Melbourne allocates $26 million in new and upgraded green space

The Metropolis of Melbourne has launched its Draft Finances 2026–27, outlining a $26 million funding within the metropolis’s inexperienced areas, together with the supply of 13 new or upgraded parks and public outside areas within the CBD and surrounds.

One of many council’s key initiatives contains the town’s largest park in additional than 50 years, dubbed Market Sq., as a part of the Gurrowa Place precinct at Queen Victoria Market, designed by NH Structure, Kerstin Thompson Architects, Searle x Waldron Structure, Jackson Clements Burrows, Openwork, Lovell Chen and Urbis, and beforehand 3XN Australia and McGregor Coxall.

Sited atop the previous Previous Melbourne Cemetery, the 1.8-hectare public park is about to interchange the market’s present open-air automotive park. A plan to extend greenery on Franklin Road, linking to the market, can also be a part of the draft price range, as is funding for stage two of the $7.8 million College Sq. improve in Carlton, and an funding in a brand new 2,500-square-metre open house by way of the Chapman Road pocket park in North Melbourne.

In Kensington, within the metropolis’s internal north-east, $6.4 million has been allotted to rework a warehouse right into a group house at Chelmsford Road on the sting of the Moonee Ponds Creek, within the neighborhood of the Younghusband precinct – a group of historic wool sheds that had been transformed in 2025 into places of work and retail areas to a design by Woods Bagot.

On the south facet of the town, the draft price range contains $5.5 million for a brand new 5,000-square-metre public house alongside the Metropolis Highway undercroft beneath Kings Means. The deliberate recreation house will sit instantly reverse the newly opened Hannah Road Resort by Flack Studio and Fraser and Companions Architects, and hyperlink with close by Boyd Park and Boyd Neighborhood Hub.

With a 450-metre part of latest boardwalk at Birrarung Marr, on the northern financial institution of the Yarra River, now full, the draft price range additionally accounts for additional planning on the subsequent phases of the four-kilometre Greenline venture, to which the federal authorities has dedicated $4.4 million. Elsewhere within the south, the Metropolis of Melbourne’s funding plans embrace increasing reserves at Miles and Dodds streets in Southbank and at Normanby Highway in South Melbourne.

Lord Mayor Nick Reece stated that Melbourne was “main the way in which as Australia’s Backyard Metropolis.”

“We’re constructing a inexperienced legacy for an even bigger, busier and extra vibrant metropolis,” he stated, commenting that the 13 new and upgraded inexperienced areas can be “delivered at file velocity and scale.”

The Draft Finances 2026–27 is open for public session on the Metropolis of Melbourne’s web site till 28 April.