CBD Rental Apartment Stock Drops Sharply
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CBD Rental Apartment Stock Drops Sharply

The latest data indicated inner Melbourne has seen a 76% dip from February.

By Terry Christodoulou
Tue, Nov 16, 2021 3:30pmGrey Clock < 1 min

Rental apartments across inner Melbourne are hard to come by at the moment, with the number of available rental apartments dropping by 76% since February and down 56% in inner Sydney new data from CoreLogic shows.

In the past nine months, inner Melbourne’s available rental stock has dropped from 7890 – recorded in February – to just 1920 by the end of October.

Levels peaked in November last year, and, since then have been trending lower and are now 53% below the pre-pandemic level.

Similarly, inner Sydney rental listings dropped from 4521 to just 1970 for the same period. Stock levels have now fallen 57% lower than the March 2020 level since listings peaked in June.

Since the onset of the pandemic, capital city house rents surged 10.%, while unit rents stayed 0.3% below pre-COVID-19 levels.

Melbourne’s average inner-city rent has fallen by $91 since March 2020, or 18.1% below the pre-COVID high.

Similarly, the average rent on an inner-city Sydney unit is now $21 a week cheaper than it was in March last year.



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Wild cities and concrete corridors: How AI is reimagining the landscape

A new AI-driven account by leading landscape architect Jon Hazelwood pushes the boundaries on the role of ‘complex nature’ in the future of our cities

By Robyn Willis
Wed, Dec 6, 2023 2 min

Drifts of ground cover plants and wildflowers along the steps of the Sydney Opera House, traffic obscured by meadow-like planting and kangaroos pausing on city streets.

This is the way our cities could be, as imagined by landscape architect Jon Hazelwood, principal at multi-disciplinary architectural firm Hassell. He has been exploring the possibilities of rewilding urban spaces using AI for his Instagram account, Naturopolis_ai with visually arresting outcomes.

“It took me a few weeks to get interesting results,” he said. “I really like the ephemeral nature of the images — you will never see it again and none of those plants are real. 

“The AI engine makes an approximation of a grevillea.”

Hazelwood chose some of the most iconic locations in Australia, including the Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge, as well as international cities such as Paris and London, to demonstrate the impact of untamed green spaces on streetscapes, plazas and public space.

He said he hopes to provoke a conversation about the artificial separation between our cities and the broader environment, exploring ways to break down the barriers and promote biodiversity.

“A lot of the planning (for public spaces) is very limited,” Hazelwood said. “There are 110,000 species of plants in Australia and we probably use about 12 in our (public) planting schemes. 

“Often it’s for practical reasons because they’re tough and drought tolerant — but it’s not the whole story.”

Hazelwood pointed to the work of UK landscape architect Prof Nigel Dunnett, who has championed wild garden design in urban spaces. He has drawn interest in recent years for his work transforming the brutalist apartment block at the Barbican in London into a meadow-like environment with diverse plantings of grasses and perennials.

Hazelwood said it is this kind of ‘complex nature’ that is required for cities to thrive into the future, but it can be hard to convince planners and developers of the benefits.

“We have been doing a lot of work on how we get complex nature because complexity of species drives biodiversity,” he said. 

“But when we try to propose the space the questions are: how are we going to maintain it? Where is the lawn?

“A lot of our work is demonstrating you can get those things and still provide a complex environment.” 

At the moment, Hassell together with the University of Melbourne is trialling options at the Hills Showground Metro Station in Sydney, where the remaining ground level planting has been replaced with more than 100 different species of plants and flowers to encourage diversity without the need for regular maintenance. But more needs to be done, Hazelwood said.

“It needs bottom-up change,” he said. ““There is work being done at government level around nature positive cities, but equally there needs to be changes in the range of plants that nurseries grow, and in the way our city landscapes are maintained and managed.”

And there’s no AI option for that. 

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