.
• Design for the Future:  The project acts as an exemplar of large-scale sustainable landscape design within an urban environment.  It demonstrates new and innovative ways of managing degraded landscapes in order to enhance social, economic and environmental resilience in the built environment for future generations.
• Embrace Responsive Design:  Project demonstrates the need to provide urban communities with healthier, renewing, recreational environments of appropriate scale and quality, essentially, close to home.  The sustainability agenda which drove the decision-making processes was crucial to achieving the quality of the designed landscape outcome.

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