Cairns City Centre Master Plan

What improvements do you think can be made to help recognise and support the key heritage elements of the City Centre?

What improvements do you think can be made to enhance the strategies to express Cairns' cultural landscape within the Cairns City Centre?

The City Centre Master Plan seeks to recognise and support the key cultural and heritage elements that make the City Centre unique, with key strategies including:

• Create an arts hub around the new entertainment precinct 
• Create places for buskers, street performers and small scale events in public spaces
• Enlarging Fogarty Park for larger scale informal gathering and events by ‘completing’ the leisure precinct with a new park over the Pier car park. 
• Highlight special heritage places - European heritage (buildings) in streetscape; Describe Chinese Heritage in Grafton; Indigenous Heritage in the City Heart; Environmental Heritage
• Support more events in the City through the design of places

Which of the activation and accessibility strategies do you think Council should focus on to deliver the greatest benefit to the City Centre?

What benefit do you think a more compact City Centre will have on its activity and vibrancy?

The Cairns City Centre has the potential to be more vibrant, compact, intense, diversified and defined.  Key Activity and Accessibility strategies in the Master Plan include:

• Change the definition of the edge of the City Centre – make it smaller and concentrate the activity within.
• Encourage mixes of uses and other economic opportunities such as medical tourism, education and corporate headquarters for businesses operating in

What improvements do you think can be made to enhance the strategies to provide greater green spaces throughout the City Centre and its buildings?

The Master Plan strongly supports the special characteristics of Cairns by encouraging greener built environments. Key strategies include:

• Encourage the urban rainforest throughout the City – not only in streets but as part of the buildings, upper level terraces and skyline.
• Create urban verandahs, shaded outdoor rooms and tropical terraces unlike any other in Australia.
• Enhance connections to the water.
• Enhance and reinforce laneways through streetscape treatments.
• Build on the heritage of verandahs and colonnades.
• Reinforce the special corners on the street grid.

Which of the strategies do you think Council should focus on to deliver the greatest benefit to the City Centre?

What improvements do you think can be made to enhance these strategies?

The vision for the City Centre is to become a green, tropical, attractive city that is safe, friendly, efficient, accessible and appropriate in scale.  Key strategies include:

• Roll out of simple programs of large scale street greening to cool streets.
• Create deep cool awnings where there is no shade.
• Create a new pavement which is special to the City Centre and enhances its look and presentation.
• ‘Shield Street Heart’ – a new heart and public space with sheltered seating and gathering spaces, refurbishment of the seating areas around the existing fig trees, play spaces for children and grassy areas for seating and respite.
• ‘Greening of Grafton’ – new urban parks in Grafton Street which created shaded green recreation spaces.
• ‘Pier Park’ – a new green gathering space built over the car park.
• Trinity Inlet – a network of boardwalks and public spaces