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Town planning in the City of Yarra.

Richmond · Fitzroy · Collingwood · Abbotsford · Carlton North · Clifton Hill · Cremorne

Yarra is Melbourne's inner-industrial heartland turned mixed-use success story — Victorian terraces, warehouse conversions and new apartment buildings within metres of each other in Richmond, Collingwood and Fitzroy, almost all of it under a Heritage Overlay.

Planning here is dense in every sense: heritage streetscapes with strict expectations, design and development controls in Cremorne and along the main corridors, Environmental Audit Overlays on former industrial land, and a car parking regime where reduction requests are a normal part of most applications rather than an exception.

Yarra applications live or die on two questions we resolve early: what the heritage fabric can absorb, and how the parking and traffic story will be told. Warehouse conversions, shop-top housing, licensed premises and change-of-use matters in the mixed-use spine are the recurring work — each one an exercise in fitting contemporary use into a protected shell.

The planning framework

Controls you'll commonly meet in Yarra.

Every property is different — these are the zones and overlays that most often shape applications in this municipality. Each links to the current ordinance in the Yarra planning scheme.

FAQs

Questions we’re asked most.

If you have a question that’s not here, call us — we answer honestly, whether or not it leads to work.

  • Yarra grants parking reductions more readily than most councils — the scheme itself recognises the inner-city context, and many activity-centre properties sit where a full statutory rate is neither achievable nor expected. The application still needs a proper parking demand assessment, and the difference between a granted and refused reduction is usually the quality of that evidence.

Got a site, a permit, or a refusal on your desk?

An obligation-free conversation is the fastest way to see if we can help. We respond within 24 hours — usually much sooner.