Our Urban Design team worked with DTP to help them test the built form controls across these 50 additional centres.
This work was the largest single project our Urban Futures team took on in FY2026, showcasing our ability to collaborate with large government clients on the most complex and challenging issues facing our cities and regions.
Our primary objective: to identify place-specific local variations that better respond to the unique conditions, opportunities and constraints of individual centres.
Together, these changes can pave the way for over 300,000 new homes by 2051, all located close to the public transport network, employment hubs, and essential services.
Balancing growth and amenity
A key objective of the Train and Tram Zone Activity Centres Program is to introduce a consistent set of built form standards that support growth while ensuring development responds and contributes positively to the local context. A set of best-practice urban design principles (depicted above) influenced the built form standards.
Local variations provide a mechanism to apply these standards in a balanced and context-responsive manner. The local variations framework seeks to achieve:
-A balanced growth outcome, ensuring development supports sustainable expansion while maintaining liveability
-A reasonable level of access to sun, protecting sunlight to parks, public spaces, and key streets to enhance public use
-A sensible approach to protecting amenity, managing change at sensitive residential interfaces to safeguard it for existing and future residents
-Protection of key view lines, maintaining important visual connections to landscapes and local landmarks.
-Outcomes that reflect any other matters captured in community, council, State Government and Traditional Owner feedback, all supported by a set of urban design principles that guide practical implementation.
Collectively, these objectives and principles create a framework that balances growth with amenity, heritage, and environmental quality, supporting sustainable and high-quality urban outcomes.
Responding to each local context
Our urban designers looked at how effectively the Global Built Form Controls could achieve a balanced outcome between facilitating housing growth and protecting the existing amenity of public and private spaces within core areas of the activity centres.
The scope for our local variations testing included:
-assessing sun access to parks and key streets to ensure adequate daylight and comfort in public spaces
-managing sensitive interfaces to protect residential amenity, and
-protecting key views and landmarks to preserve important local and site-specific features.
If we found that applying the built form controls didn’t fully achieve the standards set under the Activity Centres Program, we proposed local variations tailored to the specific conditions of each centre. (See indicative example above.)
Ultimately, our aim was to help the state establish development outcomes that are balanced and contextually appropriate – supporting smart approaches to density in Victoria over the long term.
