Evacuation Diagrams for Mixed-Use Buildings in Australia

Mixed-use buildings are increasingly common in Australian cities. A typical mixed-use development might have retail on the ground floor, commercial offices on levels 1 to 3, and residential apartments from level 4 upward. Some include hotels, medical suites, childcare centres, or gyms within the same building envelope. Each occupancy type has different people, different hours of operation, different risk profiles, and often different fire safety systems.

Under AS 3745:2010, Planning for Emergencies in Facilities, every area of a mixed-use building requires an Emergency Management Plan and compliant evacuation diagrams. The complexity arises because multiple tenants, a building manager, a strata body corporate, and possibly a separate commercial strata may all share responsibility for different parts of the same building.

Why Mixed-Use Buildings Are More Complex

In a single-use building, one Emergency Management Plan and one set of evacuation diagrams covers the entire premises. In a mixed-use building, there are typically multiple layers of emergency planning. The building owner or manager maintains an overarching building emergency plan. Each commercial tenancy maintains its own tenancy-specific plan. The residential component has its own plan, usually managed by the strata body corporate. And each plan has its own set of evacuation diagrams.

The challenge is coordination. If a fire alarm activates on the commercial levels, what happens on the residential levels? Do the residential floors evacuate simultaneously, or do they shelter in place? If the retail tenants evacuate through the ground floor lobby, does that conflict with residents evacuating down the fire stairs to the same lobby? These are real design and planning questions that the building's Emergency Management Plan must address, and the evacuation diagrams must reflect.

AS 3745 requires an Emergency Planning Committee (EPC) for the building. In a mixed-use building, the EPC should include representatives from each major occupancy group: the building manager, a commercial tenant representative, the strata committee (for residential), and any major single tenant (such as a hotel or childcare centre). The EPC is responsible for ensuring that the individual tenancy plans are coordinated with the building-wide plan.

Different Occupant Profiles, Different Risks

The fundamental challenge of mixed-use building evacuation is that different occupants have different capabilities, different awareness levels, and different response times. Office workers are typically ambulant, trained through workplace drills, and present during business hours. Retail customers are transient, unfamiliar with the building, and may be present during extended trading hours. Residential occupants may be sleeping, elderly, or have mobility limitations, and they are present 24 hours a day.

This means that a single evacuation diagram design does not work for all areas. The commercial level diagram should be detailed and technical, showing warden positions, intercommunication points, and zone-specific procedures. The retail diagram should be simple and visitor-focused, with clear exit routes and assembly area information. The residential diagram should assume that the reader may be in their apartment at 3am, half-asleep, and unfamiliar with anything beyond their own floor.

Each diagram must be designed for its specific audience while remaining consistent with the building-wide evacuation strategy.

• Commercial occupants: trained, ambulant, present during business hours
• Retail visitors: transient, untrained, may not know the building layout
• Residential occupants: present 24/7, may be sleeping, elderly, or have reduced mobility
• Hotel guests: similar to residential but with even less building knowledge
• Childcare or medical tenants: may have vulnerable occupants requiring assistance

Fire Separation and Compartmentalisation

The National Construction Code (NCC) requires fire separation between different building classifications within a mixed-use building. A residential level (NCC Class 2) must be fire-separated from a commercial level (NCC Class 5) and from a retail level (NCC Class 6). This separation is achieved through fire-rated floors, walls, and doors that contain a fire within its classification zone for a defined period.

Evacuation diagrams should clearly show fire compartment boundaries, particularly on levels that transition between occupancy types. A fire on the retail ground floor should be contained by the fire-rated floor slab above, allowing commercial tenants on level 1 to evacuate in a controlled manner rather than in panic. The diagrams should communicate this by showing the compartmentalisation and the available egress routes from each compartment.

Fire stairs in mixed-use buildings are typically shared by all occupancy types but may have restricted access at certain levels (for example, residential levels may have swipe card access to prevent public access to residential floors). The diagrams must accurately show which fire stairs are accessible from each level and any access restrictions that apply.

Coordination Between Strata and Commercial Management

One of the most common problems in mixed-use building emergency planning is the lack of coordination between the commercial building manager and the residential strata body corporate. In some buildings, these are the same entity. In others, they are completely separate organisations with different management companies, different AGMs, and different approaches to emergency planning.

When the commercial and residential components are managed separately, there is a real risk that each side develops its own Emergency Management Plan in isolation, resulting in conflicting procedures (one plan says evacuate via stair A, the other says shelter in place), incompatible warden structures, and diagrams that do not tell a consistent story.

The solution is an overarching building Emergency Management Plan, required by AS 3745, that sits above the individual tenancy and strata plans. This building-level plan defines the evacuation strategy for the whole building, the alarm response protocol (which zones evacuate, which shelter in place), and the coordination mechanisms between wardens and the fire panel. Every tenancy-level and strata-level diagram should be consistent with this master plan.

Assembly Areas and Evacuation Staging

In a large mixed-use building, the assembly area can become overcrowded if all occupancy types evacuate simultaneously. A 20-storey building with 200 apartments, 8 commercial floors, and a ground-floor retail precinct could discharge more than 2,000 people to a single assembly area. If that assembly area is a footpath or car park across the road, it may not have the capacity to safely accommodate everyone.

The building Emergency Management Plan should address assembly area capacity and may designate multiple assembly areas for different occupancy groups or different building zones. The evacuation diagrams must reflect whichever assembly area is designated for the area the diagram covers.

Some mixed-use buildings use a staged evacuation approach where the fire floor and the floor above evacuate immediately, and other floors wait for an "all clear" or further instruction from the warden system before evacuating. This approach reduces stair congestion and assembly area overload. If staged evacuation is used, the diagrams and warden training must clearly communicate the staging protocol.

Get Evacuation Diagrams for Your Mixed-Use Building

EvacPath creates AS 3745-compliant evacuation diagrams for mixed-use buildings across Australia, including commercial, residential, retail, and hospitality components. We understand the coordination requirements and produce diagrams that are consistent across all occupancy types within the building.

Send us your floor plan and we will deliver print-ready PDFs in 3 to 5 business days. No site visit required. Pricing starts at A$70 per diagram. Basic Package A$280 for up to 4 diagrams, Standard Package A$420 for up to 8 diagrams.