What is Bluefield Housing?

Existing urban housing policy in Australia largely falls into three distinct categories:

• Greenfield Housing, where undeveloped land (most often on a city’s fringes) is developed for housing for the first time, extending suburbia;
• Brownfield Housing, where redundant non-residential land is converted to residential use, often at a medium- to high-density scale; and
• Greyfield Housing, coined by Peter Newton in 2010 to describe the middle suburbs, where ageing housing stock is demolished and replaced with new medium-density housing on subdivided or consolidated allotments.

Each of these models, along with transit corridor apartment development, aims for density increases to be achieved without negatively affecting the more established and character-laden parts of a city. However these older ‘no-go’ suburbs nonetheless continue to face character and amenity pressures externally, due to their adjacency to medium and high density ‘go-go’ development zones, and from within, due to a constant erosion of character via small scale KDR infill.

Bluefield Housing distinguishes itself from these models in three ways:

1. It acknowledges that older suburbs change regardless of policy – as existing properties are continually adapted in ways that their original owners could never have imagined – and it leverages this by increasing density and diversity in the likeness of these alterations.
2. It creates small yet complete backyard dwellings by eschewing the subordinate Accessory Dwelling Unit model, creating instead a flat hierarchy of dwellings across the allotment.
3. It is a design-led and whole-of-site approach. Rather than determining infill opportunities metrically through identifying minimum site areas, the Bluefield model ignores allotment size and instead empowers the proponent to demonstrate appropriateness of the development based on resident need, contextual fit and design responsiveness.