Green Your Laneway program
There are over four hundred lanes in the central city and even more across the City of Melbourne’s neighbourhood precincts. The opportunities for laneway greening are immense. We’ve been trialling and testing laneway greening for several years, and have refined our approaches to enable community members to implement greenery in the places where they live, work and play.
Pilot projects
In an Australian first, we established the Green Your Laneway program to transform city laneways into leafy, green and welcoming places for Melbourne’s community to enjoy. This pilot program tested if greening could improve amenity, cool the city, attract visitors, and support community health, wellbeing and social cohesion.
As part of the program we developed a world-first
interactive map to demonstrate laneways that were suited for greening, based on the amount of sunlight they receive, exposure to wind and physical characteristics.
Using our interactive map data and through a community voting process, we delivered four green laneways at:
- Katherine Place
- Meyers Place
- Guildford Lane
- Coromandel Place.
These green laneway projects were completed in 2017 and were evaluated in 2023.
For more information about the pilot project community engagement process visit
Participate Melbourne – Green Your Laneway.
Evaluation and models for future laneway greening
Five years after greening the laneways, we evaluated the pilot projects to understand the factors that contribute to successful, enduring laneway greening. The evaluation was endorsed by Council at its meeting on 25 July 2023.
Based on our findings, we’ve developed three models to promote future laneway greening across the entire city centre, in ways that meet community expectations, and create sustainable, lasting and socially inclusive greening. These models are:
- Community-led greening that empowers community members to implement small-scale, temporary greening in pots and plants on Council-owned laneway footpaths through the Greening Melbourne permit process. In this model, we provide guidance and permission that enables community members to appropriately green local spaces.
- Community and business led greening that is supported with matched co-funding, through the introduction of a laneway greening stream to the Urban Forest Fund grants. This model supports private greening on building facades and walls that interface with laneway environments.
- Council driven projects will continue to be identified and implemented by the City of Melbourne where there are opportunities to do so.
We’re sharing our evaluation to provide publicly-accessible information to other local governments and cities who are interested to learn about our approaches to laneway greening.
Download the evaluation report.