Despite the push to get workers back into CBD office space (cue yet another interview with an inner-city cafe owner), the answer may lie on letting work reshape itself and finding intelligent reuse for buildings.More than 80 unoccupied and underused office buildings in Melbourne’s CBD have been identified as prime candidates for redevelopment into more than 10,000 new homes.
A property audit of the city centre, conducted by the design studio Hassell and planning consultancy Ethos Urban for the Property Council of Australia, listed 86 buildings in Melbourne as “really ripe for adaptive re-use”.
Ingrid Bakker from design studio Hassell in front of 85 Spring Street, an unoccupied building identified as suitable for conversion to housing.
“If we only converted half of those, we could supply around 10,000 to 12,000 new homes, and each repurposed building would use roughly half the upfront embodied carbon compared to knocking existing buildings down and rebuilding,” said Ingrid Bakker, principal at Hassell.
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