Funded by the Landcom Roundtable and aligned with Landcom’s Sustainable Places Strategy, this research aims to support Landcom and its stakeholders, as well as any developers, in making planning and design decisions that recognise this influence.

Planning and developing healthy and inclusive neighbourhoods to accommodate rapid population growth is critically important. However, new environmental and social conditions demand innovation in planning and design processes, and new sensitivities in relation to what people want and need from their neighbourhoods in the much warmer Sydney of the future. While climate-controlled environments are an important part of the picture, the challenge is to design shared urban environments that facilitate comfortable mobility and sociality. From our perspective, these qualities are what make living in a city worthwhile.

Learning from international examples of what has worked well in practice, we identify key design patterns that improve how communities can live in a hot city. Our context is the commons – those spaces, practices, resources and knowledges shared by a community, and that a community depends on for a sense of cohesiveness and well-being. It is on the quality of the commons that perceptions of liveability across environmental quality, social connectedness, accessibility and safety, often stand or fall.

Designing with an intergenerational mindset requires those with a shared stake in maintaining healthy and inclusive neighbourhoods to have a sense of extended responsibility for design decisions, which continue to resonate past the point of occupancy. Our research identifies patterns at the planning, delivery and post-occupancy (or lived in) stages of a development, which outline material and social strategies that are required for optimum liveability. These patterns expose and support aspects of community life that are compromised by increasing urban heat and the retreat into private air conditioned environments, which is rapidly becoming a design and social norm.

Patterns for cool commons are not discreet but are a result of interactions between the natural and built environment and rhythms of social life that recur over time. A wide, shaded walk-way furnished with seating and water stations and connecting residential environments to public transport networks or shops, affords walkability and sociality for diverse members of the community. However, since a pattern such as “Shaded Pedestrian Linkage” is distributed across space and time, as it is activated by pedestrians, it is not “owned” or cared for by a single entity. We claim the commons should be the focus of strategies for cooling the city but, as the historic commons economist Elinor Ostrom describes, they require protection and maintenance on an intergenerational basis.

This research takes up the challenge of promoting a new approach to thinking about urban liveability in warming cities, with two principles at its core. First, asking how open space can be planned for “coolth” defined as the experience of feeling manageably comfortable in a hot city; and second, how coolth can be connected with sociality.

This research has two outputs. The first, this Report, contains background material and an Appendix of the presentations and workshops held over the course of this project, which made up our methodology. This Report underpins and informs the second and key output, the Cooling the Commons Pattern Deck available on the Cooling the Commons website. The deck is conceived as a prototype decision-making resource for planners, developers, community liaison officers, council workers and the communities they serve. It is envisaged that the pattern deck will be “resonance tested” with stakeholder groups facilitated by the research team, with feedback from these groups incorporated into the patterns on an ongoing basis. While currently in a prototype form, we argue that the pattern deck represents the sorts of strategies and resources now needed to ensure liveability in new and renewing neighbourhoods in Greater Western Sydney, into the future.