Adelaide's Tonsley Innovation District wins top gong at Urban Design Awards

The site of a former car factory at the heart of Adelaide’s newest suburb has set the bar for large-scale redevelopment in Australia. 

The Tonsley Innovation District at a converted Mitsubishi car plant 10 kilometres from the city centre took out the top award for a large-scale development at the Australian Urban Design Awards in Brisbane on Wednesday night. 

The district will become a major employment and education hub in the city, interspersed with community spaces.

In addition to housing Flinders University and TAFE SA campuses and established and emerging businesses, the site will one day house about 1200 residents across 850 homes. 

It’s the type of ambitious brownfield development all cities should be looking towards, Australian Urban Design Awards chairman Bill Chandler said. 

“A fundamental issue with development is that often we’re just focused on building just an office, or housing, or commercial spaces, and we do it all separately,” he said. 

If we want to see the vision of a 20-minute city realised, Mr Chandler said it was vital for cities to increasingly look to mixed-use developments. 

“We need to have quite a lot of people that are able to live, work and shop in and around the same area,” he said. 

He added it was key to increasing liveability, even in cities such as Melbourne  – voted the world’s most liveable city seven years in a row.

“People are having to move further and further out of the CBD and then drive for an hour to get to work. That’s not something I want to be doing,” he said. “In my opinion, that’s not a life or a liveable city.”

Apart from its appeal as a mixed-use precinct, he said the Tonsley Innovation District also managed to strike the balance between respecting the heritage of a site, while simultaneously turning it into a new and exciting community space.

The redesign and redevelopment of the site was a joint effort by Woods Bagot, Oxigen, KBR, WSP, Tridente Architects and Renewal SA.

Strong public space was also a big factor in the decision to award Orange Regional Museum in New South Wales the top small-scale award. 

Its sloping landscaped roof that rises from the existing lawns has provided a new public green space for the community and a vantage point offering views across the city. 

Apart from offering up a place to relax, the site had integrated seating and stairs that create an outdoor amphitheatre where the community can interact. 

“Urban design is not just about buildings, it’s very much focused on people and how they get to use a space,” Mr Chandler said.

While Mr Chandler said regional cities often struggle to compete against the big cities for urban design, projects in Wodonga, Maitland and Murray Bridge also received commendations at the awards. 

“Regional cities still don’t get as much focus as they should,” Mr Chandler said. “There is strong interest from the community for good design, sometimes more than in parts of the bigger cities.​