Designing Australia's Public Housing

Australian housing is predominantly low-density, detached family homes built in greenfield developments. Early Australian public housing also followed this trend, with multiple state governments producing master-planned suburbs using lower-cost land that was easier to develop and was thought to align better with Australian housing aspirations.

At different points in time, circumstances have made inner-city land available in Australian cities for public housing development. Due to the higher value of this land, these housing projects required increased density to ensure rents remained affordable. As a consequence, these projects have aimed to demonstrate the liveability of higher density to an often resistant Australian public. This led to a high degree of experimentation in building forms and internal layouts as designers sought to achieve high levels of resident amenity, often well above that offered in lowdensity projects.

Many projects also explored what was required to facilitate community development, although at times producing contentious results. Where master-planned suburbs had focused on green space and community infrastructure, high-density projects innovated with building arrangements, such as clustering of entrances or stairwells to create more intimate groupings of neighbours, or high-quality communal and circulation spaces such as corridors, lobbies and laundries to create socialisation spaces or ‘streets in the sky.’

Post-war Australia grappled with an immense housing shortage that was fed by the mass return of servicemen and a rapid immigration program alongside the previous wartime restrictions on private building works for new supply and maintenance.

In Melbourne, public housing waiting lists had become unmanageable. Instead, allocation to the two-year shortlist was conducted by a public ballot. At the same time, severe shortages of construction materials and labour rapidly increased building costs.

These constraints inspired an unprecedented level of government-led, housing construction through technological innovation. Federally, the Commonwealth Housing Commission provided loan funding to state governments for the rapid construction of rental housing and demolition of slum areas. The Commonwealth Experimental Building Station was established to invent and improve new materials and techniques for home construction, particularly using concrete.

Across the states, the prefabricated construction of housing dominated as the factories, technology and labour saving
efficiencies that had been developed during the war were put to peacetime uses. Some schemes were commissioned in partnership with the private sector, some were imported from European factories and others were developed within government, such as occurred at Holmesglen when the Housing Commission of Victoria leased the former Commonwealth government munitions and tank factory.

Different material initiatives in prefabricated housing were occurring, often with one scheme being trialled in different cities. Examples include houses predominantly constructed of steel, timber, concrete or asbestos panelling.

At the end of the 19th century, Australia’s larger cities, particularly Sydney and Melbourne, were grappling with providing adequate and affordable housing for low income working households. A dramatic rise in the number of households reduced the availability of inner-city workers’ housing, which drove up the rent charged by private landlords for what was often substandard accommodation. Sub-letting rooms was a common practice to make rents more affordable, which further worsened living standards.

Australian state governments responded to the critical need for adequate worker housing in early 20th century cities by creating master-planned suburban estates. Public housing estates were viewed as an opportunity to demonstrate to the public and private developers innovative international town planning principles, such as the Garden City, New Town, the Vienna Werkbundsiedlung and Radburn movements. These movements often had idealistic visions of how the emerging town planning profession could improve citizen’s morality, health and respectability through space and orderliness. In an effort to shape Australia’s suburban form and society, these projects experimented with different street layouts, community and urban infrastructure, and housing diversity.

Often estates were located close to new centres of employment, such as factories that were emerging on the city fringes as Australia’s economy industrialised and broadened beyond its focus on primary production. Projects grappled with the problem of fostering a sense of community in large, newly constructed housing developments for people who had no previous connection to each other or to the estate.

If you would like to know more or receive updates about this exhibition, please reach out to Alexa Gower of the AHURI Professional Services team at alexa.gower@ahuri.edu.au