Westmead Innovation District
Westmead, Sydney
The Westmead Innovation District is to be developed as a major health, education, and research precinct with the challenge of accommodating significant long-term growth in students, staff, patients, visitors and residents. The district’s success is dependent on providing collocated research, hospital, university and schooling facilities, an interconnected multi-modal transport network and opportunities for high value, skilled jobs to create a dynamic world-class precinct capable of attracting the best clinicians, researchers, entrepreneurs, academics, and students.
COX assembled and led the multi-disciplinary, world-best consultant team to prepare the Westmead Innovation District Master Plan. The Master Plan underpins the area’s growth and competitiveness – balancing the need for it to function in a practical sense, while setting ambitions for social, economic, and environmental sustainability, and preserving its Indigenous and European history. Giving rise to a number of projects already underway, the plan guides Westmead’s transformation as one of the two preeminent health precincts in the southern hemisphere and supports its preparation for its role within the Metro West corridor.
The Master Plan seeks to enhance Westmead’s vision of building its powerful health presence, prioritising growth in education, research, industry, and housing to establish Westmead as a prolific innovation district. The development of new industries within Westmead, and a new university campus, are further encouraged by the Master Plan. This significant new infrastructure will be supported by new transport connections, forming a transport network that seamlessly integrates the Metro station and Light Rail with future pedestrian and cycle connections throughout Westmead.
Peter Hall, Cities in Civilisation: Culture, Innovation and Urban Order
Innovation districts embody the very essence of cities: an aggregation of talented, driven people, assembled in close quarters, who exchange ideas and knowledge
The delivery of a high-quality network of vibrant public places and parks is of high priority, the Master Plan forming the essential framework required to achieve great connected places that are enjoyed by present and future residents, who will have access a diversity of homes to suit the different lifestyles. With public and green open space addressing major streets, Parramatta River and Toongabbie Creek, the Westmead Innovation District Master Plan works to unlock and enhance Westmead’s key assets to provide for a thriving community.