Adrians post... ruminating the suburbs

Sydney’s suburbs

(why it is not about the quality of the individual house):

1. Suburban is not in opposition to, but lies within a more general urban condition.
2. Suburban condition is conceived by the profession only as the locus of problems not of already existing value or potential
3. Suburbs is shorthand usually = western suburbs not the north shore for example
4. Profession seems to focus on the type of housing in the western suburbs, this is a false problem.
1. Critiques regarding ‘housing type’ serve to mask judgements on taste (and following Bourdieu therefore class) behind imperatives on ethics (energy and expenditure)
2. Interesting to note how language from popular interest into diet/health/weight control is appropriated by professional comentariat into discourse on McMansions/obesity/weight control eg Liz Farelly in the SMH.
3. Would be useful to compare life style costs versus embodied construction costs
4. Organisationally speaking domestic space in the inner city north shore and the west are indistinguishable with regards to their interior. Both seek to increasingly atomize their inhabitants and produce good consumers + individuals.
5. The actual problems that effect the suburbs are urban and infrastructure based.
6. Social mobility, mixing, conflict, tensions and negotiation are products of density. Low density dwelling diffuses interaction.
7. The suburbs are originally conceived as a withdrawal from the problems of overcrowding. Before the suburbs can be invented, an image of the city/density that is threatening must exist.

If it is not about discreet housing, then….

Globally-some optimism and confidence please

A larger problem in sydney is its failure to position itself as one of a set of regional primary cities - bankgkok, singapore, hong kong

this is an infrastructural problem: the infrastructure of public space, transport networks - road, rail and air for example and our ability to think of them at another scale - not that of sydney city (still too colonial) and not that of the olympics ( who can think at that scale).

we know there is an issue re affordable access into asia and the network strengthening this will bring.

Airports

(why it is about infrastructure)

What Sydney’s suburbs need is not architects telling them that their homes are bloated, that they lack taste/should exercise more self restraint etc….What Sydney’s suburbs need is MAJOR spending on capital works and public infrastructure

The system of secondary and tertiary European airports have revolutionised European tourism and the regional European economy. Without this system of subsidiary airports, there would be no low cost air travel and no tourism boom in Europe.

With additional airports come an entire range of benefits, an intensification in the flows of people, goods, information through a region. The mass transport and freight infrastructure that comes with new airports, additional programs, like freight distribution, management, hotels, duty free shopping, departure lounges, parking etc. (ok so this is the base line of programs that come with an airport)

Other Programs

The first question given the above is what other programs might be profitably attached to the above.

Shopping (beyond duty free)/Westfield, Health, Retirement/Golf courses/Spa (Australia could become to China what Spain is to Britain and Germany), Education (collaborative campuses, higher education one of our biggest exports, universities could share resources on one campus with individually branded degrees)

Design/Architecture

The design problem is to a large extent how we might take these different programs and collapse them into an urban condition that is complex, porous, flexible. These projects always resolve themselves into campus style business parks (see J.G Ballard Supercannes) or otherwise banal security enclaves with golf courses….the logic behind which is always suburban (diffuse/withdrawn/segregated)…how to generate an urban condition out of these aspects is an interesting design question.

This infrastructure has a multi-scalar consequence. It will address the metropolitan region, the quarter, the neighbourhood and the block

It will also have a site specificity - Bankstown (obviously) will be different than that other site to the north west the difference between the two what benefit can be leveraged through such infrastructure at multiple scales and according to the various logics of each site - and this is where the spatial argument comes in: this is where the architecture is - it's a spatial argument.