Heights call is sensible

EDITORIAL: The Fragrance Group’s proposal for a 210m-tall hotel tower on Hobart’s waterfront was always totally unacceptable for our beautiful capital city.

Urban design consultant Leigh Woolley. Picture: RICHARD JUPE

THE Fragrance Group’s proposal for a 210m-tall hotel tower on Hobart’s waterfront was always totally unacceptable for our beautiful capital city. At three times the height of Hobart’s tallest building — the Wrest Point Casino that opened in 1973 — the Fragrance proposal was rightly pretty quickly rejected out of hand. And yet it has left what has become a strong legacy: forcing the council to properly consider what is the appropriate-scale development for Hobart’s waterfront and central business district.

That work reached a milestone moment yesterday with the release of urban design consultant Leigh Woolley’s sensible recommendations that the council will now take out for public consultation.

MORE: HOW TALL IS TOO TALL FOR HOBART?

Mr Woolley’s approach was to start by accepting the reality that future growth is inevitable. But he also took the very welcome view that any future large-scale buildings in Hobart should not feel out of place.

And the key insight he had was that each city block — indeed every single property — should be considered in response to its unique location: how it fits within the natural contours of the land, and how tall a building on each site might affect the surrounding views of the natural and built environment.

This means the new limits he has proposed for building heights in Hobart are not a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, Mr Woolley has proposed different height-limit zones — and the added imposition of looking at each individual block “in its own right”.

The result is that instead of the headline-friendly 45m-height limits proposed under the 2015 Hobart Interim Planning Scheme, Mr Woolley’s Hobart Building Heights Standards Review Project proposes “height-control zones which consider the shape of the city centre within the landforms surrounding it”.

As reporter Anne Mather explains today, the standards suggest different zones across the city which transition in scale from low-rise residential precincts, waterfront, and slopes adjacent to the city centre. The highest buildings would be allowed at the low contours of a basin, which — fortuitously — is already home to the inner central business district. Height limits would then be lowered outside of this inner core to both contain development to what Mr Woolley describes as “a more compact and contained urban form” and to protect “view lines to the mountain ridge lines, the river and beyond”.

This all means that the vast majority of buildings in the inner city will remain below the 68.5m-height of the Royal Hobart Hospital’s newly constructed K block. However, there is the potential under Mr Woolley’s guidelines for buildings as high as 75m to be proposed and pass the tests he has suggested. And considering those tests are all based on protecting what we most love about Hobart, then so be it.

As we have said many times in this column, growth is not necessarily a bad thing. The protection of our unique lifestyle relies on proper planning and rules, rather than in knocking back interest from developers. Mr Woolley’s review appears to understand this. At the end of the day, however, this is your Hobart. And anyone with a particular view should get engaged in the public consultation process that will come next.