Biodiversity Sensitive Urban Design
We’re incorporating biodiversity objectives into our early planning process, to ensure a net benefit to native species and ecosystems. Professor Sarah Bekessy and Dr Georgia Garrard (RMIT and Icon Science) prepared the Glen Junor BSUD report (link attached below) which will guide our decision making as we undertake our development decisions in the future.
Biodiversity sensitive urban design (BSUD) represents a fundamentally different way of planning for and designing urban developments. Biodiversity sensitive urban design aims to create urban environments that make a positive onsite contribution to biodiversity through careful planning and innovative design and architecture. Rather than considering biodiversity as a constraint - a ‘problem’ to be dealt with - biodiversity is seen as an opportunity and a valued resource to be preserved and maximized at all stages of planning and design.
Biodiversity Sensitive Urban Design (BSUD) is a protocol for urban design that aims to create towns that are a net benefit to native species and ecosystems through the provision of essential habitat and food resources (Garrard et al. 2018). BSUD represents a new approach to urban biodiversity conservation that seeks to achieve biodiversity benefits on site, within urban environments. This is in contrast to the standard offsetting approach, which reduces the opportunity for urban residents to engage with nature and, at the same time, delivers questionable ecological outcomes (Maron et al. 2016).
