These apartments were built just five years ago, now they’re being demolished

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Key points

• Buildings account for 66 per cent of all emissions across the City of Melbourne.
• By 2050 embodied carbon could account for 85 per cent of carbon emissions from Australia’s building stock.

A 12-storey apartment block in North Melbourne that was built only five years ago will be knocked down and rebuilt in what experts warn points to the city’s fixation with disposable buildings.

The City of Melbourne voted on Tuesday night to approve the demolition of the RMIT Village development on the Haymarket roundabout and turn it into a new 19-storey student housing building with build-to-rent apartments.

The RMIT Village building earmarked for redevelopment. Credit: Jason South

Deputy Lord Mayor Nicholas Reece said it was concerning in the midst of a climate emergency to be asked to approve the demolition of the large, near-new Flemington Road building.

“Taking a wrecking ball to a five-year-old building is wasteful, and creates waste,” he said.

“We cannot let Melbourne become a city of disposable buildings – a city where new buildings are built on the cheap, to be knocked down every 20 years or so.

“We will end up with a throwaway city of junk buildings, as well as an unacceptable environmental cost.”

Buildings account for 66 per cent of all emissions across the City of Melbourne and Reece said adopting sustainable building standards was critical to reducing the city’s carbon footprint.

“We need to see a stronger commitment to upgrading existing buildings for extended use, where viable, as a more carbon-efficient alternative to demolition,” Reece said. “We need to construct buildings to last, not cheap disposable rubbish.”

Andrea Zohar, planner with planning consultancy UPco, represented the building’s owners at the council meeting, and said the site was “currently looking pretty tired” and was “grossly underutilised”.

Zohar said the owners had considered retrofitting the building, rather than demolishing it.

The site of the proposed RMIT Village redevelopment.

“When you look at what we’re offering, what is a significant contribution to student facilities with much larger scale communal areas out there [in North Melbourne] is something that can’t be achieved by retrofitting,” she said.

Reece urged Melbourne to ensure disposable buildings didn’t go up in the first place and push for viable alternatives to demolition such as retrofitting and adaptive reuse.

However, he said the proposed RMIT Village redevelopment met the planning controls for the site so issuing a permit for the demolition and construction was “the correct decision”.

“But let the word go forth that the era of the disposable building is over, and the construction of new low-grade buildings with a short life span will not be tolerated in the City of Melbourne,” he said.

The City of Melbourne approved the demolition of the existing building and construction of a new building at the RMIT Village development.

Just across the road from the RMIT Village development at the University of Melbourne, a Retrofit Symposium has been taking place for the past two days.

Sarah Bell, City of Melbourne chair in urban resilience and innovation, said Australia was “behind the eight-ball” compared to the rest of the world when it came to retrofitting buildings, as developers opted to do knockdown rebuilds instead.

“Our planning system is getting better at delivering energy-efficient buildings, but it doesn’t yet consider the energy used to construct a building or resources wasted in demolition,” she said.

By 2050, Bell said embodied carbon, the amount of carbon emitted during construction, could account for 85 per cent of carbon emissions from Australia’s building stock.

“In London, developments like [RMIT Village] are assessed on full life-cycle impacts, including materials and energy wasted when buildings are demolished,” Bell said. “That means there needs to be very strong justification to demolish an existing building.”

In contrast, Victoria’s planning system does not require developers to consider the whole lifecycle of their projects.

“If we are to meet our carbon emissions targets, we need to account for carbon wasted in demolition of buildings and carbon emitted to build new ones,” Bell said.

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