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It is rather daunting to be asked to open the innings at a Weekend of Ideas and talk about an icon like the Quarter Acre Block, something that almost everyone has quite strong ideas about. Whatever I say, I think I’m at risk of upsetting somebody or maybe everybody.
The Quarter Acre Block deserves re-visiting if for no other reason than the impact it has had on so many generations of Australians. Its future is not as clear as many would have it – if you listened to some commentators, you would think it had been dead and gone for years. But it is too early for obituaries and I will go into bat for Suburbia and the Quarter Acre Block because of the immense effect it has had and will continue to have on so many Australians. Later I will also have a few words to say about what might be done when suburbs stop being suburbs and the Quarter Acre Block is no more.
The Quarter Acre Block assumed mythical proportions after the Great War as part of the Great Australian Dream of home ownership. All our cities grew outwards at the same time. The first blocks in these new nirvanas were almost exactly one quarter of an acre – for those here today born after February 1966, an acre is about the size of a rectangular football field and a quarter acre is about 1040 square metres. In Adelaide in 1921, blocks of land at Colonel Light Gardens in Mitcham averaged 11,000 square feet, almost exactly one quarter of an acre. When I bought a block of land in the new suburb of Garran in January 1966 it was still just over a quarter of an acre. Blocks have got steadily smaller since and a suburb of full quarter acre sites has not been on offer for many years.
From the beginning, the new suburbs received much negative press, by no means all deserved. Robin Boyd called suburbia a “half-world between city and country” and in Australia’s Home he marvelled that “in a land of rolling plains and wide blue skies, a race of cheerful agoraphobes grew up in little weather-sealed boxes”. The pejorative associations of the word suburban remain, with suggestions of not only remoteness from the centre of things but also ordinariness. Conversely, urban implies being in and of the town or city, full of energy, with it, cool, urbane and discerning. Suburbia has fortunately had its share of staunch defenders. Hugh Stretton said you don’t have to be mindless or ultraconservative to choose to live in a suburban house – Patrick White did, he said, and so did Thomas Keneally. Closer to home, so did Manning and Dymphna Clark and Sebastian.
In his Ideas for Australian Cities, Stretton noted that “about half of the lives of most of us are spent growing up then bringing others up” and that a free-standing house and garden in suburbia is a very good place to do this and a lot of other things as well. A cottage then and now was the cheapest way to build, and the space around the house was the best and cheapest source of light and air and insulation from noise. You could open the windows when you wanted to and close them just as easily. It was also a lot more sustainable and energy-conscious than some will ever concede, and it is demonstrably more in tune with the natural environment than high-rise apartment living.
Australians who choose to live halfway between what Stretton called the real bush and the real city enjoy remarkable freedoms. They are free to be neighbourly or withdrawn or both, and to have as many or as few friends and visitors as they like. You can grow fruit and vegetables or feed your food scraps to chickens and collect the eggs; or build a bookcase or a cubby house or a granny flat. You can add bits to your house or re-model it completely. The freedom to alter things quite dramatically without changing your address is, I think, much underrated, as is the capacity for you to use every corner of your block. I have a friend with a quite modest house who also has a fine collection of vintage cars housed in a garage you can hardly notice. You can’t do that in a flat or a townhouse. I was thrilled to discover that the garden of one of my early houses had a starring role in the Open Gardens scheme for many years. You can’t move too far into the city and do that either.
The arguments for more compact living patterns in the future are of course compelling. The citizens of Rome are said to have the smallest houses and the largest living rooms, because they meet and talk and eat and drink outside, using the piazzas and squares and steps of the city as their own. It has been said that if we lived together as closely as possible we could build shorter lengths of everything.
Arguments for smaller and denser living units are often dressed up in economic garb, and are usually part of larger plans for lifestyle and behavioural change. In the last year or so, we in Canberra have been told that the inner city suburbs belong to this or that generation of younger people with their social networks, who will presumably move on in due course to make room for the next lot of trend-setters. Old fuddy-duddies should get out while the going is good. I am not prepared to accept just yet that the world should be moulded only by tweeters or twitterers or liquid crystal conversations.
So should the Quarter Acre Block live on? and if not, what will replace it? Some terrific things happen in suburbs, even the distant ones, but we must accept that we cannot keep spreading out into the countryside. Subdivisions of Eighth Acre Blocks (which is what we are now building around our cities) will find it difficult to provide what the Quarter Acre suburb so effortlessly gave us. These new estates (I do not much like the word ‘estate’, a little too Brave New World for me) are different animals altogether.
Not every Quarter Acre suburb made the spirits soar, but it seems to me that the Eighth Acre estate stands no chance at all - colourful but squashed-up houses on narrow blocks along narrow streets, gravel and some bushes and a small tree here and there, huge garage doors, small front doors with a couple of columns, security shutters on the windows, hear no evil, see no evil. Or McMansions, houses too big for their blocks, no eaves, no grounds, no privacy, no reason to live there. And whereas there was once plenty of land at prices people could afford, we now have rationed land at prices that maintain the steady climb in real estate values.
It is time, I think, to draw a line under all this and accept that the freedom to live alone or in any grouping in peace and a little away from the centre of things will be available to only some of those seeking the Great Australian Dream, including those who can afford the transport costs. In Canberra, there are very good examples of where the Quarter Acre neighbourhood still works its magic. Maybe we will also see varieties of a new 21st century Three-Sixteenth Suburbia, making better use of existing suburban blocks in the more distant districts where the topography is suitable, where property values remain reasonable and land can be consolidated here and there and re-subdivided. Anything would be better than jamming a second house behind an existing house.
I have a few words to say about the hot topic of a second life for the older inner suburbs of Canberra, and I will use the foothills west of Mount Ainslie and Mount Majura as an example. The garden suburbs of Dickson and Downer and Hackett have the largest continuous collection of Quarter Acre Blocks in the Canberra valley. It is a highly desirable place to live – near to town and to employment centres and entertainment, with established streetscapes, parks, schools and shops, all the things that are being carelessly left out in the newer and more distant suburbs. Griffin had its streets lined with the walk-up tenements he was familiar with from Chicago. Now it has a chance to try Griffin’s urbanism. Not unexpectedly, this is where real estate developers have stepped in to put 4 or 5 flats where once was a modest cottage.
Redevelopment of the highest quality here should be a no-brainer, the site and the city deserve no less. But the Territory Plan has only vague design criteria about reflecting residential scale, privacy and solar access. The Plan provides no overall picture of how it could all hang together, no plans for what neighbourhoods might be found there, no urban structure and no enhanced infrastructure. There is a real risk that we will wake up one day to a second or third rate result and a paradise lost.
The Territory Plan is a dull and proscriptive document - why should buildings be only two storeys when the trees are often twice that height? A bit of variety in the skyline would be welcome anyway. Why cannot there be even higher blocks along the several wide avenues and opposite parks? Where are the parks and community gardens for a 21st century inner city neighbourhood? What have the planners got against corner stores? Indeed, why not insist on ground floor ceiling heights of 3 metres or more, so that all sorts of businesses can open up some time in the future? Why on earth demand 1.25 car spaces per unit on each block? Aren’t we supposed to be encouraging public transport? Cars are put in basements (with horribly steep driveways) because basements don’t count in calculations of floor space. A car space costs about $50K to build. Leave them out and the apartments become suddenly a lot more affordable. Why not go further and let good-looking two- or three- storey carparks be built here and there. Selling at even $30K per space, there is profit for all. Add some biggish storage spaces for hire, or workshops for all those things you can’t easily do in a third floor flat. This could be an exciting and flexible place to live for the next 50 years, whatever your position in society.
So please, my final salvo in the fight for respect for both suburbia and the Quarter Acre Block is a plea for inspired hands to take the green and pleasant lands of Dickson and Downer and Hackett and come up with a few bags of realisable dreams. Not all developers look only for the profit. After all, Regent Street in London was a speculative development. So too was most of Paddington in Sydney. Neither was the result of ticking rules in a dull planning document, each made money for the sponsors and each left a valuable and sustainable legacy. Once upon a time, Canberra led the country with imaginative planning and high standards for design and construction. It’s time for us to take the lead again.
Thank you.
Roger Pegrum
Canberra
2 April 2011