Goyder Square

Goyder Square Palmerston, Northern Territory, Larrakia Nation

• Designers

Palmerston Council had the bold ambition to transform Palmerston from a city for cars to a city for people. Its civic heart – Goyder Square is transformed through a thoughtful combination of adaptive reuse, infrastructure repurposing, landscape design, place activation and cultural events planning.

Goyder Square in Palmerston changes the game regarding the use of our urban spaces, turning the usual approach of car parks and overdevelopment into a busy, multipurpose public asset that can be adapted over time and activated quickly.

With its well-designed mix of creative spaces, public facilities and lush greenery, the square creates a new civic heart for Palmerston and a place where people can meet, enjoy the community and be entertained. The site’s cost-effective transformation is a model for many other towns that have at their centre a dead zone of car parking and asphalt. This project affirms that, with community input and courage from local government and business, good urban design has the ability to transform lost, soulless spaces into attractive, green places that prioritize people and revitalize the local economy.

Palmerston, a sibling of Darwin, is a tropical city eager to find its own identity. Seven years ago, the city centre was dominated by cars, indoor shopping centres and very little community interaction. There was no real town centre and walkability around it was non-existent. People chose to travel between shops in their cars, instead of walking the 100 metres between Bunnings and the supermarket. Overarching this was a dysfunctional and disconnected town.

The master plan was designed through the lens of the public - to transform the main street and Goyder Square. Given the uniqueness of Palmerston and limited budget, we had to be creative and innovative in our design concepts - taking a piece of lawn and creating an incredible story of connection and community. Instead of suburban sprawl, we planned to capture the uniqueness of the Palmerston community with the goal of improving overall happiness. We wanted to connect the values of the Northern Territory climate with civic life.

Rather than focus on land use, we focused on activities that would bring people into the city centre, creating an urban destination, using public spaces. We brought to the table the idea of social capital as having an important role in sustainability. Our staging plan was to not just see the delivery of more floor space but the identification of places and activities over time that would improve human happiness and a complete street approach of transport. We gave priority to people walking, cycling and using public transport.

Through our research of urban structures and local character, we explored different models of density. We didn’t want to copy big cities; we developed a hybrid model that was high/low density on a human scale with slender towns to take advantage of views, sunshine and cooling breezes. Overlaid by the narrative of retaining the local identity - underlying patterns to ensure legacy and memory was embedded in the master plan. Our approached was more evolution than reconstruction.

With the council’s limited budget, we focused on recreation of a dense tropical landscape utilising water during the wet season and sustaining itself during the dry: a low-tech approach but highly effective in creating beautiful, welcoming landscapes.

Ultimately, this project brought a fractured community together. Shifting from the existing model of close circuit TV to activating the town, bringing more people to the centre, and creating safer spaces by creating places to gather, do activities and get to know each other, welcoming everyone in.