Garden cities of tomorrow
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 29: Prosper or Perish
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Tone Wheeler
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Tone Wheeler's biography and other articles by this writer
A projected Australian population of thirty-six million people by 2050 is being touted as a figure to fear. The pressure on food supply, lifestyle, natural resources, transport, housing and urbanisation, the thinking goes, means ‘we’ll all be rooned.’ Yet the raw numbers and past experience suggest that it is not such a problem for the supply of housing or the quality of our cities. If the projected number is reached, it will constitute a 65 per cent increase over forty years. Four decades ago the population was 12.7 million, a growth over the equivalent period of 75 per cent.
In 1970 housing was quite different – blocks of land in the major capitals were twice the size, but houses were half as big as today’s two-storey McMansions, with half as much glass, cars and appliances. This is the 2x2x2x2x2 phenomenon. Forty years ago, however, the average number of occupants in each dwelling was almost twice what it is today, even allowing for a greater diversity of household make-up and an increase in unoccupied holiday homes, which skews the figures.
Following the numbers, there is an easy solution to housing an increasing population: go back to the 1970s home-occupancy rates and add one or two people to every household. Problem solved. But contemporary ways of living and population diversity make this solution simplistic.
The Australian domestic lifestyle is distinguished by the ability to live outdoors, in private. There is a symbiotic relationship between freestanding houses with front and back gardens, which make up three-quarters of the housing stock, and the very low density in the sprawling areas of Australian cities of only ten houses on each hectare. Unlike denser cities, where apartment dwellers use public gardens for recreation, in Australia and other countries that heeded Ebenezer Howard’s call for the Garden Cities of Tomorrow, recreation was increasingly privatised in the backyard.
The interiors of contemporary Australian homes are like those elsewhere – ever larger open-plan spaces, multiple bathrooms, bling kitchens and lightless media rooms. The big difference is outside, where a transitional space, an outdoor room, is common. From the early 1800s this was grafted on to imported English and Irish plans. A veranda was added for sun and rain protection, and the house and outbuildings were often linked and stretched to create an internal courtyard for added security. The word ‘veranda’ comes from the Spanish baranda, meaning railing or handrail, and was corrupted by English troops as they invaded the New World.
The Irish novelist Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman provides an idiosyncratic way of seeing the difference between the houses of the old and new worlds. The hero is an expert on the writings of a fictitious scholar whose many hilarious theories include ideas about roofless and wall-less houses expressed through tale of a builder who made houses as ‘wall-less roofs’ and ‘roofless walls’, and who cautions against their use as ‘many more than one sick person lost his life in an ill-advised quest for health in these fantastic dwellings.’
To Australian eyes such houses are perfectly reasonable: our verandas and courtyards are seen as vital in keeping the occupants alive and comfortable. By the early 1980s Australian houses had blurred the lines between inside and outside, and outdoor lifestyles became a defining mark of yuppies – or, as Australian Crawl sang in ‘Beautiful People’, ‘the garden’s full of furniture, the house is full of plants.’
Recent home designs have gone further, combining the veranda and courtyard into one space – the ‘sala’ or ‘al fresco’ – and at display villages, such as Homeworld in western Sydney, every one is fitted with a barbecue and dining area. These are the ne plus ultra of Australian living, giving us the largest houses in the world but creating a dire sustainability problem that will be exacerbated as these houses march over ‘the sunlit plains extended’ as the population doubles.
FOR A LONG time suburbia appeared to be a monoculture. But there have always been alternatives, including the walk-up flats built before and after World War II. They accounted for less than a fifth of all dwellings and their compact size made them less visible, at least to politicians and planners, if not the neighbours. The increasing diversity of the population and building types has meant that in the past ten years the number of apartments has greatly increased; in Sydney more apartments than houses are being approved, and are becoming more noticeable and controversial as a result.
The twentieth-century ideal of an Australian monoculture living in uniform suburbia has long gone, if it ever really existed. Australia now has one of the most diverse populations in the world, yet the freestanding single-family home still accounts for three-quarters of the housing stock. We are now building a far greater range of housing, including duplexes, townhouses, and low-rise, medium-rise and high-rise dwellings in response to changing demographics.
Consumers are demanding more housing choice, and planning policies are struggling to catch up. The traditional family of two adults and at least two children accounts for less than half of all households – extended at one end by multigenerational families of six or more and share households, and at the other by an increasing number of couples and singles.
In response, an array of different housing types is being designed and built to challenge the current duo-culture of single-family house or medium-rise apartment. The need to have the largest homes in the world is being challenged. A survey of emerging housing options shows how the future population could easily be accommodated within the existing cities, and with greater amenity. So while the simple arithmetical solution of adding one or two people to each household would not work, with smarter housing design and planning policies this might be achieved in a way that increases amenity and affordability – and creates a new style of garden city.
Change is afoot in suburbia. The fringes of the cities continue to be developed, but economic factors are forcing variation as affordable shrinking lots force an evolution in house designs. Display villages now include many more smaller homes (partly so first-home buyers can afford them). On these smaller lots, the problem of overshadowing from adjacent two-storey houses is addressed by moving the living areas from the front (where they were from 1900 to the Jennings houses of the 1970s) to the rear, where they face gardens – not yards – with an outdoor room on the corner so the plan can be oriented to north on a variety of sites. A few recent designs have started to address the idea of a multi-generational home, with a separate flat within the house, often downstairs so the grandparents can have easy access and stay home to mind the children while both parents are earning wages to pay off the mortgage.
The idea of two houses in one has a long tradition: the granny flat, frequently illegally built, provided additional accommodation for granny (who often tipped her savings into the home) or supplementary income from a lodger, to offset rising costs or enable the changing family to remain in a desirable area. This form of single-owner dual occupancy is being increasingly codified in most cities; it has recently been reintroduced in New South Wales after being needlessly withdrawn by Premier Bob Carr in the mid-1990s to curry favour with Sydney’s upper-middle-class residents, who feared their suburbs would be overdeveloped by stealth. Bans don’t stop the second dwellings being added; they just drive the process underground (or under stumps, in Brisbane), where it is unregulated and consequently often poorly done. It may surprise local councillors to learn how many garages are actually occupied as flats.
As well as new designs, recent subdivisions are also fostering different house types, including courtyard houses on zero-lot lines (houses built to one boundary to reduce the waste created by the traditional one-metre setbacks), or townhouses (two zero-lot lines). These can work on lots of 200 to 250 square metres, a quarter of the traditional block.
This will potentially double, perhaps triple, suburban density – but it is still not really sustainable. Most fringe suburbs are poorly served by public transport and the services are too scattered to be efficient. The problem is epitomised by the recently opened zero-energy house in outer Melbourne, built by Henley Homes and designed in conjunction with the CSIRO, which is monitoring it. The house is fairly conventional, with an added airlock for thermal comfort, yet contemporary in its façade and internal finishes. It operates with no demand on the local water or electricity supply, although it must be connected to both: to fluoridate drinking water and feed solar electricity back into the grid. Its overall sustainability is limited by distance from the nearest station – ten kilometres away, at Epping – and the absence of shops, schools and health clinics, things typically missing in all fringe developments. Planners argue that these services will come, but there are often lags, so Landcom in Sydney and VicUrban in Melbourne are demanding that the ‘village centre’ be built concurrently, although public transport inevitably arrives much later (or seemingly never, in Sydney).
The battle to design a freestanding sustainable or zero-energy home has been won, but it is a pyrrhic victory: these are now seen as worthy objects whose dependence on a massive infrastructure and hidden transport costs hinders rather than aids the development of a sustainable city. The push is on to increase residential density, but we are in danger of throwing the baby out with the grey water in a rush to medium– and high-rise apartments. A century of freestanding homes has left Australians in love with the possibilities of indoor and outdoor private life, a life that will not be easily squeezed into towers.
Urban planners argue that high-cost services are often underused in existing suburbs which have undergone generational change; and that it would be more sensible, and sustainable, to increase the usefulness of existing services by increasing the local population. This comes with the added benefit that if the new buildings are well designed, they may make little demand for electricity and water on the existing infrastructure.
These infill developments are sometimes called six-packs, as they seek to replace a single house on a suburban block with three, four or – optimally, from a developer’s perspective – six townhouses or apartments. But compactness cannot be achieved simply by squashing existing houses closer together: they would overshadow each other, cars would dominate the streetscape, the houses wouldn’t cross-ventilate and the private garden would be lost.
There is a way, however, to combine the more efficient higher-density housing with the best aspects of the freestanding home – that is, individuality, privacy, variety and, most critically, access to a private garden. This is the holy grail for sustainable housing, and the solution may well be a scheme that is upside down, inside out and back to front.