Victoria Point Study

This studio collaborated with and was sponsored by the Redland Shire Council. Redland Shire fringes the southeastern edge of Brisbane City along the southern edge of Moreton Bay. Its rich red soils were once the foundation of extensive small crop farming and the area was once known as the salad bowl of Brisbane. Rapid urban expansion has largely replaced farming and there has been a belated emerging realisation that further loss of productive land should be limited wherever possible. The studio focussed on the bayside suburb of Victoria Point as a test case for ways of managing development and conserving productivity. Concepts of diversified local economies were examined as a means of offsetting the urban/rural land valuation disparity that drives urban sprawl.

As an example of the outcomes, one group (Conybeare, Watson and Yates 1998) used the “think globally, act locally” conservation slogan as a theme to frame their proposals under a four part strategy of preserving the character of Victoria Point, providing connections to the region, promoting ecological values and producing economic initiatives. In the Harvest Park and Kitchen 4 Conybeare (1998) proposed a community park at a highly visible road junction that incorporated demonstration productive gardens, crop processing facilities and training rooms linked to a Harvest Kitchen designed as a public education facility and café (Figure 1). The idea was to encourage development of niche markets based on boutique foods made from locally grown crops. The central Kitchen was supplemented by mobile catering vans to expand the facility to other venues in the region and a range of franchised roadside stalls that could be rented by specialty producers for direct marketing (Figure 2).

Figure 1 - Harvest Park and Kitchen
Figure 2 - The Roving Kitchen and Portable Roadside Vendors (Conybeare 1998)

In a second example (Croudace, Gold, Uchida and Walbank 1998), the strategic device of a lock and chain was used to symbolise two extremes. These were:
• a choice of remaining locked into past practices that would lead to environmental degradation in the long term; or
• adopt a vision based on unlocking an environmentally and economically sustainable future that links the community with the landscape and its character (Figure 3).
This strategy is blatently aimed at grabbing public attention to encourage further investigation of the issues, a strategy that proved particularly successful in this case. It demonstrates that naïve graphic representation such as this can have a place when dealing with community based design activities.

Figure 3- The symbolic lock and chain representing community links (Croudace, Gold, Uchida and Walbank 1998)

Within this strategic framework of linkage Walbank (1998) proposed an alternative approach to conventional residential development that had the conservation of productive land and economic equity for the landowner as equally weighted objectives (Figure 4). He proposed a small lot cluster housing approach under the Body Corporate and Community Management Act (1997) to plan a mixed-use development in which all householders had a legal and economic interest in a community farm operated on the Common Land. The farm incorporated intensive agriculture, buffer crops, bushland conservation, crop processing and other community facilities (shop and café), as well as delivering a housing yield equivalent to that of a conventional subdivision on the same area of land. Council Planning Officers expressed particular interest in this proposal in relation to a development application they were negotiating at the time.

Figure 4 – Mixed Use Residential Development Proposal (Walbank 1998)