World Cities Day – Regenerating the City:
Adequate Housing for All
A world city is made distinct from a global city by its ability to exert cultural, political and historical – not only financial – influence far beyond its borders. World Cities Day is an annual observance, held at the end of ‘Urban October.’ The convening body, UN Habitat, invites city-minded organisations to raise awareness for cities, and specifically to address the challenges or urbanisation around the world. This year, the chosen theme is ‘Regenerating the City: Adequate Housing for All.’
In Australia, we might agree that ‘adequate housing for all’ denotes a sufficient supply of houses to meet demand, and by extension, a system in which house prices do not become an impossible barrier to tenancy or home ownership. The supply of and access to housing, at least in Australia, boils down to a question of affordability: can people afford to buy, rent and build houses? This might be the central question of our age. As the well-known Australian economist Alan Kohler writes in The Great Divide (2024), housing affordability is a problem that presently dominates the Australian consciousness.
In the spirit of the idea of the world city, Perth has the potential to exert far-reaching cultural and political influence if it navigates housing affordability correctly. Because of the scale and extent of Perth’s one-hundred-and-fifty-kilometre sprawl and its correlated low urban density (among the lowest in the world for any comparable city), Perth will offer a unique case study to the world. What kind of case study, however, remains undecided. Will it be a lesson in keeping supply abreast of population growth, or a warning in how a city sleepwalks into an urban nightmare? I argue that the former is more likely than the latter, but only if we understand housing density in more positive terms.
My thinking on medium density flows from the Committee for Perth’s 2050 Summit and the subsequent 2025 Densification working group. Their submission recognised that support for infill will not be secured through dwelling targets and planning reform alone, but through positive stories about vibrant neighbourhoods, successful community initiatives and the advantages of compact city living. Through our collaboration with Australia’s other capital-city committees on Density Done Well, this local ambition has become part of a national effort to shift the culture surrounding urban growth. This article suggests that Perth’s best medium-density developments offer not only national, but world-class evidence that density can strengthen character, amenity and belonging.
Reframing Density
Housing density debates tend to default to defensive language. Touted as a panacea for out-of-control urban sprawl, rising infrastructure costs, environmental destruction, weakened social cohesion, construction targets, road congestion and carbon emissions, denser housing is rarely discussed as an end in and of itself. Framing density as a remedy for these problems has done little to dislodge an ostensibly widespread preference for single house lots over multi-storey dwellings. As UWA professors of urban studies Paul J. Maginn and Neil Foley argue, the rise of sustainable development in planning theory and practice coincided with Perth’s ongoing ‘general fear of the amenity impacts of higher density housing on local neighbourhoods and communities.’ (Perth: From ‘Large Provincial City’ to ‘Globalising City, 2017).
Many accounts of Australia’s affordability crisis posit that resistance to increased dense housing stock stems from the dominant cultural proclivity for ‘the Australian dream’. For Kohler, so prolific is the instinct for green title housing that it exists in the souls of Australians as a ‘moral imperative.’ Compounding the preference for single residence dwellings is a set of historic tax and policy settings that have led to the treatment of housing as an investment asset through which to build wealth (Kohler, The Great Divide). Such a position has an observable basis in reality. In Australia, there is a greater proportion of low-density housing than there is medium and high, and single-domicile residences tend to accumulate value faster than flats. The scarcity of denser forms of housing, so the story goes, boils down to culture.
A fixation on the cultural roots of housing preferences risks clouding more nuanced economic and historical factors that explain prevailing social attitudes about density. The Australian dream narrative is compelling, but it can also be an alluring absolution for urban planners, economists and city advocates. When cultural values are presented as immutable, it follows that denser forms of housing are politically unworkable. If the average Australian doesn’t want higher density, then why would politicians enact reform? Add in Australia’s multilayered government and expansive housing policy and tax settings and we have arrived at the impossible politics of housing affordability.
But is the question of adequate housing irreconcilable with Australian values? Brendan Coates and Joey Maloney of the Grattan Institute understand the politics of densification well. In their critique of Kohler’s thesis, they write that ‘building denser cities is a political decision… [and] the political tide is starting to turn.’ Citing survey respondents in Melbourne and Sydney, they note that residents in those cities ‘want more density if it means being able to live in a better-located suburb’ (Setting Alan Kohler Straight on Housing Policy, 2024). Significantly, their survey data tells us that the best advocates for density are residents, as opposed to urban planning experts or economists. Those who have experienced the tightened community bonds that flow from living in closer proximity to their neighbours turn out to be density’s best advocates.
Coates and Maloney have landed on the paradox of density. For developers (and even governments) to construct liveable and desirable medium density housing at scale, there must be sufficient community demand to justify an expensive and risky undertaking. But sufficient community demand seemingly depends on a cultural paradigm shift that can only be brought about by the advocacy of people who have lived in close-knit neighbourhoods. The paradox of density has a particular relevance to Perth, where, as Maginn and Foley identify, there is an entrenched scepticism of higher density forms. The appeals of developers, urban planners and academics about the economic and social benefits of a high-traffic, mixed-use, diverse neighbourhood can only go so far in a city where lifestyle has thrived despite (but not necessarily because) of a vast urban sprawl.
Looking local
Concept art for Willing’s award-winning Clifton & Central in Mount Lawley, art courtesy of Willing.
How then, can we reconcile the paradox of density and the politics of affordability with the pressing demographic and environmental challenges Perth faces in the twenty-first century? There is a tendency to look to international case studies for a solution. Vancouver and Auckland are oft-cited example of cities that have effectively incentivise more intensive land use. But these cities have vastly different governance systems than Perth. Zoning reforms in Auckland, for example, followed a 2007 Royal Commission on the city’s governance. The outcome of that inquiry was to centralise a unitary council with a jurisdiction inhabited by approximately 1.8 million people. Perth does not enjoy such a unitary governance structure, and until such time as it does, parallels with cities overseas unfortunately have limited application here. In Perth, the community must work within existing constraints to solve local problems.
Rather than looking abroad, we should look to Perth first for examples of locally meaningful denser housing builds. Fortunately, examples of architecturally inspiring and community integrated medium density projects abound. The slow but steady appearance of local undertakings in this space is itself an indicator that the appetite for low-rise apartment living is changing. The Perth developer Willing (est. 1969) is undoubtedly a leader in this space, and their efforts merit celebration. Willing’s builds are typically four to eight stories with around thirty dwellings per site. As president of the WA chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects Fred Chaney writes in Business News, this is a scale of development Perth is ‘chronically underbuilding.’ Willing mix classical and modern architectural forms to create aesthetically pleasing mixed-use, low-rise accommodation that are intentionally designed in keeping with surrounding residences and infrastructure.
Willing’s offerings are at the boutique end of the market. Importantly, however, their developments centre around integration with the local neighbourhood. Retail space on bottom floors for cafes and businesses invite the neighbouring community to participate in the public life of the building. The divide of the public and private realms diminished, the result is a magnetised street that is a more interesting and colourful place for interaction, discussion and diversity.
People gravitate towards spaces where ideas move quickly, and that feel lived in and used. Activated public spaces are generators of what academics call the ‘microsociology of public order’ whereby the sum of repeated public contact at the local level creates a feeling of public identity, safety and trust. Never have truer words been put on paper than those of the American political scientist, James C. Scott, who wrote: ‘the absence of this trust is a disaster to a city street’ (Seeing Like a State, 1998). Creating public trust through example, it stands to reason, will play a vital role in showing rather than telling, the people of Perth the community benefits of denser housing.
Willing is not alone in championing medium-density builds that stand to overturn prevailing local negative attitudes towards denser housing. The ECU Mount Lawley Redevelopment, Knutsford East Village and Fremantle Muse are notable for their ambition to foster connectivity with local creative industries. The recently announced WA Government Station Precincts Initiative to unlock higher density around metropolitan train stations also poses an opportunity to inspire an attitudinal shift towards denser forms of housing. Crucially, proposed developments must learn from the industry leading local examples that have inspired close-knit, interesting communities bound by public trust. Expedient, ugly builds lathered in concrete render and with no bridging of the public and private realms will erode community confidence because they are antithetical to the microsociology of public order.
Crucially, the principals of community-integrated planning that vitalise boutique projects can scale across the market. Common Ground East Perth (Kaalak), designed by architects Gresley Abas, is a monument to the idea that social housing needn’t conform to prevailing stereotypes. With locally symbolic red terracotta brickwork and high masonry arches, the building recalls the Federation feel of East Perth’s civic and industrial heritage. On the threshold of one of the City’s largest and greenest public parks, with sunlit open air community spaces and proximity to transport, health, wellbeing and participation services, it provides the foundational ingredients for the systems of reciprocity and trust upon which great communities thrive.
Conclusion: The busiest room in the house
Housing affordability is far more complex than unlocking medium density alone. As Steven Roley, Rachel Ong and Amity James of Curtin University write, the scarcity of social housing in Perth is closely related to a lack of housing diversity (Perth’s Infill Housing Future, 2017). Indeed, Perth’s rapid greenfield development beyond the urban periphery, high-density forms and suburban subdivisions all have a role to play in housing the nearly four million people who will live here by the middle decades of the century, regardless of their age or financial position. The construction of new neighbourhoods and the densification of existing ones pose urgent questions regarding strain on infrastructure and the environment. It is to medium density ‘with identity’ that we should look to for inspiration.
World Cities Day invites us to lift our sights about urban challenges. Award-winning medium density builds that create social capital in Perth are case studies that dare the world to dream. It will not be through words, but actions, that Perth realises its potential as a world city. Roley, Ong and James write that medium density developments that exhibit ‘innovative architectural solutions… that preserve neighbourhood character and foster vibrancy in communities’ are the best defences against public opposition to infill housing. Builds that offer leadership and vision through the quality of their design and their ability to foster a civic spirit are a significant component in removing the density barriers that are an obstacle to adequate housing for all. The same logic applies to higher density builds. Multiplex’s Raffles Waterfront Development (built 2006), for example, was an award-winning structure that a Committee for Perth study found had increased ‘public acceptance of the need for higher density development’ within traditionally low-density locations.
In this article I have argued that we should look closer to home for local blueprints for medium density projects that enliven the community. We might look as well to our own homes, and to their busiest rooms, to better grasp the benefits of denser communities. This is at least what James Scott pondered in his critique of how high-modernist planning usually fails because it overlooks local knowledge. ‘Understanding the magnetic effect of the busy street over more specialized settings’, he wrote, ‘is no more difficult than understanding why the kitchen is typically the busiest room in a house. It is the most versatile setting – a place of food and drink, of cooking and eating, and hence of socialization and exchange.’