Macquarie Mall Redevelopment

Innovative soil trench with water harvesting, for healthy trees in upgraded Macquarie Mall – using Stratavault

Commenced in 2015, the Macquarie Mall upgrade aimed to create a vibrant communal hub to accommodate the city’s rapid growth and stimulate jobs and investment. Featuring a huge outdoor digital movie screen, a children’s water play space, and a giant chess set, the rejuvenated mall is surrounded by a number of revamped outdoor dining areas and feature trees for shade and visual appeal.

macquarie mall redevelopment featured

With the objective of providing a good, healthy tree canopy for visitors to enjoy, Stratavault was selected for its cutting-edge water harvesting abilities – giving trees both the water and uncompacted soil they need to thrive in a hardscaped, urban environment.

macquarie mall redevelopment stratavault installation

Ben Gooden, Design Leader and Founder of Citygreen, said, “One of the overall intents with this plan was to provide a good healthy tree canopy for the residents as part of a brilliant streetscape upgrade to make this a really nice place to be. There is a real focus on healthy trees in this design.”

Mark Wilson, Senior Project Manager – Infrastructure and Environment at Liverpool City Council, agreed, saying, “Trees are essential to revitalizing any centre of any city to bring back that green that we were lacking. It’s acting as a catalyst for encouraging not only businesses but also the public to come back to Macquarie Mall.”

macquarie mall redevelopment

Mark Kuhn, Director at Urbis, said, “The Macquarie Street Mall is a really well loved and well used space. Our design strategy is to hang on to all of the components that are working well in the mall and rearrange them, and fundamental to that is providing shade to the space. With the several different options that were available, the Stratavault product is the most effective and efficient product on the market and we’re familiar with the success of this product from projects of over 10 years ago. So, we were very keen to use this in an urban environment.”

macquarie mall redevelopment 04 Citygreen

Mark Wilson said, “We’re lining the mall both sides with 70 trees and those trees will enhance the look of the mall. Most of those trees will be deciduous so it will allow the sun in during winter and give shade in summer by having the continuous root growth through the Stratavault system. It allowed us to have healthy trees for the entire mall. It also enables us to have irrigation within that trench, and the agricultural drains to make sure it’s properly draining.”

Mark Kuhn said, “Water harvesting has been around for the last 10 years or so and it’s just integrated into everything that we do. What we wanted to do was try to be responsible and capture as much water on-site before discharging it into the surrounding drainage system. We integrated the water strategy with the tree alignment within the mall, and directed all of the surface water run-off towards the trees, trying to capture as much of that as possible within the Stratavault cells below the surface.”

macquarie mall redevelopment

Ben Gooden said, “The Stratavault and Stratacell systems are both made from 100% recycled polypropylene. The strengths that we can provide are double that of similar offerings. Given we can achieve that with recycled plastic, it delivers massive benefits from a green building point of view. Every project is removing tons of industrial waste in landfills. The public are becoming more and more aware of the benefits of healthy trees and at the same time the cost of this system is decreasing. So now what we are seeing is projects no longer with city councils only, but also with big stores and shopping centre car parks implementing the system.”

macquarie mall redevelopment stratavault installation

Mark Wilson concluded, “At the end of the day, when we have this Macquarie Mall complete, it will give back to the community – not only with the trees, not only with the Stratavault system, but also with all of the amenity that is provided. There will be a street market and lots of activities that will attract the community back into the CBD.”

For more information on Citygreen’s cutting-edge, sustainable landscape solutions, click here.

“Great customer service, quick response times and a very in depth QA system with constant support.”

- Laura Wiesenekker, Project Engineer, Densford Civil -

“Citygreen is a very professional  business, and I found everything was great in terms of deliveries, product supply and information. It was all forthcoming and helped us to complete the project.”

- Keith Burns, Architect/Designer, Keith Burns Architect -

“Citygreen offered training and invaluable technical assistance during the works.”

- James Callan, Estimating Manager, Complex Co Pty Ltd -

“Our experience, in working with a Citygreen Design Studio was second to none. We found responses from the design studio to be very timely, and technically thorough. We went backwards and forwards a number of times, looking at different iterations of the design and, nothing was too much trouble to examine and explore different possibilities. I would highly recommend the Citygreen Design Studio to any future client considering using your services.”

- Sandra Smith, Principal Landscape Architect, City Of Monash -

“We are big on compliance on all projects, and the fact that their SmartCertify cloud platform covers all bases, and supports their 20 year warranties, is critical – especially that these pits are being installed under roadways and footpaths.”

- Johny Purkaystha, Civil Program Engineer, Central Coast Council -

"I reviewed all the previous projects that we have installed in the past couple years using your product and I can happily report back that we have 0% mortality in the soil cells, which is incredible!"

- Brendan Wilton, CEO, Trim Landscaping, Bedford, Canada -