Introducing Bluefield Housing Madigan, Damian
Bluefield Housing As Alternative Infill for the Suburbs,
2024, 2023, Volume:
1
Book Chapter
Open access
This introductory chapter provides an overview and general discussion of the premise of bluefield housing as an alternative form of infill that expands existing land and housing definitions. It ...describes the bluefield approach as a co-location model, with houses sharing a single site and its landscape. Additionally, it describes the structure of the book's five parts and the links between them.
This chapter provides an overview and general discussion of the premise of bluefield housing as an alternative form of infill that expands existing land and housing definitions. It describes the bluefield approach as a co-location model, with houses sharing a single site and its landscape. Bluefield housing is offered as a supplement to existing medium density 'missing middle' strategies. 'Bluefield housing', as a land definition and an accompanying housing model, offers instead a 'both / and' approach. The bluefield model takes a whole-of-site approach that co-locates the new housing with the old without establishing a hierarchy between the housing units. 'Bluefield' deserves clarifying in relation to older people. Bluefield housing is about infill for the traditionally homogenous, gentrified suburbs, but the methods can be deployed elsewhere.
On character and 'fitting in' Madigan, Damian
Bluefield Housing as Alternative Infill for the Suburbs,
2024, Volume:
1
Book Chapter
Open access
Chapter 3 discusses not-in-my-backyard-ism, framing it relative to historical change already accepted in the suburbs, rather than what new change we may be willing to accept. It discusses character ...beyond look and feel, addressing the character of activity. It uses historical photographs and drawings as examples of how to interpret character shifts over time and argues that in understanding subtle neighbourhood change, we give ourselves permission to explore strategic transformation, even in character suburbs.
This chapter discusses character beyond look and feel, addressing the character of activity. In the effort to transition cities to more dense housing futures, agencies responsible for implementing and managing change seek to strike a balance between introducing new housing forms and retaining the best of the established suburban way of life. One of the intrinsic difficulties with this policy framework, particularly in lower-scale, lower-density cities, is that the demarcation between intensification and non-intensification zones can establish tensions between the existing settlement patterns and the new. Adjacencies between such medium-density developments and their single-family home neighbours are difficult to mitigate. Neighbourhoods often display a unique character that differentiates them from other places, even those within the same city.
From top-down to bottom-up Madigan, Damian
Bluefield Housing as Alternative Infill for the Suburbs,
2024, Volume:
1
Book Chapter
Chapter 9 discusses bluefield housing as a deployable site-level approach to suburban infill: bottom-up and scalable, and an alternative to top-down city-wide planning. It introduces the eight design ...studies that follow in Chapters 10, 11, and 12 and captures the design thinking and scenario planning that underpins them.
Bluefield housing is premised on a case study approach, a housing research strategy that often faces an unreasonable prejudice against it, specifically around a perception that such processes are too idiosyncratic to be broadly useful beyond their own study areas. The top-down thinking is common in housing research, particularly when policy and financial mechanisms are created as the drivers of housing supply. The bluefield housing model has been borne of a case study approach, with detailed design investigations being the instrument not just of idea development, but of discovery. In the design drawings, site plans describe the maximum number of bedrooms relative to the number of car spaces provided. The bluefield approach requires a nuanced reworking of the retained neighbourhood housing, and local characteristics will vary across locations and housing types.
Double allotments Madigan, Damian
Bluefield Housing as Alternative Infill for the Suburbs,
2024, Volume:
1
Book Chapter
Open access
Chapter 11 expands the single allotment model of Chapter 10 to two amalgamated lots, presenting three detailed designs that demonstrate the amenity, accommodation, and diversity gains achieved across ...two adjacent sites. The case studies include back-to-back, side-by-side, and laneway variants.
The back-to-back scheme is conceived of as a normative, yet more heavily intensified, additions and alterations project providing independent houses and gardens for five to six unrelated households. Designed to retain the existing mature landscape, small additions to the two existing homes are coupled with a detached mini apartment building in the centre of the lot. Utilising a semi-basement for the three-storey apartment building keeps the building height to approximately 8m above ground level, with this mass positioned toward the centre of the site and away from side boundaries. Labels describe the dwelling density of the scheme, the lot dimensions, the street arrangements, the number of rooms in each dwelling, and elements such as rubbish bin areas, car parking, and a shared garden. The side-by-side scheme illustrates that density can sometimes be just a number, with flexibility-by-design allowing for anywhere from two to six dwellings without additional building.
Chapter 2 presents case studies of shared housing models that include courtyard housing, multigenerational living, cohousing, pocket neighbourhoods, deliberative developments, and backyard homes, or ...ADUs. In doing so, it makes the case for bluefield housing taking its place in an existing spectrum of shared housing, describing the potential for the model to formalise existing ad-hoc shared living arrangements already in existence in the suburbs.
Living in a traditional westernised suburban setting has generally meant occupying a house offering space, separation, and autonomy from other residents. In contemporary suburbs, a certain detachment from neighbours is heightened when access to and from the home is via a garage connected directly to the inside of the house. By comparison with traditional courtyard models where multigenerational living is key, the westernised post-war enthusiasm of low density living on individual lots saw many suburbanites shy away from cohabiting with other generations of their families. As public awareness of housing stress grows, an increasing catalogue of online news articles regularly brings otherwise hidden stories of multigenerational and shared living to prominance.
Being 'suburban' Madigan, Damian
Bluefield Housing as Alternative Infill for the Suburbs,
2024, Volume:
1
Book Chapter
Open access
Chapter 1 acknowledges the fact that issues of politics, race, and inequity underlie many suburbs. It posits bluefield housing as a model that can target the built form of suburbia, potentially ...separating the design arguments of suburban infill from the political. It describes what is lost in the business-as-usual approach to knock-down-rebuild residential development in the suburbs, including the negative environmental impacts of reduced tree canopy and soft landscape surfaces. It concludes by outlining recent international design competitions that demonstrate the ambitions for new approaches to medium-density housing are not restricted to one particular place.
This chapter posits bluefield housing as a model that can target the built form of suburbia, potentially separating the design arguments of suburban infill from the political. It describes what is lost in the business-as-usual approach to knock-down-rebuild residential development in the suburbs, including the negative environmental impacts of reduced tree canopy and soft landscape surfaces. A design-led response to suburban infill housing such as the bluefield model cannot expect to address deep suburban politics that underlie and continue to affect the social and physical structure of a suburb. Leveraging the pattern of suburban change, bluefield housing relies on rather than critiques suburbia. The earliest suburbs in many post-Industrial Revolution cities were the first escapes away from the grime, intensity, and stress of town to a cleaner, more spacious, and calmer way of life.
Chapter 19 describes two generative design and planning exercises presented as studies in abstraction to temporarily liberate the user from traditional neighbourhood constraints. 'Seven Design ...Tactics' provides a set of tools with which to broadly speculate on the housing capacity of an established suburban block without the potential encumbrance of issues around neighbourhood character and aesthetic fit. 'Algebraic Siting Strategies' provides a method of creating a fictitious study area borne of the prevailing housing types and their spatial arrangement within the neighbourhood. Together, the two exercises can be used in design studios or urban planning workshops by practitioners, design research scholars, or students, as an adjunct to other forms of housing intensification studies. They are an important tool of discovery and underpin the Suburban Operations detailed in Chapter 4 and the dual and multiple lot design studies shown in Chapters 10 and 11.
Housing for whom? Madigan, Damian
Bluefield Housing as Alternative Infill for the Suburbs,
2024, Volume:
1
Book Chapter
Chapter 20 describes the utility to be found in personifying who the proponents and occupiers of innovative housing might be, particularly when facing a potentially unreceptive audience. The chapter ...describes shifting discussions from the 'what' of new housing to 'for whom?' In doing so, it returns the reader to the opening premise of the book: that our suburbs drastically need not just more housing, but housing that is much more diverse in response to our changing household needs. The chapter also discusses co-design and the benefit of tailoring workshops to a project. It concludes with 'lessons from the Town Hall floor': practical advice from reflecting on several years' of presentations of the bluefield model to lay, professional, and government audiences.
Single allotments Madigan, Damian
Bluefield Housing as Alternative Infill for the Suburbs,
2024, Volume:
1
Book Chapter
Open access
Chapter 10 demonstrates the bluefield housing model, incorporating the Suburban Operations introduced in Chapter 4, the Seven Principles of Bluefield Housing defined in Chapter 6, the lot-level ...design tactics of Chapter 7, and the liveability and sustainability strategies described in Chapter 8. Detailed design studies are illustrated across four individual allotments ranging in size from 325m2 (3,500 sq ft) to 920m2 (9,900 sq ft). The case studies demonstrate the bluefield model for single-entry, dual entry and corner lots.
This chapter presents the inherent and deployable design tactics that underpin the liveability of the bluefield housing model at the scales of the lot and the building. They include flexibility, ...adaptability, and amenity for small footprint living. Also described are the sustainability and climate resilience tactics that underpin Principle 7 of the model, as introduced in Chapter 6.
This chapter presents the inherent and deployable design tactics that underpin the liveability of the bluefield housing model at the scales of the lot and the building. When designing context-appropriate low-rise infill in and around existing housing, it becomes necessary to reduce the building footprints for extensions and backyard homes. When renovating older houses, it is common to cut large openings in existing walls to extend outwards, or to combine spaces internally. Sustainable design is a broad and evolutionary field, but there are some fundamental strategies that can and should be deployed in new development. Active strategies can then be deployed, specifically those aimed at eliminating the use of fossil fuels in running the housing.
