Landscape Architecture Award (AILA VIC)

Ata Tara (TRACE Director) received a Landscape Architecture Award in Research, Policy and Communications Category (AILA VIC 2020).

This Award is for a body of on-going research in the field of Visual Impact Assessment (VIA) focused on urban environments. Informed by practice, the research is disseminated by a PhD dissertation at QUT University (2017) and a series of publications in peer-reviewed journals undertaken at RMIT University. Also, the research findings are applied to a real-world project in Gold Coast in development of a new method to define building heights. The research aims to extend the knowledge and capacities of the field of VIA and advocate the role of landscape architecture in guiding the vertical growth of Australian cities.

Statement of Achievement

Thinking

Urban environments are filled with the potential for conflicts over resources, memories and meanings between people who share a place. These conflicts are an integral part of the growth of cities; however, they can result in costly development delays and uncertainties for the community, developers and local governments. Population growth, densification policies and increased demand for land and resources escalate the number of development conflicts occurring each year. Nurturing the intrinsic sense of place and visual considerations become more critical in Australia where land, language and culture are interconnected in the indigenous culture.

The research focus was shaped by the review of development conflicts in urban environments in Australian cities over the past few decades. Visual amenity as one of the critical concerns of the community is highly associated with local character and sense of place; views to landmarks and landscape features; height, bulk and dominance of proposed built forms; visual relationships between new and existing developments; urban form and skyline; daylight and overshadowing. The planning authorities and decision-makers who drive the densification and consolidation scenarios, sometimes disregard visual amenity considerations under the mantra of “jobs and growth” which has a stronger voice politically and financially. Moreover, the determination of the significance of the visual impacts is mixed with subjective and uncertain interpretations which results in disagreement between experts over bulk, height, dominance and further arguments in lengthy court cases.

Increasing legal requirements for visual impact assessments, the subjectivity of visual judgments and inconsistency of methods in design and assessment were drivers of this research to fill gaps in the existing methods. Hence, the research endeavoured to establish an evidence-based approach through valid measurements to assess visual impacts of building heights and advocate the role of landscape architects as frontiers of visual considerations in guiding and shaping of future densification and consolidation scenarios in cities.

This research is on-going and intends to expand robust technical methods is design and planning by integrating aspects of quality from the community’s perspective to reduce oppositions and increase the public’s acceptance of future decisions. This trajectory is an example of research informed by practice by an AILA registered landscape architect with +12 years of industry experience. The research aims to extend the knowledge and capacities of VIA in urban environments and extend the role of landscape architecture in shaping the future of Australian cities. 

Leadership & Innovation

• The key innovation of this research is the development of new digital tools and techniques to quantify the visual properties of urban environments to assist designers, planners and developers with assessing and quantifying visual impacts associated with building heights.
• It resulted in developing a new concept of “visual bowl” to evaluate the visual character of urban settings by projecting the visual environments in a vertical plane.
• These techniques are developed in GIS which expands this field in landscape architecture and related disciplines by using new survey technologies and city models which became available in recent years.
• This research is operationalised in an industry project in Gold Coast and resulted in the development of a new tool to define building heights and forms. This project and methodology are also published recently as an academic paper “Growing by Place: Identifying Building Height Limits using Skyline Thresholds”. This method advances previous approaches to landscape assessment and protection such as the London View Management Framework and is informed by Skyline Threshold analysis. Skyline Threshold technique expands the concept of visibility from a 2D viewshed representation to a 3D space, providing a tool to relate urban form to its surrounding landscape context.
• The developed methods are repeatable and applicable to any urban settings that are potentially at risk of being modified by densification and consolidation scenarios.
• The research contributes to excellence in site-responsive urban design at strategic and local levels by understanding the significance of visual changes by future developments.
• The measurable approaches provide a reliable basis to integrate the public’s opinion on visual impacts to inform design and decision-making processes in urban environments.

Engagement & Partnership

• A collaborative approach was undertaken to engage with industry experts as well as academics to establish and expand this research. A wide range of professionals and academics in urban design, landscape architecture, planning and geospatial have contributed to this research.
• The research is contextualised in Queensland and Victoria with various case studies in Melbourne, Brisbane and Gold Coast.
• The research publications are published in peer-reviewed journals. They have been presented in international conferences and shared with an extensive academic network in the US and Europe. A recent research paper is accepted to be published in Landscape and Urban Planning, which is a high-rank journal in the field (Q1-Impact Factor 5.144).
• Findings of this research are contributed to industry projects and local governments and resulted in creating leadership in landscape evaluation, VIA and on-going commitment to the integration of landscape character and visual amenity design and decision making.
• This research has established new avenues for future research by engaging with the community. The better understanding of reasons for objecting a development by the community can enhance the likelihood of gaining community support for developments which can transform NIMBYs into QIMBYs —Quality In My Backyard—or YIMBYs —Yes, in My Backyard. This will result in achieving more sustainable outcomes for the community and fostering experiences that enhance the quality of social interactions and life.
• Future partnership opportunities are fostered between RMIT Centre of Urban Research and Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) to continue this research.
• New tools and techniques are developed in GIS which can be integrated into 3D programs to understand the on-the-ground experience of building heights as visible in the 360° context and determine the visual impacts of future developments.

The jury recognised the extensive and thoughtful enquiry that has been pursued, with research and industry input, to define new parameters to guide policy and evaluate development impact as a part of the planning process. This project pushes urban visual impact assessment from local to regional scales while developing useful tools to aid assessment.