Suburbanised cities share a common dilemma: how to transition to more densely populated and socially connected urban systems while retaining low-rise character, avoiding gentrification, and opening ...neighbourhoods to more diverse housing choices. Bluefield Housing offers a new land definition and co-located infill model addressing these concerns, through describing and deploying the types of ad-hoc modifications that have been undertaken in the suburbs for decades. Extending green-, brown-, and greyfield definitions, it provides a necessary middle ground between the ‘do nothing’ attitude of suburban preservation and the ‘do everything’ approach of knock-down-rebuild regeneration. An adjunct to ‘missing middle’ and subdivision densification models, with a focus on co-locating homes on small lots, Bluefield Housing presents a unified design approach to suburban infill: retrofitting original houses, retaining and enhancing landscape and urban tree canopies, and delivering additional homes as low-rise additions and backyard homes suited to the increasingly complex make-up of our households. Extensively illustrated by the author with engaging architectural design studies, Damian Madigan describes how existing quirks of suburban housing can prompt new forms of infill, explains why a new suburban densification model is not only necessary but can be made desirable for varied stakeholders, and charts a path towards the types of statutory and market triggers required to make bluefield housing achievable. Using Australian housing as an example but addressing universal concerns around neighbourhood character, demographic needs, housing diversity, dwelling flexibility, and landscape amenity, Bluefield Housing offers innovative suburban infill ideas for policy makers, planners, architects, researchers and students of housing and design studies, and for those with a stake in the future of the suburbs.
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.
A new normal Madigan, Damian
Bluefield Housing as Alternative Infill for the Suburbs,
2024, Volume:
1
Book Chapter
Chapter 13 discusses the strategic importance of describing housing innovation to multiple stakeholders in terms of how similar it is to the established business-as-usual approach, rather than in ...terms of its differences. In doing so, it argues that large organisational change can occur in our housing through small physical change and that the best way to de-risk innovation in the eyes of stakeholders and to get decision-makers to 'yes', is to play to these small changes.
Lenders calculate the profits they will make on a loan taking into consideration the amount of risk to that profit that is inherent in the project. Statutory planners seek positive city, neighbourhood, street, and site outcomes that are as predictable as possible. Attempting to introduce an alternative housing form to an established risk-averse system is challenging, and the temptation is to discuss the proposal in ways that highlight the scheme's innovation. The act of subtly repressing a housing scheme's innovations in favour of emphasising its similarities to the norm is not to be confused with trickery. In the bluefields, getting to the 'yes' of YIMBY is an exercise in subtlety. It means recognising and responding to the statutory and neighbourhood concerns of NIMBYism and showing that change can be minimal, but with great effect.
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.
Multiple allotments Madigan, Damian
Bluefield Housing as Alternative Infill for the Suburbs,
2024, Volume:
1
Book Chapter
Open access
Chapter 12 expands both the single and double allotment models of Chapters 10 and 11 for multiple lots, describing the possibility of the bluefield housing model to work as a dispersed housing ...system, particularly for housing providers that can procure individual lots over time and undertake redevelopment incrementally.
This chapter presents case studies that demonstrate the potential outcome of starting the development process on a single lot before incorporating additional lots incrementally to increase housing outcomes, encourage community connectedness, and improve landscape conditions. The development is fully self-contained but designed in anticipation of potential expansion over adjacent lots or those across the laneway. The laneway house is offset from the boundary by the width of a parking space and presents a blank wall to the laneway at ground level. The housing provider, having established a long-term relationship with their neighbours, approaches the owner of the central lot with a proposition to integrate the property into a fully connected housing community where the owner can stay on in a newly renovated home of their choosing.
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.
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.
Zoning laws Madigan, Damian
Bluefield Housing as Alternative Infill for the Suburbs,
2024, Volume:
1
Book Chapter
Chapter 16 outlines the kinds of planning policies necessary to achieve the co-location model of bluefield housing, focussing on a design-led and context appropriate approach to infill, with a ...reduced reliance on quantitative zoning metrics.
Established as a densification model that slots into existing single-family home neighbourhoods, bluefield housing will be subject to zoning policies at two levels: : neighbourhood-level intensification measures that determine the number of dwellings permitted per lot; and building-level design metrics that will describe the permitted development envelopes for the housing based on local built patterns. In low density cities, the density increases achieved in low-rise neighbourhoods will be an immediate step-change. Terms such as 'laneway house' are what they say: a house that addresses a rear lane and by default is located behind an existing home that faces a primary street. Zoning policies and approval decisions are based on a conditional approach.
From green to blue Madigan, Damian
Bluefield Housing as Alternative Infill for the Suburbs,
2024, Volume:
1
Book Chapter
Chapter 5 describes the urban morphology associated with the existing green-, brown- and greyfield land definitions in common use and the types of housing undertaken in each. It discusses their roles ...in quarantining older character suburbs from broad strategic infill policy, and argues that established suburbs exempted from infill policy should be given their own definition and housing model as the 'bluefields', where an alterations and additions infill model makes sense.
Private domestic yards, often decorative to the front while more operative at the rear, are defining features of suburban living. They are the spatial buffers that can cocoon a house and help establish its setting as a home within a garden. The greenfields are those areas on the fringes of a city that have never been used for housing. They may be agricultural lands which are now more valuable as sites for housing than for farming. The extent of green and recreational infrastructure across a greenfield development is planned relative to the number of allotments realised and overall scale of the new suburb, with facilities often mandated by or developed in coordination with the local authority. As manufacturing shifts offshore, large industrial land holdings within city boundaries can become redundant. Large brownfield developments, like their greenfield cousins, can offer a town centre with commercial, retail, hospitality, and service functions.
Chapter 15 discusses the market for bluefield housing, focussing on the residential construction sector's largest participants: homeowners, domestic builders, architects, residential developers, and ...home lenders. Land titling to mitigate undesirable land division is discussed, along with the model's ability to be flexible over time, enabling a project to be strategically staged to anticipate future needs and to be scaled back should a single-family home be required. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the importance of Written Family Agreements for shared family living and an example Resident Agreement for small-scale collaborative housing.
Market-driven housing systems prefer certainty, with the real estate sector fuelled by quick and predictable sales. Bluefield housing will hold limited appeal for profit-driven speculative developers. Its patrons are likely to be those who see value as a long-term proposition that includes social or familial benefits: not-for-profit community housing providers and associations, a family unit, a group of related or unrelated owner-occupiers, or one or two owner-occupiers who can subsidise the entire construction and rent out one or more of the other bluefield homes. Because bluefield housing is a mechanism of this domestic alterations and additions market, it operates within the established economy of private residential construction. A key concern in creating zoning policies for bluefield housing is how to stop the necessary code amendments for the model forming a Trojan Horse for standard land divisions below existing acceptable lot sizes.
