Central Melbourne Design Guide (resource)

While design guidelines can't mandate excellence, they go a long way towards militating against excrescence.

Almost from the beginning of my closer involvement in urban revitalization matters, I've been convinced of the need for design guidelines.

I was super enamored of the development and design guidelines--not particularly world-beating but they existed--for the North Park Main Street program in San Diego.  (San Diego had urban main street programs before DC, so I look to them for best practice examples.)

-- North Park Development Guidelines, adopted September 1997
-- North Park Main Street Design Guidelines

I used the San Diego example as a call to DC (not that it went anywhere), along with the example of Cleveland's Business Revitalization District Overlay, which calls for development and design coordination within areas targeted by the city for improvement, and the various examples of design review boards in cities, such as Baltimore's Urban Design & Architecture Advisory Panel.

(DC, like many cities has an historic preservation review process, and there are a couple of federal-related design review processes, but they can be hit or miss, depending.)

And of urban design guidelines for various districts in Vancouver, BC, such as the Downtown Eastside District.

In the recent entry on Alexandria about a land use intensification project there, an Alexandria resident comments in more detail about how the planning approval process works there--a back and forth involving developers, citizens, and planners.

Making the point that it isn't advantageous for developers to start out with the best possible design, because participants and stakeholders need to feel like they've had impact.

Of course, if the participants aren't highly knowledgeable or narrowly committed to particular goals, then the results are likely to be sub-optimal.  I can point to many examples in DC where this is the case.

Slide caption: Podium design: An example of podium design, demonstrating how depth, tactile materials and modulation within the streetwall integrate with the valued attributes of Melbourne’s streets.

I just came across a mention of "development design guidelines" for Central Melbourne, and they are a tool for shaping better outcomes, and if people read them, for educating stakeholders about better design.  From the description:

The Central Melbourne Design Guide has been developed by the City of Melbourne to support the use and interpretation of the Urban Design in the Central City and Southbank Design and Development Overlay Schedule 1 (DDO1) within the Melbourne Planning Scheme.

It is an illustrative document that mirrors the structure of DDO1, which are set out in order of scale from the neighbourhood or precinct, to the scale of building interfaces and design detail.

The Guide uses illustrations and photos to visually communicate the desired outcomes of the objectives and design requirements of the DDO1 with additional images of outcomes we are seeking to avoid. The intent of the graphic format of this document is to make the policy clearer and more accessible to a diverse audience, including the community, designers, planners, and developers.

The six themes include:

-- Urban structure
-- Site Layout
-- Building Mass
-- Building Program
-- Public Interface
-- Design Detail

The intent of the easy to use, and simple graphic format of this document is to make the DDO1 clearer and more accessible to a diverse audience, including the community, developers, designers and planners.