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 The New
Rouse Hill Interviewee: Ken Knox, born 1964 Interviewer: Frank Heimans, Date of Interview: 13 June 2007 Transcription: Glenys Murray, July 2007 |
I guess it wouldn’t have been too badly a change for you from South Africa things weren’t that bad were they here?
Oh no I shouldn’t be making out that it was bad. It was a wonderful place to arrive and we spent a lot of time at the beach in our early years. Coming from Johannesburg which is six hundred kilometres from the sea, we thought our worlds had all arrived at once. Being able to go the beach after school it was like an idyllic place to live.
Did you play any sports at school?
Played cricket, rugby and I was a much better swimmer than I was a cricket or rugby player.
Now after getting through your later years at high school, did you have any idea yet what sort of direction you might want to go?
I always had an interest in geography and particularly cities, how cities worked. I was fascinated about people’s roles in cities and I found geography and history very interesting. How they merged and how they created countries and societies. I was quite interested in getting involved in some form of property or urban planning at that stage.
There were quite a lot of things happening in urban planning in those days. This would be the late 1980’s or 1990’s would it?
It would have been the early 1980’s. Sydney was changing there was a fair bit of stuff happening with Sydney skyscrapers starting to arrive.
So what did you do to realise that ambition to have something more to do with town planning or urban design?
It was interesting I went and had a few talks to some people who were already obviously professionals in industry and said to them that I wanted to do town planning or urban geography. The advice that I got was “go and get a solid degree not a town planning degree”. So I applied and went to Sydney University and did an Economics Degree but also did some streams in geography and the economics of systems rather that the more traditional microeconomics and traditional economic streams. The path people suggested was get a strong base degree and then you can pursue whatever career you want off the back of that.
Do you remember the topic of your thesis?
I looked at the changes to sporting venues in inner urban Sydney over the last fifty, sixty years and what was driving those changes.
So that included the Sydney Cricket Ground did it?
Yes, you had the changes at Sydney Cricket Ground, Henson Park, Glebe Football Field. The rise and fall of the changing populations and densities and the well being of the inner suburbs of Sydney. You also had the changes in race courses and greyhound tracks and how they changed uses over time. So it was quite an interesting study.
I remember in the 1940’s and 50’s greyhound racing was much more popular than it is today I think?
So there were things like that, reflecting the change in character of the people that live in urban areas and their lifestyle, their behaviours, their affordability, their character.
That would give you a pretty good insight into how people live?
After you finished your university degree what sort of opportunities was open to you for employment?
Well I actually chose to go and travel straightaway before I went and got a job. I took a backpack and went around Australia for about three and a half months. Went all the way to Cape Tribulation, all the way to Darwin and back to Adelaide, I had this desire to see more of Australia given I had only been here five or six years. I wanted to understand the country that I’d adopted a bit more. Then to answer your question I came back in April May of 1986 and started looking for a job. I ended up getting a job with a company called Plant Location who did market research, demographics, retail analysis. Studies for shopping centres, office buildings, industrial buildings.
What kind of things did you pick up from that kind of work? More insights into how people spent their money?
Lots of insights into that and I was lucky to work for a gentleman I still know now, called Peter Leyshon who still runs that business under a different name. He’d worked in that field for ten, fifteen years he was a good student of understanding how suburbs and demographics relate to the types of businesses and industries that congregate in them. As an aside in talking about greyhounds actually, one of his rules of thumb, was that you could drive around a suburb at five in the morning or five in the evening and you could work out its social demographic profile by counting the number of people walking greyhounds.
You also had some overseas experience didn’t you? Who was that with?
I worked with a company called Juliana’s Leisure Group who did run in Australia for many years the Juliana’s nightclubs. They ran a chain of nightclubs around the world. I left Australia in about 1989 to just do the Australian thing, go and work overseas and see the big wide world beyond. Through people I had met in my first three or four years of work I got an introduction to this company. They were looking for a young person to do some research and financial analysis and some studies on hotels, nightclubs, restaurants. I got a role with them and ended up working for them for five years in both London and Singapore.
That would have been quite interesting. I think Juliana’s had a nightclub in Sydney didn’t they?
They did in the Sydney Hilton.
So you were in the high end of the market then? How did your career begin with Lend Lease how did that all happen?
I’d been away from Australia for about five or six years. I’d had a great time and I thoroughly enjoyed the work with Juliana’s looking at entertainment and leisure. At that time I was in two minds whether I came back to Australia or would end up being an expatriate for a long period of time. I’d always had an interest in retail and shopping centres. They’re obviously an important part of how communities and towns work. The leisure business was quite glamorous going around the world looking at hotels. The shopping centre industry was beginning to evolve at that time to understand how restaurants, cinemas more open space worked with the shopping centre business. It was just by coincidence that I bought The Sydney Morning Herald one day when I was walking down Orchard Road in Singapore, sat down and had a good read through it and there were some broad advertisements looking for development managers for Lend Lease in Australia. So I’d been umming and ahhing about what my next move was, so I sent my CV off to them and two months later I was working back in Sydney. Bit of a long story to get how I got to Lend Lease, I saw it as an opportunity to merge my skill base.
You’d been away for about five years from Sydney?
I’d been away for about five years.
Had Sydney changed a lot?
Yes it had. Through the eighties you’d started to see the whole evolution of Asian restaurants and a much more diverse food palate in Australian society. The whole internationalisation or globalisation that Keating talks about with regards to the international banks and the freeing up of the financial system had all started to come to fruition. You could see the dynamics of the economy were a lot more fluid and a lot more connected to the world.
So what was your first job at Lend Lease when you got back here?
I worked on Charlestown Square which is a large regional shopping centre up in the Newcastle area and we did a forty five million dollar extension to that centre, adding a Target and a Franklins and a large car park.
This would have been about 1995 would it?
Yes it was 1994/5 that all happened.
Now Westfield were doing similar things weren’t they at that time?
Westfield are one of the other main shopping centre operators in the country and yes they are actively involved in a similar sort of business.
So what is your present position with GPT now and tell me how GPT actually came into the equation?
I’m a Project Director with the GPT Group. The GPT Group is a large institutional owner of shopping centre, office, hotel and industrial assets and businesses. The GPT Trust was set up by Lend Lease some thirty or forty years ago and was managed by the Lend Lease organisation during that period of time. In 2005 the unit holders of GPT voted to internalise, which meant that they removed the Lend Lease organisation as the manager developer of its commercial assets. At that point in time a large number of former Lend Lease employees were offered and chose to leave Lend Lease and join the GPT Group where we now do a similar role to what we did at Lend Lease. Which was do the development management, the property management, the investment management of the GPT Group’s assets.
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It’s the old General Property Trust.
When was you first exposure to the Rouse Hill project?
I can trace it back to my time at university, Frank. Which brought a wry smile to my face, when we started looking at the bid in 2002 the Rouse Hill project I believe was known as Mungerie Park or Mungerie House. It was a large parcel of land that the NSW Government identified in the early eighties as the future town and regional centre for the North West growth sector. As I said before I’d done a lot of urban geography, urban development and that was one of the short studies that we did while I was at university.
It was even talked about in the 1980’s then?
It was.
What were the plans at that stage for it?
I don’t think that they had crystallised them to the degree that we saw in the early 2000’s but it was identified as the regional town for that North West growth corridor. I don’t believe that they were talking about the type of model that we’ve now developed. It was probably more thought that it would be a traditional mall type shopping centre with other associated council facilities attached. In the more traditional USA type mall model.
How fast is that population growing do you think in that North West sector?
The population growth in the last five to ten years has been extremely strong. It’s growing at some three to four percent per annum which when you compare the overall Sydney population growth of one percent is quite extraordinary.
Right that’s three or four times the normal Sydney growth?
Yes
You had to bid for this contract didn’t you? Tell me what sort of research was done by you and your team to be able to find out what you were going to do?
I might just talk about the bid process, because that covers a bit of that, Frank. The NSW Government set up a quite exhaustive bidding process and it was a competitive bidding process which all the major property groups in Australia participated in. The government was quite clear in its objectives that it wanted to look at a model that created a sustainable and workable Town Centre for that fast growing North West part of Sydney. They were quite clear that they wanted a development that embraced high quality urban design, best practice sustainability, best practice transport. A management model, that ensured that this worked and was open and available to the broader community. So we looked at that brief and we went to understand from first principles what made the notions of a healthy community. What made the notion of a thriving community? We looked at the opportunity from that basis.
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Absolutely what you find when you start pealing back to successful communities. You find that communities that start to engage more with nature, use food that’s grown close to where they live. People that can walk to work or walk to schools tend to have healthier lifestyles they tend to be more open communities. It leads to a higher quality of life. That sounds quite altruistic and to a degree it is but it actually underpins what makes urban planning and strong societies work.
So did you do that research then and what did the research show you?
We did quite extensive research. We obviously brought in world class urban planners to help us understand how that site integrates and links to the broader regional network. So we understood the landform, the transport networks and the ecosystems. All the natural aspects that relate to that land we then went and did more economic research. So we did that from a number of aspects, obviously to understand the type of housing products and the types of places that people wanted to live in. We also did very extensive research from a retail and Town Centre perspective to understand what services people wanted, where they currently shopped, what shopping opportunities were missing and how best to deliver those opportunities.
What were some of the critical attributes that you brought to the project? That helped you get this particular tender?
We understood that there was a large pent up demand for a critical mass of quite a large Town Centre. The government had held this site for some twenty years and rather than it being a true green field development on the outskirts of Sydney. It was actually more of an infill development in that the communities had already arrived and had already gone past the site. There was already quite a substantial population within five kilometres and up to sixty, seventy, eighty thousand people. Those types of demographic indicators suggested that you could build a much bigger Town Centre than initially thought.
In answering your question the critical mass of the Town Centre that we were going to build at day one. So some seventy to eighty thousand square metres plus the urban planning and the sustainability initiatives that we brought those three packaged together were the critical factors we understand in securing the bid.
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The earlier questions we talked about GPT Group leaving the Lend Lease. Back in 2002 at the time of the bid the GPT Group and Lend Lease were one entity and we bid for this project as one entity. We still have a joint venture development company which manages the whole of the entity which is called The New Rouse Hill. That is developing and managing the process of building the residential estate, putting in the broader road network. Creating the schools and the Caddies Creek precinct as a subset of all of that the GPT Group in its own right is developing, will manage and then will own what’s called stage one of the Town Centre which is that seventy thousand square metres of retail, commercial uses within the Town Centre.
Now who were your team that were involved in planning this new Town Centre?
Back on the bid there were four core members of the team, Myself with a chap called Jeff Dutailis another gentleman called Mark Sydney and a lady called Debbie Berkhart who were the four key development and project director people. We pulled together a diverse team that included Joe Hruda who was our international master planner and urban designer. Joe comes from Vancouver Canada and was instrumental in a lot of the great urban planning solutions and outcomes in Canada. We also then brought in a range of other Australian architects, a consortium of architects led by Keith Cottier an eminent Australian architect. In a consortium of Allen Jack Cottier, Rice Daubney and Group GSA and then a range of specialist transport, environmental, construction, building project consultants.
Quite a high powered team there, you had quite a good architecture team. So what will the commercial and retain sectors in the Town Centre actually contain?
The concept is built around still having some of the traditional types of retail that we know that people like. So we’ve got two full scale supermarket offers, so the latest and greatest Woolworths and Coles supermarkets there is then also the opportunity to shop at discount department stores. So the latest Big W and the latest Target so they form the core retail offer. Around that we’re also having a large leisure offer which is anchored by a Reading nine screen cinema. There will be restaurants and cafes associated with that and then some other two hundred speciality retail shops which are your typical fruit and vegetable, delicatessens, pharmacies, banks, fashion shops, sporting good shops, optometrists. We will then also have some large medical facilities and also some commercial offices so the opportunity for people who want to run some small accounting or service businesses will be taking some space as well.
What parking facilities will there be?
Parking, we’ve got three thousand car parking spaces, quite an innovative solution. Instead of building the car park in traditional large deck car parking next to the centre, we’ve actually put all the car parking underneath the Town Centre. The majority of the parking some two thousand six hundred cars underneath, some cars on the streets, and some cars sort of just on the side, what that is part of the environmental initiatives to let us reduce the overall footprint of the Town Centre. So that we can still create some twenty five hectares of parks as well as enough area to build the number of houses that are needed for that market.
What would you say are the defining feature of the new Town Centre that you are developing?
It’s probably a reversion to the more traditional and older models that people like about towns. So the whole notion of a main street with a range of public spaces a market square, a town square and some smaller intimate squares would have to be the defining character, the defining ambience of the place.
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I think it’s going to have a great effect. What it does is it’s going to get a lot more activity on the street so you’ll have people being able to walk down real streets. There will also be cars that will have to share those streets obviously at low speeds and in slightly different modes. People more looking for parking rather than using it as a thoroughfare but it creates the whole notion of active streets.
How much does this Rouse Hill development borrow from the new urbanism movement that is happening in the United States?
I think it’s a merging of what I’ve been calling traditional mall retailing which is about having major retail anchors proximity of car parking, ease of access to shops with some of the new urbanism aspects which are like main streets. Bringing cars involved and bringing mixed use in so we’ve actually brought the notion of multifunctional variety of uses into the Town Centre. This Town Centre will actually have people living in it. In the stage one we’re building one hundred and four apartments and town houses within the centre of town. So the notion of true mixed use, a main street merged with traditional retail I think is quite defining as well and probably hasn’t been done in too many places around the world.
Is this Town Centre like anything else that exists around the world?
Going further into that, there are elements of it that we have seen around the world. We’ve obviously done, building on that discussion about research before we’ve done a fair bit of research into what’s worked around the world. There are places in the West Coast of the USA where some of the new urbanism models have been built such as Santana Row, Victoria Gardens, University Village in Seattle, Redmond Town Centre they’ve all got some great learnings but they probably haven’t been done on the same scale and also then with the merging scale of retail and residential.
So what architectural style would you say is the Town Centre development?
We are using a modern, contemporary Australian. So instead of reverting totally to the historical aspects of the North West Sydney where you had the old colonial towns of Richmond, Windsor or going very modern and unconnected to its environment. We’ve used the clues of what’s happening in Australian society at the moment. The desire for contemporary and innovation but with some clues and elements back to the history of the colonial towns and the rural fringe of Sydney. I suppose it's called modern, contemporary Australian but it reflects all those themes.
Does it reflect anything about the environment of that area?
Absolutely, so back with the fundamentals from an urban design perspective the orientation of the streets and the orientation of the pedestrian streets allow us to get glimpses and sight lines of the surrounding hills. So you can still see the natural vegetation. There are connection routes down to the creek systems and we’ve also actually brought those connections back into the town with landscape elements. Then the material selection as well starts to reflect the colours and the patterns of the indigenous past, of the colonial past, of the natural environment. Then we’ve looked at the more recent industrial subtle themes and subliminal colours and patterns have been merged into the architecture and into the place making aspects of the town.
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In designing a town I suppose you can’t put a roof over the whole town which is I suppose the difference between a shopping mall concept and a town concept. So to understand that people still want to use a place you have to be able to offer a variety of experiences and a variety of places. What that means is, in some places you do need roofs where people will be warm or cool when it’s raining or when it’s hot. But there are also places when people are doing certain types of shops when they want to be out in the open and feel the sun on their face or feel the wind in their hair. Obviously that was quite a significant challenge. What we did was we retained a company called CJB Cundells who are environmental modelers and we did exhaustive computer technology testing. We build 3D models of the town, looked at ten years of weather data, rain, sun, wind, heat and understood where and how we needed to build weather protection if it was required in relation to the different types of places we wanted to create. So we did want to create an outdoor area where people could sit and feel the sun on their face. We made sure that we deigned that space so that the prevailing winds didn’t negatively impact on that. I know that is a long answer but there seriously was extensive design work on that.
How important is The New Rouse Hill project for GPT, what will it do for the company?
It’s a landmark development and it’s a defining development. The Rouse Hill Town Centre will be the first major retail and Town Centre development that the GPT group opens as its own entity. It’s also going to be a development that the whole shopping centre industry in Australia watches with anticipation to see how the merging of traditional retail and new urbanism works. We are very confident that we’ve spent a lot of time doing the right research and working with the right experts to get a great result. We believe it's going to be a great responsibility and a great outcome for the people of North West Sydney.
So what are the big challenges until the completion of the Town Centre do you think?
Well we’re at a stage now we’re in June 2007, where the majority of the base building and the structure is all complete and we’re now into the fitting out and the opening of all the shops. The leasing campaign to secure the two hundred and twenty odd businesses is a long way down the track. The first stage which we’re opening in September is fully leased. The real challenge is to open with excellence and the focus is now on the finer details of getting the shops open. The finishes on the streets, the chairs, the lights, the real touchy, feely bits that make a town feel authentic and real.
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Landscaping is a great area to talk about. It obviously started with great vision and understanding from a sustainability perspective. The appropriate species and types of plants that go with the local area but also with a modern contemporary Australian town. So the urban planners and landscape team did significant work with us over the previous two or three years. What we did, we made a commitment in early 2005, late 2005 to actually buy all the trees. So the trees that are going on the town square have been nurtured and looked after up in Maroochydore for the last year and a half. The balance of the trees and shrubs and smaller plants have all been purchased and have been looked after and nurtured in a big nursery down in Kemps Creek in Western Sydney.
They’re getting acclimatised are they?
They’re getting acclimatised, they’re getting trimmed. Particularly for the larger species it’s quite traumatic to relocate them. I supposed the fundamental reason that we’ve bought them early is to get some scale and get plants that don’t sit half a foot high on day one. We want them to be quite large and we want the place to feel like it is landscaped and is quite luscious.
In the brochure that I’ve looked at about The New Rouse Hill Town Centre it states that it “will seamlessly create a connection between people and place”. How will it actually achieve that connection?
I think the discussion has been talking about the creation of a public realm. The various public spaces that we’ve talked about the market square the town square, the smaller public spaces that we’re creating around the town. I suppose it is the spaces between the buildings. When you look at towns from an urban planning perspective everyone looks at the buildings. An architect will look at the buildings and urban planner or a place maker will look at the spaces between the buildings. You look at how they all connect to each other. So we’ve actually done almost the reverse planning of looking at all the non built space and understood what each of those spaces should look like. What the landscaping that should be. Should they have a social role? Should they just be a quiet space? The type of landscaping that goes in there, and then layering on some of our interpretive, some of our public art programmes to say how you can actually create an interest in that.
We’re also then looking at how you get community engagement into that. So we’re looking at some public art programmes where people will be involved in competitions to draw or create the piece of art for that. That brings from our view the seamless nature in that, because you can move from space to space and not really realise why you feel good in that space. It just does.
What’s been the community reaction to your plans for the Town Centre?
Been very positive there has been a lot of community consultation in all the aspects of this job that I’ve been talking about. Right from the very early days per bid by Landcom then during the various master planning phases by the joint developers. If I had to summarise it would be “bring it on”, “make it happen guys we’ve been waiting for five or ten years, we’ve bought houses out here in the North Western suburbs of Sydney and we were told that this town was going to be here just get I here we’re waiting”.
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GPT will be the owner of the Town Centre and we will also be the manager. This is a different model, in your traditional shopping centre model you don’t have people living in the middle of it, and you don’t generally have as many broad uses, and you don’t have main streets that people can freely walk up and down twenty four hours a day. We’ve taken a step back and we’ve tried to understand how that model works. There are models because councils do it all the time. There are also government type agencies that manage the public domain such as The Rocks, Darling Harbour, Sydney Olympic Park who have management plans to deal with the whole notion of public/private space. We’ve met with a lot of those organisations. We understand what works, what doesn’t. We’ve prepared a Public Areas Access Management Plan which will govern and give a framework for our role as manager, as well as clearly communicate to all users they’re ability to use that space. How that space can be used freely and for the betterment of all in the community.
Let’s talk a little about the environmental attributes of the project such as the energy, the power, where it comes from and how it will be used, the water recycling aspect of it can you tell me about those?
The ecological footprint and the impact on the environment is something we take extremely seriously. Traditionally large shopping centres and large office buildings have been large consumers of power and water. There is two components in the shopping environment, the owner and what we call the building fabric. Then the businesses and tenants within that who also then have to take some form of responsibility for their own use of water and power and in a traditional shopping centre environment a lot of that is taken away from them because they just purchase that from the owner or the developer of the shopping centre. There is no responsibility or care taken on that. We’ve had a look at how that whole model works and said that everybody has to be responsible for their use of water and power, and I suppose that’s a learning and a self empowerment process to drive cultural change in the use of resources. In terms of energy the biggest user in shopping centre environments is air conditioning. We’ve achieved about a twenty five percent reduction in energy usage by the use of a central chilled water plant. That means that there is a pipe that literally goes around the whole town that pumps from a central plant. So you get economies of scale and energy efficiency out of that. That pumps cold water around the whole town and the each individual shop or business can then tap into that cold water and they use that to run their own small chilled water plants to air condition their stores. They’re then each individually metered to that if they want to use more or less they take that responsibility in terms of managing that outcome. Similarly for water, there is a water pipe that goes around and each individual store or shop will be metered and that will drive behaviour in terms usage of water. There is stormwater and rainwater capture. We’ve got an extremely large tank which is used to top up and maintain the water sensitive urban design requirements of the ponds down around the Caddies Creek. There is significant water savings, I think the numbers I said, were like forty or fifty percent reduction in overall water usage by the use of metering and more water efficient equipment. We’re not using our own recycled water plant. They’re already using in North West Sydney the Rouse Hill Recycled Water Plant. We’ve tapped into that system and we’re helping that system by returning all our grey water and dirty water to that plant.