Australian cities: the things we don’t talk about

All the aspirational documents assume that in some way cities are designed, in the sense that an architect designs a building to fit into a landscape.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Architects and urban designers play little part in the design of our cities. No one person can be called “the designer”. There is no specific overall design of a new suburb. The suburban environment is the sum total of a lineal series of uninterested stand alone decisions made by separate actors operating under separate bits of regulation.

The system is the consequence of the historical accretion of development control systems. Recently, most of these have been lumped into the “planning” legislation, but the several separate processes haven’t changed. Nor have the roles of the separate actors whose tasks were established following the introduction of subdivision control around the beginning of the 20th century. Since that time the suburbs are unchanging apart from the detailing on the houses and the layout of roads - dead worms, grid pattern, etc.

Two basic modes of production are available - the subdivide first, build second method and the build first, subdivide second method. The first mode necessarily results in the standard and ubiquitous “detached house” suburb; the second is used for apartments and town houses. The zoning system reinforces the division between the areas created by the one mode and those areas created by the other by calling the one zone “detached housing” and the other “medium density”. Politically, detached house zones have always been seen as normal, with the potentially better designed suburbs less acceptable.

Subdivide first, build second

The production of a detached house suburb is highly efficient. Early cash flows are produced and the repetition of standard house products ensures low cost production. No wonder this production method is able to produce so much housing space at such a low price.

The production process for detached housing is a series of self-contained steps:

The end state plan colours the map to denote the detached house zones, the medium/high density zones and the shopping, commercial and industrial zones. On the detached house land a standard subdivision design is laid out. Roads and services are constructed and, in the process, the land is shaped to create flat building sites ready to receive concrete slabs. Any topsoil and trees that survived the subdivision design may suffer at this point.

The now serviced, subdivided and moon-scaped lots can be sold to individual buyers whose payment provides a cash return to the land subdivider. That role is finished and the builder takes over.

The purchaser selects the desired home from the project home catalogue or display village (five out six new houses are project homes). The project home has not been designed for the site. Rather it has been designed, first, to fit on any standard parcel in any orientation and, second, to produce the maximum space at the minimum cost. The house is essentially wheeled onto the site and set down within standard set backs measured from the newly created boundaries. Project homebuilders sell size not good environmental design.

Because each lot is dealt with as if it is an island no knowledge is needed of the context, including what might happen next door. The set backs are designed to provide a uniform streetscape and ensure a least bad relationship between neighbouring houses. In the process much land is wasted, which is unfortunate, as, in an effort to increase densities, lot sizes have reduced while houses have increased. Backyards, usually put forward as a key virtue of detached housing, are disappearing.

Build first, subdivide second