Victorian tranche 2 regional implementation projects

As part of the second tranche of activities, the Victorian Regional Advisory Panel identified and prioiritised a number of projects considered to be critical to the successful transition to a water sensitive region. These projects will inform the selection of the CRCWSC tranche 2 research activities from 2016/17.

Regional city-based water sensitive cities

This project will investigate the translation of water sensitive city principles and practices to urban areas in regional Victoria. Regional Victoria includes a number of major cities such as Geelong, Ballarat and Bendigo, as well as smaller cities and towns.

Specifically, this project presents an opportunity to pilot city-scale transitions in a regional context, and highlights the links between liveability to economic outcomes in the future of these areas. It also links to initiatives to establish long-term urban water security for these regions by diversifying urban water resources.

Emerging city-based water sensitive cities

This project focuses on the one-off opportunities to plan the development of urban growth corridors. Melbourne is growing along a number of its urban fringe areas, and decisions will be made during the tranche 2 period on the urban design and urban water servicing strategies for these localities.

These growth areas exhibit several interesting characteristics:

  • development will transform the landscape from rural into urban. The current population will be replaced with a new, urban population whose values, priorities and interest in water sensitive practices is unknown. With a strong emphasis on meeting customer needs, water agencies are unsure how to plan for services in these areas, since the future customers do not yet exist;
  • the urban development process will fundamentally transform the natural waterways in these areas. Thoughtful urban design is able to offset some of this impact but requires an integrated approach to urban water cycle management; and
  • a conventional approach to urban water servicing will often require upgrades and extensions to centralised water, wastewater, and drainage systems. These new developments provide an opportunity to explore alternative approaches that could avoid such upgrades.

This project provides an opportunity to understand and potentially remove barriers to more innovative water servicing technologies; once all options can be considered, to develop evaluation protocols can help investigate the broad range of benefits that may arise from such innovation, and new community engagement approaches can be explored to inform planning.

Urban city-based water sensitive cities

This project focuses on the major redevelopment opportunities occurring in cities. These redevelopments often replace industrial land with higher-density mixed uses and require major upgrades of urban water services to meet the increasing demands. This provides opportunities to investigate the role of local-scale service solutions for these areas. Similarly, ensuring the liveability of these areas through green landscapes and other strategies is highly desirable.  The water sector can play a role in delivering green infrastructure and maintaining these new landscapes.

Fishermans Bend and Arden-Macaulay provide examples of such redevelopment areas in Melbourne. These are large infill development opportunities that offer a large-enough scale for trialling new technologies. The CRCWSC research can assist by addressing the questions of flood risk and exploring the synthesis of opportunities across both the public and private realm. It will also:

  • enable development of a "liveability" business case, and subsequent evaluation of these outcomes;
  • inform new governance models, and evaluation of these; and
  • provide a demonstration of infill scenarios that that can be transferred to other capital cities.

Catchment-based water sensitive cities

This project considers the opportunities for building water sensitive cities at the river basin scale.  Melbourne catchments typically cross multiple jurisdictional boundaries. The strategies for water management will vary amongst these jurisdictional stakeholders – with different needs and priorities matching the location in the catchment, presenting an opportunity for a more integrated management approach. The Dandenong Creek and Yarra River catchments offer useful case studies. Each has a significant urban area and is managed by multiple utilities and councils.

Both catchments are interested in developing a more integrated governance approach.   The CRCWSC can assist with knowledge on how to:

  • engage diverse communities;
  • set targets that are locally specific and catchment relevant;
  • integrate water and urban planning tools at catchment scale;
  • evaluate and transfer of knowledge from individual agencies’ pilot projects; nad
  • pilot of catchment scale planning and governance approaches.
Last updated: 6th Dec 2017