Tuesday, May 8, 2007
The demise of ‘Residential A’ (a mercy killing)
For so long the bastion of the Great Australian Dream, the ‘Residential A’ zone has conveyed a sense of certitude that one’s house on a quarter-acre block would forever and a day be surrounded by the same and nothing else (save the local park and maybe a primary school). However, the notion of ‘Residential A’ is rapidly approaching its use-by date. A great tidal wave of demographic, economic and environmental change sweeping Australia into the post-globalised world is consigning it to grey-cardigan obsolescence. The day is rapidly approaching, when living in quiet, suburban obscurity will be the preserve of the rich who choose to be there, and the disadvantaged who can’t afford to leave.
For although it projects a relaxed and comfortable feel of endless summers with pools, backyard cricket and barbeques of a sense of unique ‘Australianness’ that forms part of the common cultural language of the Nation, the rapid evolution of our social structure is presenting us with new scenarios of how this culture could be expressed . A new role where the post-war suburb takes a diminished role in our collective consciousness. Chiefly amongst the forces that dictate the future of Australian cities is the car and the role it plays in shaping our personal mobility. Fast approaching is the day where the places you can walk to from your front door and those you can access by public transport become as important as places you can drive your $300-per week running cost car to, if not more so.
This would be a society where living in some far flung estate with the two hour return journey time at the end of the 10-hour day becomes the social equivalent of hell on earth. A place where replacing our fossil-fuel burning individual transport machines with ‘clean’ cars running on hydrogen fuel cells still won’t cope with the congestion costs from millions of unnecessary vehicle trips and the constant barrage of toll gates on yet-another underground traffic sewer.
We are heading down a transport cul-de-sac where we just cannot build our way out of the problem, as the economic, social and environmental costs of road infrastructure, built to ever more exacting specifications, spiral beyond price levels that the community is willing to pay. It hasn’t quite crashed and burned yet, but we’re tipping over the edge of the hill and the brakes are looking wonky.
The great modernist/rationalist experiment with modern urban living has reached maturity and the outcome doesn’t quite match the sales pitch. The freedom of individual mobility afforded by the car has become the means by which we imprison ourselves in our own suburban prisons, where the threshold of anxiety we impose on our doorstep holds back the faceless, monocultural ‘other’. There is a limited sense of the collective public domain in the suburbs, there is private space, but no sense of real belonging beyond the front gate. There is limited reason to walk out the front gate and down the street, because in most parts of most suburbs, all there is to walk to is other houses, and maybe a park, or a school. There may be a local shop, a bus stop or a train station if you are lucky. But there is oh-so much that can be accessed within a comfortable five minute drive, which is bearable at $1.20 a litre for petrol, but how will it stack up at $3.00 a litre, or even triple that price? Will there come a time when our transport costs exceed our mortgage repayments?
It is becoming obvious that a fundamental difference needs to be made in the way in which we organise our urban spaces, to bring ourselves into a situation where we don’t have to drive to make all of our basic daily trips. To do this, we need to tap into this vast reservoir of ‘Residential A’ land, so as to bring facilities and services closer to where people are going to be living. That is of course, unless there is a mass flight from the suburbs resembling some 'Day after Tomorrow' scenario.
As always, there is a balancing act and trade-offs are required. In order to gain the freedom from the motor car afforded by more local shops, employment opportunities, community facilities and the like, we also have to agree to have some more neighbours in our neighbourhoods. Neighbours who don’t necessarily live in single dwellings on quarter acre blocks. Instead, they may live in cottages and duplexes, small groups of townhouses or even apartments. These are after all residences, and why should they be excluded from a particular area if they are of a form and scale that is complementary to single dwellings?
As a general rule, we need to double the population of each suburb in existing ‘Residential A’ zoned areas to have at least a fighting chance of there being any hope for a sustainable future for these places. The old model of single dwelling households used to work fine back in the day when most households consisted of two parent families, typically with at least two, if not more children. This produced a density of around 50 persons per hectare (because even then, most blocks weren’t the mythical quarter-acre- more like 500-850 square metres), which is at the lower end of what is required to sustain any kind of local community infrastructure, be it a bus service that comes once an hour, a viable primary school population, a vibrant local shopping centre or sporting or social clubs.
Over the last 30 years or so, the population of established Residential A areas have been declining, as children leave home (and leave the area), partners die, and households are bought and sold, with incoming households progressively less likely to be couple with children households. This can be seen especially in older areas that predate the concept of ‘Residential A’, where former corner stores dot the landscape as their catchment of potential customers declined past the point of viability.
These trends progressively suck the life out of ‘Residential A’ areas and they can atrophy socially and economically, unless they are lucky enough to have attractive features that make them socially desirable, whether due to advantage of location, natural features or a quality building stock. These areas tend to gain in value and become more exclusive, as demand exceeds the static supply of housing stock.
For those suburbs that are less well endowed, the prospects are grimmer, being faced with the prospect of flat or declining house values and the gradual withdrawal of services as the population thins, and there is no reinvestment into the area through the renewal of housing stock. This also reflects in the infrastructure maintenance standards for these areas, which also declines as the roads and pipes age, but the rate base remains static, making them a drain on the public purse, unless rates and land taxes increase in line with rising maintenance costs.
Oddly enough, these seemingly different problems have a similar cure. For richer areas, the turnover of a proportion of housing stock to various forms of multiple dwelling can help maintain community by providing entry level accommodation in the area for fledgling households leaving the family nest, allowing them to stay in the area without necessarily relying on a financial helping hand from their parents. It also allows those who work in the retail, service industries and the essential services needed within the area to also live there. At the other end of the lifecycle, an increased dwelling mix allows empty nesters, who have lived in an area all or most of their lives to downsize whilst maintaining their social and community ties.
Important net environmental benefits are also gained from this approach, by enabling the consolidation of extisting areas that are under-developed, pressure can be taken off the urban fringe, with a consequential lessening of the effects of urban sprawl, such as loss of ecosystems, further damage to waterways, loss of greenspace as well as the environmental impacts of the private-car based transport patterns these places engender.
For the places without the value premium of the upmarket suburbs, these things also hold true, with the added value of allowing a greater proportion of people currently in housing stress in these areas due to a lack of accommodation opportunities (in total number or affordability bracket) to gain an affordable housing option. This new wave of building also has the effect of stimulating local demand to create grassroots retail and other employment opportunities.
A far greater mix of uses should therefore be allowed in conjunction with the greater housing choice needed for our ‘Residential A’ areas, apart from those which create obvious nuisance to residential amenity, however, we also need to be a little less precious about what residential amenity needs to be, so as to avoid the faceless back fence estates that plague our landscape. This includes more opportunities to work from home and for local businesses to establish in locations that enable our centres to grow, by designating active frontages to roads rather than tightly defined pockets of commercial use. This approach needs however to be defined in a manner which excludes the ugliness of the ribbon development that blights many of our major roads, and the incessant power tools of the home based trade business that is essentially light-industrial in nature.
It is certainly going to be a challenge defining and understanding what a post ‘Residential A’ city could look like, and how liveable it would be compared to the current trends. I believe that this could represent a better outcome for all of us who live in Australian cities, lost in the suburban nowhere land.
