The ground plane checklist

Widths are set by the traffic engineer and the retail is asked to fit. Width is destiny. A 9-metre lane will not behave like a 3-metre one no matter what is leased into it.

The street is wide, the buildings are low, and one side is a residential lobby and a substation. Single-sided retail halves the reason to walk the length, and low enclosure makes the space read as a car park with shops around it.

The drawing shows 4 metres and the built pinch point is 2.2 metres behind a planter and a bin. Draw the section with a pram, a table and two people passing in it.

One tenant holds 30 metres of frontage behind full-height uniform glass. The walk past becomes a walk through, and the operator has nowhere to merchandise.

Deep narrow tenancies are created because they suited the structural grid. They will trade poorly and they will discount at renewal, permanently.

The loading dock is discovered late and takes the best corner. This is the most common late-stage frontage loss we see. A corner sees two streets and should carry a tenant that benefits from both.

Trees are placed for the landscape drawing rather than the walking route, and the awning is discontinuous. Weather protection on the main route determines winter trade more than most design decisions.

A colonnade is drawn for weather protection. In Australia they usually darken shopfronts, break sightlines and create surveillance problems. The exceptions need height, very high foot traffic and immediate street adjacency. Default to no and make the case if you want one.

The precinct is internally coherent and turns its back on the desire lines around it, and wayfinding is expected to compensate. Sightlines to a visible destination do more than signage ever will. Watch where people currently walk and put the entries there.

The main space is in permanent shadow from 2pm, in full western sun in February, or under a podium downdraught. Any of the three empties it, and none is fixable afterwards.

A street is closed because closure feels like the pedestrian-friendly choice, or speed is managed with a sign on a pole while the geometry says 50. Where pedestrian volumes alone cannot sustain trade across the day, a shared street outperforms a pedestrian-only pathway. Our Band D shared-way spines are designed to a 10 km/h maximum, and the geometry has to deliver it.

The public space is the floor-space bonus made physical, sized to the planning requirement and located where it cost the least. Well-designed publicly accessible space is among the highest-returning investments a precinct developer can make, and the returns are set by where it is and what faces it, both of which are locked at this stage.

The positioning welcomes every use, or leasing targets are set before the ground plane strategy exists. Leasing without strategy is building walls without a foundation.

The project claims daily users, visitors and destination seekers equally. Daily users are the economic backbone and want convenience and reliability. Destination seekers want something worth the trip. Those two briefs pull design in opposite directions and one of them has to win.

Assumptions live in people's heads. Every load-bearing assumption should sit on one sheet with its evidence, the test that would break it, and a current verdict. If you are marking this checklist honestly, you are already building the first column of it.

A floorspace gap analysis says there is no gap and nobody has walked the incumbents. A theoretical absence of gap routinely conceals poor operators in poor locations. That is a competitive gap rather than an arithmetic one, and it is a finding.

The answer is "there will be 4,000 new residents". Every precinct competes with the couch, the local strip and the phone. Residents are demand, not a reason.

Nobody has stated the absences. A strategy that lists what is present and stays silent on what is missing has not made a choice, it has made an inventory.

The mix is copied from a comparable scheme with a different catchment, or medical, allied health, childcare and services are treated as filler for the tenancies retail did not want. They generate the most reliable weekday traffic in most precincts.

Three restaurants are spread across three separate frontages so none of them benefits from the others.

The precinct opens 40 per cent leased and spends three years fighting the impression that it is empty. This weighs heaviest in build-to-rent, where the community does not exist on day one.

Rent is set top-down and the categories have never been shown to a real operator. A 12.5 per cent rent premium means nothing if the tenant cannot achieve the sales to support it. This is the single most common cause of a well-designed ground plane failing.

The anchor is assumed to be a supermarket. Libraries, cultural institutions, transit interchanges, education and health facilities and food halls all now function as anchors, and several of them generate more useful dwell than a supermarket does.

Every tenancy is sized and priced for a national brand, and the only path in is a five-year lease with a bank guarantee. The independents are what make the place worth choosing and they cannot carry national-brand fitout and rent structures.

The evening economy is a strategy document position and every lease permits closing at 5pm. A precinct that only works at its peak is failing the other twenty hours. Night trade also needs a physical home: it concentrates or it does not happen. And the mapping has to show overlap rather than adjacency. Value is created where the same space serves different people in different ways at different times, not where a gym and a cafe happen to share a wall.

Each landowner manages their own asset and nobody owns the ground plane between them. This is the most common reason a well-conceived precinct degrades within five years. The anchor creates the halo, the halo creates the precinct, and the precinct only works when someone is responsible for the whole thing rather than the building in the middle.

Public access is a condition of consent with no funding model and no management plan attached. The objections to privately owned public space, restricted access, restricted protest and photography, are all answerable through the management plan. They are not answerable afterwards.

The precinct succeeds and prices out the independents, makers and cultural tenants whose presence was the reason anyone came. Without a deliberate mechanism, success is the failure mode. Collingwood Yards is the working Australian model.

An activation mandate is written against square metres. Activating too much space with too little demand disperses energy so thinly that nothing earns the trip, and produces the curated sterility that reads as busy in a report and empty on the ground.

Connecting with Country is delivered as an artwork commission at the end of the design process. It is a design input, it belongs at the start, and the engagement itself is the part that has to be real.

Performance is read from the rent roll alone. Count pedestrians, dwell, vacancy, turnover by category and the ordinary Tuesday. What is not counted is not managed, and the instrument has to be set up before opening to have a baseline.

Seating is fixed, bolted and arranged facing the traffic. Moveable furniture is a philosophy rather than a furniture choice. Flexibility signals trust, and trust creates ownership.

All the seating belongs to tenants. A ground plane where the only place to rest is a paying seat will not hold parents, older people or teenagers, and those three groups are a large share of weekday presence. If there is nowhere for a teenager to be, they gather where they are unwelcome and the response becomes a security problem rather than a design one.

Planting is specified for the render and replaced twice in the first three years.

At 7pm half the tenancies are dark, and a visitor cannot tell from the entry whether anything is open. Lighting, signage and clustering should make the answer obvious from 30 metres away.

Activity depends entirely on programming. Rituals are the coffee on the way to the station and the walk after dinner. They cost nothing and they are what the ordinary Tuesday runs on.

The calendar is four large events a year, funded from a marketing line that gets cut in the first difficult year. Four events do not build a habit. A weekly rhythm does, and programming is infrastructure with a running cost.

Amenities are placed at the end of an unlit service corridor. People remember the toilets.

The response to a dark corner is a camera. Passive surveillance, lighting, activated edges and residential overlook do more. Busy streets are safer streets, and safety compounds into more use.

Accessibility is a ramp somewhere. Walk it with a pram, a wheelchair and a trolley, and check that facilities are identifiable for people with vision or hearing impairment.

The car arrival is designed in detail and the bus stop is 200 metres away across a road with no crossing, with no bike parking anywhere.

Parking is either treated as the enemy or treated as the answer. Successful high streets have sufficient parking and slow traffic, not no traffic.

Shopfront signage is negotiated tenant by tenant and the street loses coherence in 18 months. Vacant tenancies with papered windows do more damage than the vacancy itself.

The only contact between management and operators is the rent notice, and the strategy is filed at practical completion. The assumptions written down before opening are the test plan for the first three years of trading.

Energy performance is a sustainability chapter rather than a line in the tenant's profit and loss. It is the latter that determines whether they can pay the rent.