Infrastructure Archives • Orterra

How can Urban Farming help save our Environment

October 30, 2023November 23, 2023 administratorEnvironment, Infrastructure, Property Development and Commercial

Feature Image courtesy of https://www.futurewild.com.au/ Urban farming is defined as “an industry located… within a town, a city or a metropolis, which grows or raises, processes and distributes a diversity of food and non-food products”. It has been suggested that urban farming may be a solution to some of our problems. The environmental impacts of urbanisation have become a growing concern across Australia and the world. It is predicted that by 2050 the functional capacity of cities will need to support over 70% of the world’s population increasing the environmental impacts of urbanised centres. In Australia, the spread of urbanisation […]

Water Sensitive Urban Design

October 2, 2023November 17, 2023 administratorEducation, Environment, Infrastructure

Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) is a concept that’s appearing more and more in local government planning policies across Australia, and rightfully so. It’s a concept that Orterra have embraced for many years because it just makes sense, for the environment as well as for the individual projects we design and deliver. Did you know that Biodiversity is one of our key values as an organisation? You can see all of our values and how we define them right here, but basically, our work has a focus on improving, rehabilitating and regenerating the biodiversity and the environment of our projects. […]

The Role of Environmental Design in Preventing Crime

July 3, 2023October 22, 2023 administratorEducation, Environment, Infrastructure, Property Development and Commercial, Residential, Tech

Did you know that the design of outdoor spaces plays a significant role in the occurrence of crime? It’s actually a concept we’ve long employed in our work with local government and developers in creating new urban landscapes. It is guided by a set of principles based on extensive research from across the globe. It even has its own acronym – CPTED What is CPTED? Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design, or CPTED, is exactly that: creating a space that feels safe, so that people can make use of it. Sometimes referred to as Designing Out Crime, it’s multidisciplinary and integrates […]

The Role of Green Infrastructure in Biodiversity

June 1, 2023November 23, 2023 administratorEnvironment, Infrastructure, Property Development and Commercial

Biodiversity is essential to thriving communities, yet, we are losing biodiversity at alarming rates. Green infrastructure is a way to protect, maintain and increase the biodiversity in our urban landscapes and is one which requires a considered planning and design approach. We wrote about green infrastructure here, but as we shared, there’s no real clear definition. The description most aligned to the Orterra philosophy is this one created by the European Commission: “Green infrastructure is a strategically planned network of natural and semi-natural areas with other environmental features designed and managed to deliver a wide range of ecosystem services such as water […]

Teenage Girl Spaces – where do our teenage girls fit?

May 10, 2023October 22, 2023 administratorEducation, Environment, Infrastructure

Teenage girls are in a tricky situation. They’ve well and truly outgrown the play equipment and the public parks earmarked for their age group – skateparks and sports and recreation fields – are undeniably over-representatively taken up by boys, metaphorically and literally man-spreading. The lack of suitable and appealing outdoor public spaces for girls is not a new phenomenon, but it is one that we are determined to address in our work as landscape architects. Research tells us that girls use spaces to chat, socialise, linger and connect. Girls schools are leading the way in creating outdoor areas with multi-level […]

The Best Way to Not to Kill Plants….

April 12, 2023April 12, 2023 debbieGarden Design, Infrastructure, Property Development and Commercial, Residential, Tech

Did you know that there’s an Instagram hashtag used over 45,000 times? It’s #plantkiller and while some of the captions are hilarious, we think it’s time to dispel some myths about how ‘hard’ it is to keep plants alive and thriving. Let’s put that hashtag to bed with a little secret that’s not really much of a secret at all: improve your soil, and your plants will thrive. Plants aren’t necessarily fickle or precocious. They put up a good fight and can thrive only to the extent to which their soil is healthy. Not unlike baking a gorgeous cake that’s […]

The Year That was 2022

November 29, 2022November 25, 2022 debbieAbout Orterra, Education, Environment, Garden Design, Infrastructure, Residential

It’s been a year- this has been a challenging year hear at Orterra. We have had some amazing highs and some lows. We have been a bit quiet on the blog front lately. I know we generally like to give your great content consistently however, we have been very busy creating some amazing designs over the last few months for our clients and as we don’t like to provide you with terrible content hence we have let this slide a bit. But don’t worry we have been planning and there are some great things in the pipeline for next year. […]

What do the Terms Cut and Fill Mean?

August 23, 2022August 23, 2022 debbieGarden Design, Infrastructure, Property Development and Commercial, Residential, Tech

When talking to our clients we often use the terms cut and fill. These often come up when discussing how you might change the ground to create different types of spaces in a garden. Often they are terms that clients are unfamiliar with. So wanted to go into more detail today about what this meant. If you have a development or build on a slope, it is extremally helpful if you understand these two terms. And, how it affects your site. Today, we are going to break it down for you. So you can have a better understanding of what […]

To Answer your Question here is our Design Philosophy

July 27, 2022August 1, 2022 debbieAbout Orterra, Education, Infrastructure, Property Development and Commercial, Residential

We often get asked by our clients what is your design philosophy? So, today I wanted to dive a bit deeper into this question of design philosophy and what it means to us here at Orterra. Places People Love That is our philosophy. It is that simple. But what I will do is break it down for you a little more to get to the core of this statement. A philosophy is “a particular system of beliefs, values, and principles.” We here at Orterra have very clear values here that we work from that underpin our design philosophy. Equality Inclusion Empathy Diversity Biodiversity Transparency We use […]

Why is Biodiversity so Important to Orterra?

May 18, 2022January 24, 2023 debbieAbout Orterra, Environment, Infrastructure, Property Development and Commercial, Residential

If you have been following us for a while you might have seen us harp on a bit about biodiversity. It is one of our core company values. Our value states that “We promote, campaign and defend our environment and improve, rehabilitate and regenerate the biodiversity and the environment of our projects.” The 22nd of May is Biodiversity Day we love this time of year as it is a great way for us to really celebrate our environment. It is a time for us in the office to really think about what biodiversity means to us and our work. How […]