Feature

Sydney will struggle to build homes and public transport infrastructure for a predicted population of six million people by 2036. This is not helped by the fact that government and the public cling to outmoded, and inefficient – some might say ugly – medium density housing models superseded elsewhere 60 years ago by better, more effective alternatives.

The demographer Bernard Salt recently noted that, “There is a significant and growing cultural divergence between different groups”, which he attributed to an economic division between niches for wealthy inner city elites, who live within 10 kilometres of the city centre, and housing for battlers, migrants and assorted low-income earners, who have now been flung to the city’s edge. The division is reflected in very different housing styles. Income, Salt asserts, is one of the key drivers of social division.

The middle and outer suburbs of Melbourne and Sydney comprise more than six million residents out of a total of 22 million. These outer edge suburbs account for the vast majority of each city’s growth. By comparison with the inner city, the residents of outer ring areas typically have lower incomes (by an average of 27 percent to 50 percent in Melbourne), are less well-educated (33 percent compared to 50 percent with bachelor or higher degrees) and have a much higher proportion of families (85 percent compared to 45 percent of households). Migration to edge suburbs increases the exposure of families
to poor public transport, health, maternity and educational services – reducing opportunity.

A wider offering of housing models that create opportunities for integrating the different economic, social and cultural groupings may prevent this. Forty years ago, dissatisfaction in Denmark with the rigid high-rise model led to the development of new forms of dense, low-rise housing. There are few similar examples in Australia. Alex Popov’s Heritage Park development at Bowral, in association with Marchese and Partners, though targeted at a demographic of retirees and affluent empty nesters, offers an alternative to the widespread exhaustion and alienation endemic to Australia’s struggling edge suburbs.

In Australia, we inherited the Anglo-Saxon prejudice against communal shared arrangements in housing. Families tend to live separately, imprisoned within an exclusive nuclear realm – not for the English the large uncurtained windows found in the Netherlands. As Popov explains, “We are up against the ingrained prejudice that the English brought here, that the townhouse is for the poor.” Popov, though Sydney-based, trained at the Royal Academy in Copenhagen, where he was exposed to a wide range of Scandinavian housing types. Australia has a very different heritage to Scandinavia – solutions that are appropriate there, may not readily translate here – however, Heritage Park draws upon the communal, Scandinavian model, while also catering to the Australian attachment to a backyard outdoors. It demonstrates that it is possible to make this model genuinely appealing to Australian consumers.

It is no surprise to discover that the challenge to the free-standing isolated dwelling has come from other cultures, notably Scandinavia, in particular from Denmark and Finland. In Denmark, Popov contends, group housing is much more about social priorities. “The idea of social values having a priority, the sense of belonging, sense of collectivism, the sense of unity, striving together, sharing,” he says. The Finnish model, as he describes it, is more about man’s passion for nature. “You get a good result in Finland because you get that – what seems to be very logical – no buildings should be taller than the trees around them. Buildings should respect the rocks, the planting; whether it is a church or a singular house they all adhere to that same philosophy. It is not a mechanical thing, ‘we should build like that’. Australia doesn’t share the same collectivism or the same social condition.”

In the postwar period, the existing suburban pattern was challenged by a model that grouped houses sensitively around wooded areas or lakes – Jørn Utzon’s Kingo courtyard houses and his ‘string of pearls’ at Fredensborg spring to mind immediately.
Earlier still, Viggo Møller-Jensen’s Atelier houses on Grønemore Allé for a community of artists in Utterslev in 1943, is justly celebrated.

There have been other notable examples more recently too. Vandkunsten’s Koglerne co-housing, at Skovbrynet, 2004, for young people with serious disabilities, fuses the individual units in a seemingly haphazard yet unified group, which, like Lansdowne
Crescent, Bath (1794), responds flexibly with its serpentine curves to the demands both of town planning and terrain.

Vilhelm Lauritzen architects’ Naestved housing, south of Copenhagen, is close to becoming acceptable in the Australian context – Danes have, in the intervening years since the 70s, become more bourgeois. Naestved’s two-storey bent wing shapes are crisp, orderly and open, in a restrained, gentle and very Danish way. If Australians are ever to be weaned off their diet of McMansions, the Naestved model offers a superior alternative that should be acceptable to edge suburb battlers, with its accessibility to landscape, outdoor play space for children and more efficient land use.