Australia’s rack-stack-and-pack syndrome

Imagine asking the Australian car industry to design a modern mini-bus. You’d probably get a stretch limousine, based on a Commodore or a Falcon, all V8 and disco lights. Ask transport experts and you’d get a highly efficient, autonomously guided, electric- or hydrogenpowered 20-seater: safe, accessible and comfortable.

Australia has pursued the same approach in the drive for urban density. A country singularly obsessed with the one-family house makes apartments by jamming units together in a rack-stack-and-pack approach akin to the extra wheels and seats in the limo.

Whilst they hold more people than a row of single houses, they come with all the downsides of suburbia, and little of the upside of urban living. We need to rethink what an apartment block might be to make a liveable city.

Apartments are the fundamental building blocks in achieving sustainability in three ways: buildings can be more energy efficient; they can provide much closer access to employment and services; and they make share transport more viable, thus reducing energy demands. To achieve these interrelated outcomes we need coordinated planning on several levels. Zonings need to be more flexible, public transport needs emphasis and building codes need to promote energy efficiency.

Rethinking the apartment/city relationship in this interrelated coordination falls foul of the three levels of government in Australia: land use planning is the province of localised councils; transport is a state responsibility, addicted to private cars; and the National Construction Code is very weak on energy efficiency (even if a federal minister argues that regulation is a state responsibility, ignoring the first word in the title).

Secondly is the pursuit of ‘home ownership’ at all costs; the of Australian housing. Whilst it works well for individual houses on separate blocks, by contrast apartments are ideal as single-owner/rental-occupant buildings, ensuring higher standards of construction and maintenance. The word ‘apartments’ is a recent phenomenon in Australia, adopted by real estate agents to denote something better than ‘flats’ or ‘units’ (which are seen as pejoratives for buildings less worthy if they are not individually owned). Designing for build-to-rent could dramatically improve housing quality.

Thirdly, ‘home-grown approaches’ from suburbia are misguidedly applied to apartment designs, giving rise to lots of failed unintended consequences. Some problematic cases from the overly codified NSW ADG (Apartment Design Guide) are balconies, cars, thermal comfort and ventilation.

A hallmark of Australian suburbia is the backyard.

For 17 years the most successful television program was named after it. The assumption is that when the house shrinks to a unit, so should the backyard shrink to a balcony. This completely ignores the advantages that apartments have in immediate access to public streets, parks and playgrounds as their backyards. Requirements force unnecessarily large balconies, used only for clothes drying or storage as the ubiquitous glass balustrades render them un-private and uninhabitable. Affordable housing solutions are better found in three-storey walkups that get by with no balconies at all.

But wait, there’s more: in the ADG 25 per cent of the site is also required to be Communal Open Space. While this has promoted rooftop gardens, no concession is given when the apartments are adjacent to a huge park or a recreation area. Apartments are not autonomous units divorced from their surroundings as suburban houses are, they are part of the urban whole.

Suburbia demands private cars (and garages, freeways, and other space-hungry disasters). But a denser city has many alternatives: walkability, bike paths, better public transport, car-share schemes. Transferring suburban two-car needs into apartments misses the advantages of a walkable city. But when the state is not doing its share of public transport, and when car-share schemes are not acceptable as an alternative, then developers who think like suburban real estate agents demand huge underground, mechanically ventilated car parks.

The passive solar house, all sunlight on thermal mass and openings for cross ventilation, is an ideal of suburbia, more in the NatHERS regulations than in reality. But those requirements are counter-productive in an apartment. The demand for two hours of winter sun in living rooms without adequate shade (a sheer wall is more desirable in a high rise) leads to grossly over-heated spaces in autumn/spring. Doors and windows for cross ventilation will never be opened if it leads to a loss of acoustic privacy. What works at 20-metre separations in suburbia fails when the balconies are adjacent. A ceiling fan in every room is far better, but not encouraged or allowed, as an alternative.

Instead of looking to suburbia for inspiration we should look to cities where apartments are the basis of a successful urban life: a desirable case in point is Berlin where we see large areas of four- to five-storey walkup apartments that have internal landscaped garden courtyards, all connected by trams to low-rise offices and great cultural attractions. Meanwhile in Barcelona, the planned grid of the Eixample has seven- to eight-storey apartments set over shops and offices. Buenos Aires is even higher, where the Palermo and Recoleta precincts have narrow, tall apartments of 12 to 16 storeys. These are set above streets filled with retail and offices, and generous parks with cultural facilities scattered through.

We need to look outwards, not inwards, for inspiration.