Urban renewal puts the Wedge at the creative edge

In 15 years’ time, when visitors to Geelong drive towards the city’s retail centre, they will barely recognise even the faintest traces of an unprepossessing traffic corridor that for 170 years has been a raw scene of light industry, car yards and large, bleak stretches of railway track and freight sheds.

Instead, they will find themselves surrounded by the vibrancy and renewed life force of an attractive 55-hectare built-up area close to Corio Bay that is set to become Geelong’s cultural and creative hub.

The Western Wedge is a large-scale urban renewal project that will bring education, the arts, business, café and street culture together in a process that Kathy Timmins, project development facilitator with the City of Greater Geelong, compares to a renaissance. “With the Western Wedge, we have a really fabulous opportunity to develop a mixed-use centre that will be lively for 18 hours a day,” she says.

The grand plan is to attract business that will employ up to 6000 new workers, and developers of commercial and residential buildings who will respond to a brief for “strong architecture of significant design interest”.

During the renewal that will respect Geelong’s already rich layering of heritage buildings and its core regional gallery precinct, the seafront will be exposed to most of the new buildings by a careful tapering of building heights. “That will allow everyone to share water views,” Ms Timmins says.

Pedestrian linkages will lace through and connect the various sub-precincts within the Wedge. These networks will be designed to maximise strolling and street leisure activities.

While the infrastructure is to come, some of the elements that make a city centre especially lively are already in place. Campuses belonging to Deakin and Ballarat universities and to the Gordon Institute of TAFE form part of the existing Wedge fabric. Together these campuses have an enrolment of more than 4000 students.

Ms Timmins says the Wedge planning framework is very specifically targeting creative industries which can make use of the talents of the many talented professionals who have made Geelong their home.

“In terms of creatives,” she says, “we are spoiled for choice. They are the people who should add the soul to what we believe will become an active, slightly bohemian and interestingly edgy place.”