City lays out plans for Geelong’s future shopping with Retail Strategy

THERE will need to be an extra 418,000 sqm of retail floor space in the City of Greater Geelong by 2036 to keep up with demand and support future growth, according to the council’s Retail Strategy.
At their meeting last week, councillors adopted the strategy, which states the city has enough retail centres to service the community for the moment but supports expanding or redeveloping existing centres over developing new ones.
The document identifies the need to prepare master plans for several retail centres, including Belmont, Separation Street and Shannon Avenue.
The council also adopted Amendment C393GGEE last week and submitted it to the Minister for Planning requesting approval.
The amendment implements the key elements of the Retail Strategy into the planning scheme but does not rezone or apply overlay controls to land.
It introduces new objectives and strategies, an updated retail hierarchy and an application of floor space caps to sub-regional centres and centres in growth locations.
In late 2019 and early 2020, an independent planning panel reviewed 14 written submissions regarding the amendment from a range of retail and land developer businesses with interests in Greater Geelong.
The panel confirmed the importance of Geelong’s activity centre hierarchy policy and was supportive of the use of floor space caps for sub-regional and growth area centres, and recommended the amendment be adopted with some minor policy changes.
The recommendation for a 11,000 sqm floor space cap for the new Kingston Neighbourhood Activity Centre in Ocean Grove was accepted, but the extension of the proposed boundary of that centre to include both the Commercial 1 and 2 zoned land was rejected.
The council says this is due to concerns a larger centre would be inconsistent with the role and function of a Neighbourhood Activity Centre, would strongly compete with Ocean Grove’s town centre and the Leopold Sub-Regional Activity Centre, and possibly redirect investment away from those centres.