Imagine you’re travelling through an established Adelaide suburb and pass a “new” knock-down-rebuild (KDR) home that has replaced the dwelling that originally stood for decades. The new house has a large footprint with little to no landscaping. You’re curious…a simple internet search reveals what the previous dwelling looked like and the established garden that enhanced its former glory. And if you were to do similar searches in other Australian cities, you’d see similar changes.
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So, is there an alternative to this trend? With studies showing most Adelaide residential suburbs have significantly less tree canopy than they did 10 years ago (up to 20 per cent in some areas), it is not surprising there is pushback on KDR developments in established suburbs.
But how can we meet the increasing demand for housing that generally only offers “going up” (high density, apartment living) or “going out” (urban sprawl)? Could we maintain/enhance inner urban cultural heritage with their established landscapes, bring community together AND make meaningful change in the housing supply?
This is an obvious gap and a real need for rethinking other ways to design suburban infill. Which is what Dr Damian Madigan, architect and senior lecturer in architecture at UniSA Creative, has been researching and advocating for the past decade.
As part of his PhD, Damian’s Alternative Infill thesis explored the adaptive reuse of housing and the use of co-location to achieve medium density in older suburbs at a low-rise scale. In subsequent design research projects he continued to develop his urban infill housing model and land definition, which he has coined bluefield housing.
Missing middle spectrum
An extension to the commonly-understood definitions of greenfield, brownfield and greyfield housing…“bluefield housing is co-located housing that integrates new additions with existing homes, looks and feels like single-family housing, but operates financially and legally like a small group of units.”
Co-located housing is described as the intentional addition of one or more dwellings to an existing house on a single piece of land, without subdividing the property. The homes are interconnected without fencing between them, preferably arranged to take advantage of existing mature landscapes, with primary outdoor areas shared to promote community interaction among residents.
Not to be confused with cohousing, the co-location model is a shared allotment with each dwelling functioning independently, but amenities like shared laundry facilities may be added if desired and agreed by the residents.
A proposed planning & design code amendment will turn the bluefield housing model into a new land-use definition called co-located housing. If passed, it will make the model a new form of permitted infill in some older Adelaide suburbs with heritage and character overlays.
Damian has been working as a research advisor to the South Australian government’s working group established to write the planning policy and zoning controls for this Future Living Code Amendment.
Could the planning amendments for this new form of urban infill lead to crammed, over-developed house allotments? Highly unlikely, as the responsibility falls on the proponent to prove to their local planner that the development will be a good fit for the neighbourhood.
Using a design-led approach, bluefield housing encompasses the entire site and looks at how many houses can be comfortably accommodated on a block. This is in contrast to the business-as-usual planning model of dictating the minimum allotment sizes into which a block can be divided. bluefield housing embodies seven key principles:
- Facilitate sharing
- Ignore lot size and yield, and co-locate to avoid land division
- Retain and adapt the lot’s original housing
- Leverage the prevailing pattern of alterations and additions-
- Create housing in a flat hierarchy
- Arrange housing around shared landscape in a unified design
- Design for social, financial and environmental sustainability.
Adaptive reuse of housing
The Planning Code Amendment is going out for public consultation from August to November this year and it is exciting to see that a decade after Damian started his research, the South Australian State Planning Commission is taking leadership for co-located living.
According to Damian, “Architects are skilled at looking at a space and creatively enabling functionality, amenity and human wellbeing.”
Combining this creativity with the bluefield housing principles and engaging with planners, one looks forward to this creative, adaptive, resilient approach being implemented across more Australian cities and regional areas where the housing supply is stretched.
“A successful bluefield housing development will ultimately distinguish itself not by being demonstrably bigger than its neighbours, nor by hiding itself away behind the “main house”, but by demonstrating that socially-connected homes can sit comfortably on a single allotment alongside single-family housing as a positive contribution to the evolving neighbourhood”.
Damian Madigan’s resourceful book, Bluefield Housing as Alternative Infill for the Suburbs, is available to download for free or to purchase as a hardcopy.
