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Suburban Rail Loop Urban Design

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Suburban Rail Loop Urban Design

Client:
AJM consortium (Aurecon, Jacobs, and Mott MacDonald)

Location:
Melbourne, Victoria

Scale:
26km corridor / 6 underground stations

Status:
Urban design work completed 2025 (trains due to run 2035)

Contact Person:
Dean Thornton

Suburban Rail Loop (SRL) East is one of the largest infrastructure investments in Victoria’s history—a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine how people live, move, and connect across metropolitan Melbourne.

Urban design plays a central role in this transformation, with our team delivering comprehensive, integrated solutions to reshape the trajectory of the city’s growth.

It supports a fundamental shift from Melbourne’s traditional, CBD-centric expansion toward a more polycentric urban structure with new, self-sustaining hubs of employment, housing, and services around SRL stations.

Ultimately, our comprehensive, integrated work in this sphere will help ensure the SRL East station precincts and their surrounding environments evolve into well-connected, liveable, and inclusive places.

Foundations for growth

Since 2020, our Urban Design sector has been working with the AJM consortium to support the design and delivery of SRL East for the Suburban Rail Loop Authority (SRLA).

Our engagement includes multiple urban design deliverables, all building toward design optioneering, design strategies, feasibility requirements and the development of six structure plans across the SRL East corridor.

The team successfully completed all six plans in parallel within an ambitious timeframe.

Purposeful growth for a new era of transit-oriented development

This work all helps define the spatial logic and design principles that guide growth and unlock economic opportunities. It also acts as a catalyst for a new era of transit-oriented development that promotes density, diversity, and sustainability within walkable catchments of high-quality public transport.

In addition to the work our urban designers completed, our Rail team worked with our AJM patners to develop the reference designs for the six SRL East stations.

Influencing infrastructure investment and policy

Our suite of urban design work for SRL East ensures infrastructure is not just delivered efficiently but also meaningfully. It embeds public value, enhances place identity, and creates a legacy of thriving communities for decades to come.

By embedding place-led, context-sensitive design principles, this lays the groundwork for growth that enhances local identity, strengthens community fabric, and delivers high-quality public spaces that promote social connection.

Our plans also lay a critical foundation for long-term livability, weaving in strategies for open space networks, walkable streets, and climate resilience.

Importantly, this body of work is not only about shaping physical outcomes. It influences policy, investment, and infrastructure decisions, ensuring that Melbourne’s growth is well-integrated, people-centred, and future-ready.

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Structure Planning

Architectus was part of the AJM team providing specialist, technical urban design advice to inform the six structure plans delivered concurrently across the SRL East corridor.

The delivery of the urban design technical work required intensive coordination across multiple disciplines, while working closely with a multi-headed client group, to align diverse objectives and priorities.

This collaborative process ensured that urban design outcomes were well-integrated with technical requirements, responsive to stakeholder needs, and grounded in a shared vision for sustainable, transit-oriented precincts.

Unique context responses within a cohesive corridor

The team’s focus was to ensure each technical report was grounded in high-quality urban design principles that respond to the unique context of each individual precinct, whilst contributing to a cohesive corridor-wide vision.

They provided a tailored design narrative and set of spatial strategies — via public realm, urban form and built form approaches — to inform the drafting of structure plans.

This approach has helped embed a people-focused, place-based approach to growth and development across the SRL East precincts, whilst providing a robust design-led evidence base to guide the strategic planning outcomes in the six structure plans.

Urban Design Strategy

Our urban designers led the preparation of the Urban Design Strategy, which was shaped by significant stakeholder input and close public scrutiny.

The strategy is a vital document that sets out what contractors and delivery partners must achieve to ensure consistently high-quality urban design and context appropriate outcomes. The strategy serves as both a performance-based design brief and a design quality assessment and evaluation tool.

The strategy features a hierarchy of urban design requirements in the form of urban design principles and objectives, project-wide requirements, benchmarks and key urban design outcomes, and place specific-requirements. The ultimate aim: to benefit communities and places and minimise and mitigate impacts arising from the SRL project.

“Thoughtful planning for the broader neighbourhoods around each SRL East station will enable around 70,000 new homes to be built in these areas by the 2050s.”

-Victoria’s Big Build website-