Blackmore Park was recently selected as the winner of the 2019 Best Affordable Housing Development Award at the 2019 Property Council of Australia Innovation and Excellence Awards. This award recognises and publicly rewards the ‘value for money’ in a new or refurbished affordable housing development. Porter Consulting Engineers were proud to be involved as the Project Engineer for the redevelopment of an unused primary school site.
Located on the former Blackmore Primary School site in Girrawheen, Blackmore Park Estate is a new 72-lot residential community which has been developed with a focus on high-quality, affordable and diverse housing options. Delivered by LandCorp in partnership with builder Now Living, the popular Estate has provided genuine choice and opened up new opportunities for home ownership in an established suburb dominated by ageing housing stock and a traditionally high proportion of renters.
It was an exciting project to be involved with, as our Practice was provided opportunities to work with a pro-active Developer with a clear vision of their Built Form end product. This greatly assisted the engineering design process, knowing the type of end user requirements from the outset, as it enabled us to work with the existing landforms and upgrade existing interfacing public infrastructure with minimal disruption.
The project scope and brief was to work in with the existing environment which resulted in innovative solutions for earthworks and also stormwater retention on site, including initiatives related to urban water design that were particularly new to the City of Wanneroo. Earthworks design made use of existing tiered areas for split level lots that reduced development costs and improved the mix of housing stock in the development.
The project has since been used by WA Waterways as a demonstration project in environmental sensitive drainage design as the existing public open space area was able to be used as a compensating basin overflow area and areas of existing mature vegetation integrated into drainage swales throughout the development. This environmental innovation had a significant financial benefit to the project and improved aesthetics to the development.
The final product was a great achievement for all the project team involved and was refreshing to see the integration of our engineering designs with the landscape elements and built form at the completion of the project. We look forward to further opportunities of working on similar projects with Landorp.
