Birtinya Town Centre Re-imagining
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Spiire was engaged by the Sunshine Coast Council to support its work re-imagining the Birtinya Town Centre.
Birtinya is a key town centre precinct for the region, located near the Sunshine Coast University Hospital and Bokarina Beach, fronting Lake Kawana.
Development of the Town Centre is subject to an old Development Control Plan (DCP). Requested changes to this DCP presented the opportunity for Council to rethink the best outcomes for the Town Centre and local residents.
Spiire’s Queensland Town Planning team facilitated an intensive workshop for Sunshine Coast Council staff to review the approved Master Plan and consider the opportunities available to re-imagine the Town Centre. Drawing on our team’s strong experience designing and facilitating workshops, we established a framework to guide the discussions and summarise background information on the key elements for consideration.
Through a number of interactive sessions, the workshop brought together key Council staff to first identify, then prioritise, the most important principles to guide future planning and decision making. Participants worked in groups to determine critical success factors, elements to be managed by design and regulations, and challenges to implementation.
Our team summarised the findings of this workshop in a report that defined the set of agreed principles for Council to use and reference in future considerations of the Birtinya Town Centre.
These paint a vision for the public realm, the future of the proposed library and cinema, housing diversity, movement infrastructure and systems, and the built form. The importance of addressing emerging challenges in the planning and delivery of the Town Centre, including the effect of climate change and how to best capture community and cultural offerings, was also identified as a priority.
The suite of re-imagined principles was generated by a wide cross-section of Council staff, each of whom have a role in the Town Centre’s planning, design and development.
