Graeme Scott: 'Compact' suburbs need buses and trains

Suburban spawl is an emotionally charged topic. On one side we have those proclaiming individual freedoms, property rights and best-value housing in the New Zealand tradition concluding that sprawl is no problem at all.

On the other we have those who view with alarm the spread of pastel tile roofs over productive rural land, the insatiable demand for roads and motorways needed to service them, and the perceived absence of community or sense of place in the new suburbs.

It need not be a polarised debate. We can all admire the garden suburb. The original garden suburbs of England and the United States were built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, concurrent with the expansion of commuter rail to service them.

We have our own version of these in the older city suburbs such as Epsom, Mt Eden and Remuera, which established themselves along tram routes and continue to be highly prized as living environments. Those communities rightly resist the erosion of their special qualities by infill housing.

The notion of sprawl is more likely to be applied to another sort of suburb, however. The increase in house size and decrease in lot size at Botany Downs or Albany, for example, has left precious little room for garden.

There, the legacy of the garden suburb is barely recognisable, with super-sized houses on small, easy-care sites, and wide, curving roads that could almost have been designed to disorient.

It is easy to fall into stereotypes when discussing the new suburb. But surely we must at least question the social, environmental and public health implications of building living environments in which even the shortest errand involves firing up the 3.8-litre four-wheel drive, and local activities are indoors in front of the illuminated screens of the computer and TV.

Some will say we will never give up our free-standing house on its individual site, and that we should just get on with building the infrastructure to let it happen. New Zealanders from Maori onwards have, after all, come here to escape crowded islands and cities elsewhere and have no desire for more dense living arrangements.

That may remain a strong sentiment, but demographics and market expectations can move with surprising rapidity. The explosion in demand for central-city apartments in the past 10 years was largely unforeseen.

As recently as the late 1980s, Auckland City was giving bonuses to developers to incorporate residential apartments in new buildings. In many cases they were converted, at completion, into offices because of lack of residential demand.

The reason such a shift in the apartment market was able to happen so quickly, and without bureaucratic intervention, is that the infrastructure to allow it was there.

The central city had bus, ferry and train services, at least to a level that enabled potential residents to consider life with fewer cars and, in any case, the city centre is quite walkable.

Other necessities - stores, cafes and entertainment - were partly there and have since grown to match the residential demand.

So is there a parallel demand for more compact living environments, but outside the central district? We suggest there is, but attractive prototypes of such an environment have yet to be built.

The quality of the design of medium-density, low-rise housing built in the past decade has been appallingly low, with many developments occupying almost all the land except that required by driveways and, consequently, lacking any landscape amenity at all.

The final insult has been that many of them leak. This has discredited all medium-density housing at the very time when it should be being seriously addressed.

We would like to see a city and industry-wide focus on building a compact community of which we can be proud, and which will demonstrate that living in such an environment can have just as many benefits as the garden suburb.

Fundamental to such an achievement is putting in place a reliable and attractive passenger transport system, since it is almost impossible to create a good medium-density environment that is wholly dependent on the car.

Now that the threat of an eastern highway ploughing through Glen Innes and Panmure is substantially diminished, there is the opportunity to develop Auckland City's vision of a compact community along that corridor.

With a university campus, existing but tired town centres, a train station and housing stock in need of a major upgrade, all the ingredients are in place. Now is the time to do the best we can in design and construction to set a benchmark for a different sort of community.

This is not to displace the garden suburb but to provide a realistic alternative to those who seek a more sustainable and community-based lifestyle.

Being able to rely on a public transport system is the keystone to this working. For just as the garden suburb was generated by the then new technology of trains and trams last century, so is a new sort of living environment waiting to be developed here from new passenger-transport technologies.

Unlike the growth in central-city apartments, new housing types to curtail suburban sprawl will not happen spontaneously. The transport infrastructure needs to be in place and proved in order to give developers and potential residents the confidence to commit to the new place.

So while acknowledging that the suburb of individual houses, based on the garden-suburb ideal, will continue as a major driving force of our cities' growth, we need at the same time urgently to develop viable alternatives.

A lot of work has been done, ranging from an overall discussion document by the Ministry for the Environment (People + Places + Spaces, published in 2002) to work being done by local councils to develop new housing types relevant to the local community and environment.

To gain acceptance there needs to be major community consultation and unprecedented teamwork, with urban designers, architects, landscape architects and developers all involved. But the key component of transport planning has to lead the way, and this is where the councils' focus needs to be if the development patterns are to change.

The suburb and the car will long be with us, but a good city gives its citizens more choices than that.

* Graeme Scott chairs the urban issues group of the Auckland branch of the Institute of Architects.