Urban sprawl is a concept architects, planners, developers and homeowners have opinions about. It’s often the topic of commentary in local newspapers and online community forums. Yet, it’s not a topic that architects — the creative thinkers, problem solvers and designers of the buildings that occupy our ever-sprawling cities — often have the opportunity to discuss on a critical level. As one of the leading platforms within the architecture and design sector, Australian Design Review not only champions design excellence, but we also provide an opportunity for our community to share their expert knowledge and insights into the topics that matter to them, and by extension, all Australians. 

Matthews Architects managing director and senior architect  Gerald Matthews has dedicated his career to designing human-centric buildings across multiple typologies in Adelaide and beyond. Reflecting on the release of the Greater Adelaide Regional Plan in September, ADR asked Matthews to share his thoughts on our seeming obsession with maintaining the rigid nature of city grids, and where we might find creative solutions to the challenges of urban population growth. 

Adelaide is well known as a city that does not embrace changes readily. This has sometimes been a good thing, especially when we’ve managed to hold on to good things that other cities (I’m looking at you Melbourne) gave up along the way.

Change is scary; however, no change is scarier because it only has one eventual outcome – decay.  If change is therefore necessary for a healthy city, we have an opportunity to direct our changes to ensure that the best days of Adelaide are still ahead of us.

For as long as I can remember, I have heard Colonel William Light spoken of as if he were a visionary who founded a city based on profound values and an inspirational notion of how a city should be designed.  

Although I respect his contributions and the positive impact of his Adelaide work, I think it’s important to view his choices and ideas objectively. 

Aside from the difficult truths of colonial settlement, which I’m sure we will all continue to grapple with for as long as we share this place, it’s important to remember that Colonel Light’s vision could only be expected to see so far into the future. 

In my opinion, the time has come not to abandon it, but to look beyond it and imagine what may come next.

Adelaide, like most planned cities, is a grid. Occasionally, there are breaks in the pattern or the grid is skewed, bent into curves, with a diagonal here and there. But nonetheless, it is still a grid. And it is efficient. 

However, the grid’s structure is not well-suited to hilly terrain, causing it to break against the base of the Hills, like water around the edges of a lake.

The grid has served us well so far. So well, that we’ve been happy to just let it keep spreading north and south. 

We are slowly discovering something that Los Angeles and a few other cities discovered many decades earlier: When the grid keeps expanding, the grid that is the essential circulatory system keeping the city alive starts to suffer from clogged arteries and veins. Occasionally a stent, like a road widening, or a bypass, also known as an expressway, is needed so that the whole city doesn’t have a stroke or heart failure. You get the idea.

For Los Angeles, the rise of the freeway was part and parcel of the dream of personal transportation and private car ownership. I suppose the thinking was that if you want to sell more cars, you need more roads, fewer buses and trains and a profound sense of individualism. 

London’s development was different from planned cities like Adelaide. It grew naturally over time and faced challenges adapting to the Industrial Revolution. At times, it was barely habitable. However, in 1863, it opened its first underground railway, even though the population was only 60,000.

This might seem strange, but there’s a different idea at play compared to Adelaide. While London itself had a smaller population, it was part of a larger network of towns with a combined population of around three million.

Adelaide is a large single city; it is a large solitary organism with an internal circulatory system that keeps its cells alive. Many other cities are better understood as communities of smaller organisms living together; separate creatures but with interconnecting relationships.  

New York is like this, which is why if you ask a local where they are from, they will often stipulate they are from a specific part, such as Brooklyn, Queens or Staten Island. They may also get very defensive about which parts of the whole they consider to be completely separate, like New Jersey.  

Greater London is also characterised by its interconnected boroughs and towns. It is too vague to simply say someone is from London without specifying a particular borough or neighbourhood such as Greenwich, Camden, Brixton or Notting Hill. 

It’s easy to think that this happens because big cities grow so large. As cities sprawl, they take in smaller towns around them and turn them into suburbs (hence the defensiveness of locals wanting to preserve and acknowledge some remnant of identity and autonomy). 

However, there are also cities like Buda-Pest and Albury-Wodonga where two towns are close together but separated by a river or a border. These towns work together, so they don’t need to be part of one big city. This shows that big cities don’t have to take over smaller towns.

For this reason, I found it fascinating to see that in the Draft Greater Adelaide Regional Plan, the idea of what constitutes “Adelaide” includes Victor Harbor, Goolwa, Cape Jervis, Mallala, Kapunda and Murray Bridge.  

At worst, this is a warning that Adelaide will one day sprawl so much that it will have consumed all these places. At best, it is the beginning of a process to better connect these separate and distinct places.

Let’s take a closer look at a problem that’s been making headlines lately: housing.

Whether it is a housing supply problem or a land supply problem, a housing affordability problem or a generational wealth disparity problem, a borrowing capacity problem, a wage growth problem or a taxation policy problem, let’s take a look at some potential solutions. 

One easy short-term solution, with terrible long-term consequences, is to accelerate the conversion of farmland and countryside into suburbs, and along with it fuel the sprawl that will result in the city consuming the towns and digesting them into suburbs.

Another short-term solution, with significant medium-term risks, is to build houses at break-neck speed. It takes training and skill to build a home that will last. 

How about modular or pre-fabricated construction? People have been building parts of houses in factories for a long time. If we can build cars on an assembly line, why not houses? However, designing a car model and building a factory takes years. To be cost-effective, you need to make thousands of the same or similar houses. Once you start, you need to keep making them to justify the cost of the factory.

Modular construction and prefabrication are important strategies, but they can’t solve all our housing problems. If done poorly, they could create more problems for future homeowners.

So what is the answer? There’s no single answer, but here are a few ideas to get us started.

Selectively embrace density. Paris is sixteen times denser than Adelaide. If we’re clever about it there are huge advantages to having more people living in existing suburbs, like more employment, shops, cafes and entertainment. 

Invest in the parklands. Don’t think of them as some greenspace for city-goes. Think of them as the botanical gardens for the Southern Hemisphere. Once they are on their way to rivalling Central Park in New York, Kensington Gardens in London or the Tiergarten in Berlin, I am confident that the idea of living in an apartment within the city will have universal and global appeal.

Connect the towns and rebuild the railways. I love the Adelaide Hills, but you need a car to get around there. If we had trains to the towns and made them better places to live and walk around, more people might want to live there. This could help stop the city from spreading out too much. We would need to have more small and medium-sized schools instead of a few very big ones.

Connect to the regions. Of the 1.77 million people who live in South Australia, only 350,000 don’t live in Adelaide. We failed to adequately invest in regional South Australia and Adelaide is suffering the effects of having 80 per cent of the population needing to live where 80 per cent of the work and the infrastructure is. Housing in Adelaide is certainly far more expensive than only a few years ago, while regional cities and towns not too far away have remained comparatively affordable.

Politicians tend to spend on infrastructure based on where people (voters) are now, not based on where people should be in the future. Personally, I’d love to see a new era for the various regions of South Australia driven by lifestyle. To do this, employment and infrastructure must come first, starting with transport.  In other parts of the world, this is known as Transport Oriented Development (TOD).

Experiment more. Most of Adelaide is made up of suburbs with houses on blocks of land and streets in front. This isn’t the only way to do it. West Lakes has houses with streets behind them and lakes in front. In Marseille, Le Corbusier built a whole suburb in one big building with gardens around it.

This doesn’t mean that grids are bad or that all suburbs should be the same. Adelaide needs different kinds of suburbs, houses and ways of living.

Many people in Adelaide don’t like change. But it’s important to try new things. If we don’t change, we will end up in the same place.

Images supplied. Photography of international cities by Gerald Matthews.

For more insights on the future of cities, read Tope Adesina’s reflections on the Living Cities Forum event earlier this year.