The suburbs on their own terms
The suburbs on their own terms
As the countryside vanishes under a top-dressing of chemicals, and as cities provide little more than an urban context for traffic intersections, the suburbs are at last coming into their own.
—J. G. Ballard, 19711
We architects have tended to see the suburbs as either a problem to be “solved” or somewhere to be avoided. Robin Boyd famously railed against the stifling limitations of life in a suburban house:
“Is it just that the Australian public clings to its depressing little boxes because it knows no better, has seen no better design?”2 Gabriel Poole said, “The suburbs we’re putting up are just bloody inhuman, how people live in them I just don’t know.”3 And according to our only Pritzker Prize winner, Glenn Murcutt, “It’s appalling housing, it’s appalling spatially. It’s not architecture, it’s merchandise” – as though excusing us of responsibility.4 These three architects are accomplished designers of homes in the singular; it seems to be the aggregation of the suburbs that troubles them. We decry suburbia’s sameness, the apparent lack of culture, the sprawl, the cars and the airconditioners. Some architects even refuse to work there, claiming it’s bad for the portfolio, as Simon Sellars discovered to his own frustration (see page 60).
But are the suburbs at last coming into their own? We saw a radical redrawing of the social and economic geography of Australian cities in 2020, as COVID forced many of us to work from home, hollowing out city centres and focusing our existence on our immediate neighbourhoods. Even now, as many of us tentatively return to the office, this experience has not been forgotten. As people seek out more space and light, and anticipate commuting fewer days in the week, real estate is surging in regional and suburban areas, while inner-city postcodes see record falls.5 Rather than the suburbs dragging us all under, The Economist predicts that
“A new age of suburbanisation could be dawning.”6 It is time that architects surrendered their prejudices and embraced the suburbs.
The suburbs do not feature in our national anthem, nor in our great artworks, but this vast terrain between the city centres and the rural fringe is undeniably the dominant landscape of Australians’ daily lives. Of the 89 percent of the country living in metropolitan regions, 86 percent (some 19 million people) live in areas considered suburban or exurban.7 Australia is the suburbs and the suburbs are us.
The experience captured by these raw statistics varies greatly, from the grand streets of Toorak, one of Melbourne’s most expensive postcodes, to the cul-de-sacs of Tregear, one of Sydney’s most affordable. Some suburbs are spacious, while others are compressed; some are leafy, while others are cleared of nature; some are well-served by public transport, others are car-dependent. What unites them is a pattern of development that is so ubiquitous as to be invisible: private blocks of land, contained by fences, each with a freestanding home with its own front door, strung together along a roadway. But within this simple type lies infinite complexity and possibility.
The suburbs are where the vast majority of migrants to Australia settle, and where they find a critical foothold.
They support tens of thousands of small businesses, grown out of garages and front rooms. It is in this slack space – undetermined, adaptable, affordable and ripe for reinvention – that new ideas and opportunities emerge.
For instance, one of Melbourne’s most exclusive restaurants is not in Flinders Lane or Brunswick Street, but in the outer suburb of Box Hill, a 30-minute drive from the city. Located in the kitchen of a brick-veneer house, the restaurant is named with the
Within the deceptively simple typology of “the suburbs” exists infinite complexity and possibility. Rory Hyde makes the case for listening to residents – experts in living – and finding new ways to develop these areas that are ripe for reinvention.
instructions given to diners as they arrive: “Enter via Laundry.” It’s in the home of Helly Raichura, a chef combining flavours from her birthplace in Gujarat, India, with native ingredients of Australia. After being featured on Masterchef, Raichura’s website was overwhelmed with bookings, which now stretch to an 18-month wait. Enter via Laundry is just one of the countless creative and entrepreneurial success stories originating in Australia’s suburbs. It challenges the easy stereotypes of the suburbs as stifling and conservative, revealing them to be the source of genuine invention and craft, cultural collision and imagination. It also offers a useful starting point for how architects might engage with the suburbs today.
Instead of attempting to “fix” the suburbs, could we instead work more constructively with what’s there – taking the suburbs on their terms, rather than our own? This would mean respecting the pattern of freehold titles and the opportunities that they afford, and extending, repurposing and reinventing in a decentralized and piecemeal way. By this measure, suburban apartment designs for the so-called “missing middle” too often miss the point. These suburban apartment buildings may achieve greater densities, but if this is at the expense of space to expand and experiment – by consolidating titles, or replacing individual garages with a car park, for instance – then they misunderstand what makes the suburbs desirable in the first place. Could we instead use these opportunities for creativity and entrepreneurship as a starting point: a patchwork of shared workspaces, infrastructures of care, social services and new granny flats that provide a greater diversity of housing options and a greater density in the spaces between?8 As Dan Hill writes here, the post-pandemic suburb could be imagined as “a colourful, undulating poly-nodal pattern of gently densifying and diversifying 15-minute neighbourhoods” (see page 46); a thick carpet of working, living, playing, learning, caring and dreaming, all blended together –Templestowe becoming Tokyo.
The projects featured in this issue begin to sketch the outlines of this future, demonstrating new approaches to the design of the home, the school, community centres and public infrastructure. While these are all exemplary projects, they are but tiny jewels within a boundless sea, with limited impact on the larger whole.
This is not a fault of these architects, but rather a symptom of the way our discipline is structured. While we labour over making good buildings one at a time, what Dolores Hayden describes as suburbia’s “growth machines” (see page 50) continue to roll across the horizon, driven by the powerful forces of housebuilders, investors and the real-estate industry, with little concern for what architects may think. To have an impact in this space, we will require new forms of practice. These new forms must not be defined by the title boundary, but must be able to operate both systemically – through the big levers of policy and planning – and collaboratively – on the ground with residents and communities.
After all, we may be considered experts in design, but it is the homeowners and tenants who are experts in how to live. Let’s build on this expertise to create new possibilities, to support those just clinging on to the property ladder to achieve a level of stability, and to boost those for whom it is out of reach altogether. We need new public infrastructure, new social spaces and new ways of living that allow each of us to fulfil our potential, rather than being stuck in traffic or quitting our jobs to do the school run. There is some truth in the critiques of Boyd, Poole, Murcutt and others, but we would do better to engage than to disparage. There is much to be done.
— Rory Hyde is associate professor in architecture at the University of Melbourne.
Footnotes
1. J. G. Ballard, Preface to Vermilion Sands (New York: Berkley Books, 1971).
2. Robin Boyd in Ian McKay, Robin Boyd, Hugh Stretton and John Mant (eds), Living and Partly Living: Housing in Australia (Melbourne: Thomas Nelson, 1971), 8.
3. Gabriel Poole, interviewed by Tim Ross for Designing a Legacy, ABC TV, 2 February 2021.
4. Stephen Lacey, “The Triumph of Ugliness,” The Sydney Morning Herald, 22 March 2008, smh.com.au/national/ the-triumph-of-ugliness-20080322-gds6cw.html (accessed 13 May 2021).
5. Emily McAuliffe, “Have Australians fallen out of love with Sydney and Melbourne?”, BBC News, 25 February 2021, bbc. com/news/business-56167965 (accessed 13 May 2021).
6. “A new age of suburbanisation could be dawning,” The Economist, 6 May 2021, economist.com/finance-andeconomics/2021/05/06/a-new-age-of-suburbanisationcould-be-dawning (accessed 13 May 2021).
7. David Gordon, “Is Australia a Suburban Nation?”, Alexandrine Press, 30 June 2016, alexandrinepress.co.uk/ blogged-environment/australia-suburban-nation (accessed 13 May 2021).
8. This idea is explored further in my previous article, “A New World,” Architecture Australia, vol 109, no 4, Jul/Aug 2020, 10–11.