Client:  Greater Shepparton City Council
Collaboration:  Chris Smith & Associates
Status:   Construction completed in December 2013

A socially rich and economically vibrant city street
The Vaughan Street Redevelopment project is an integrated design concept that considers the requirements of both pedestrians and vehicles. As a shopping strip, foot traffic and the pedestrian experience have been given priority. The vehicular traffic speed is intended to be slow. Informal speed bumps at the pedestrian crossings and planting outstand reinforce this speed and provide consistent level access for all abilities.

Existing issues in the streetscape included
Poor night lighting created an unsafe feeling with some areas floodlit and overly bright and others far too dark. Some old Plane trees created a shady, green street but they’d been pruned very poorly over the years and had developed rot in their centres. Fairly active retail, but there were a number of access and mobility issues
Services ran down the centre of the road, creating a significant constraint and an uncomfortable camber to the road
Minimal footpath surface provided limited space to facilitate the socially active street

A challenging & rewarding project
Other challenges of this project included:​Impact on traders during construction had to be minimised (the project aim was to support existing traders, not put them out of business)
Ongoing maintenance and repair costs had to be carefully considered and minimised
Only minimal parking loss would be tolerated

A beautiful & effective response
We developed a concept for Vaughan Street which had ‘at grade’ pedestrian crossings. This provided one level for pedestrians throughout the streetscape with raised crossings which created speed humps for cars
We reduced the road width, while still retaining almost all parking space and significantly increasing the footpaths. This created a series of rest areas with seats and shade to provide gathering spaces without blocking the footpath
Lighting was a key component of the concept design and we created a series of welcoming, warmly lit rest areas all the way down the street. This eliminated both overly bright lighting and dark spots
We chose Zelkova trees to create a boulevard of dappled, overhead shade and smaller Wilga trees in rest areas and pedestrian crossings to reinforce pedestrian scale, rather than vehicle scale
A significant portion of our budget was allocated to including tree cells to ensure generous spaces for tree roots with access to air and water. This has already made a visible difference to tree establishment and will reduce conflict with tree roots, services and infrastructure in the future
Significant areas of understorey planting were incorporated to create a green and welcoming street while the trees reach maturity​

This project was completed by LMLA prior to the merger with Thomson Hay Landscape Architects

Photography: Shayne Hill