Bluefield Housing as Alternative Infill for the Suburbs

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. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Damian Madigan is a registered architect and Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of South Australia. A Fellow of the Australian Institute of Architects and a member of the South Australian State Government's Design Review Panel, he undertakes housing research through design, working collaboratively with academics, industry, and government to create suburban infill housing typologies that better suit changing demographics. As an individual and collaborator, his housing propositions have won design competition awards, shortlistings, and commendations from the City of Los Angeles, the New South Wales State Government, the City of Sydney, Architecture Australia, and the Guangzhou International Award for Urban Innovation.

Part 1 1. Being 'Suburban' 2. An Appetite for New Forms of Suburban Living 3. On Character and 'Fitting In' 4. Suburban Anomalies and Operations: catalogues of infill opportunities Part 2 5. From Green to Blue: a new definition for suburban infill 6. The Seven Principles of Bluefield Housing 7. Lot-level Design Tactics 8. Design for Liveability and Sustainability Part 3 9. From Top-down to Bottom-up: a deployable model 10. Single Allotments 11. Double Allotments 12. Multiple Allotments Part 4 13. A New Normal: leveraging established conditions 14. Carrots and Sticks: incentivising bluefield housing 15. Financing, Operating, and Selling Bluefield Housing 16. Zoning Laws: enabling bluefield housing Part 5 17. The Value of the Diagram and Studies in Rooms 18. Backgrounding Design Studies: a 'designerly' way of seeing 19. Generative Design Studies for Bluefield Housing 20. Housing for Whom? - Lessons from the Town Hall Floor