In one of my favourite quotes from Robin Boyd, he asks, “Is it just that the Australian public clings to its depressing little boxes because it knows no better, has seen no better design?” The assumption being, if only we were aware of other alternatives to the suburban single-family house, we would demand better, and the market would provide it. This is the thinking that underpins the ideas competition and demonstration project approach, where governments make a call for new ideas, and attempt to use these ideas to encourage the development industry to build anything apart from more depressing little boxes.
The past decade has seen various states and territories produce versions of this approach: Density and Diversity Done Well (2017) in Queensland, Demonstration Housing Project (2019) in the ACT, Future Homes (2021) in Victoria, and Missing Middle (2017) and Pattern Book (2024) in New South Wales. All of these programs were run by state government architect offices, and all seek roughly the same goal of creating new typologies of housing that are denser, more sustainable, more affordable, and more connected to community and infrastructure.
These schemes typically follow a common structure. They start with a competition, where architects are invited to submit design ideas in response to a particular set of challenges, sites or typologies. Out of these submissions, a handful of designs are awarded as winners, with much associated fanfare and press interest. Then, in some instances, the government may work in partnership with a housing provider or developer to build a demonstration project – a real prototype – to generate more press and show that it really is possible to build something new. In some cases, the government will make some edits to planning policy, offer a streamlined approval process, or set aside some budget, to help overcome the barriers that may prevent these projects from being built. Then finally, the hope is that having demons trated that another kind of building is possible, the private sector will leap into action and a rush of developments will follow, changing the industry.
The idea is not new. One of the most iconic demonstration projects is the Weissenhofsiedlung (Weissenhof Estate), built on a site overlooking the German city of Stuttgart in 1927. Initiated by the Deutscher Werkbund, a cooperative institute of artists, capitalists and craftspeople, the project comprised a neighbour-hood of 60 “workers’” houses, to demonstrate new ways of living and new prefabricated construction techniques. Led by Mies van der Rohe, the design team included 16 of the most exper-imental architects of the time, including Le Corbusier, Hans Scharoun and Walter Gropius. While the homes were too expensive in construction and furnishing to be within reach of the intended clientele, they were visited by some 500,000 people in three months of the exhibition and published widely, coming to stand as a manifesto for the Modern movement and ultimately disseminating modernist design ideas across the globe.
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It’s fair to say the competitions and demonstration projects in Australia have been less impactful. Only one of Victoria’s Future Homes projects has broken ground, in the regional city of Shepparton, initiated by affordable housing provider Beyond Housing. And while the main incentive for developers to adopt these standardised plans is streamlined approvals, another scheme proposed for a site in the Melbourne suburb of Rosanna was denied planning permission by Banyule Council due to the objections of local residents. As the scheme’s developer, Jim Clark-Sullivan, told The Age, “The whole point of this program is that it’s supposed to circumvent this sort of NIMBYism, to enable medium-density development on good sites.”
The ACT’s Demonstration Housing Project has produced Stellulata Cohousing, a resident-led co-housing scheme of three attached dwellings in Ainslie, Canberra. The project, designed by Brett Lowe Architect, is at once modest and pioneering; simple, considered architecture, with an emphasis on aging in place, shared facilities and energy performance, all documented with openness on the project’s blog. However, it appears to be the only built outcome of the government’s scheme.
In other instances, the winners of ideas competitions are celebrated with press releases and videos, while it’s unclear or too soon to tell whether anything will be built. After all this effort and energy, why have there been so few built outcomes? Why don’t these schemes have more impact, or lead to lasting change?
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It could be that these schemes set out to answer the wrong question. There’s no lack of awareness of new ideas or alternative typologies, it’s that the momentum behind business-as-usual is so hard to challenge. In the 55 years since Boyd complained about “depressing little boxes,” the mechanism of suburban development has only become more elaborate and entrenched. The suburbs are a product of mortgage lending, real estate, precinct planning, available skills and trades, transportation planning, immense political pressure applied by industry lobby groups, as well as cultural ideas of identity and aspiration, located somewhere deep inside the nation’s indefinable psyche. Yale University professor and historian of the suburbs Dolores Hayden describes this combination of forces as “suburban growth machines.” And, as the name suggests, the machine only wants to keep growing, to keep chewing up land, relentlessly spreading over the horizon.
To take on a system as voracious as this, a competition for new ideas isn’t enough. To make these schemes more effective would require real investment in building, as well as addressing the “dark matter” that underpins business-as-usual. A few brief ideas to get started:
Land: Governments could find public land, or acquire suitable plots, and make it available for projects that show the way forward.
Policy: A thorough overhaul of planning policies and processes to place desired outcomes of climate and affordability at the centre.
Advice: Provide support for small developers and cooperatives with advice on how to navigate the hoops of bureaucracy.
Backing: Provide low-interest and guaranteed loans for developments that address targets of affordability, sustainability, climate resilience and inclusivity.
Research: Support research into new typologies that reflect the different ways we live today.
Demonstration: Governments could use major projects, such as the 2032 Olympic Games in Brisbane, to build demonstrations on a grand scale.
Regulation: Regulate bad development out of existence. This is a tough political fight, but one worth having. A stick to go alongside the above carrots.
The ideas competition and demonstration project approach is founded on the belief that “if only they knew better!” But changing big complex systems is harder than that. Developers are going to develop. Planners are going to plan. And the growth machine is going to grow. In order to change a system as socially, economically and politically entangled as this, we need more than new designs, we need structural transformation.
— Rory Hyde is an associate professor in architecture, curatorial design and practice at the University of Melbourne. His work is focused on design for the public good and redefining the role of the architect today. His books Future Practice and Architects After Architecture were both awarded the Australian Institute of Architects Award for Architecture in the Media.