Architects invited to design Sydney’s template terraces and apartments

Architects from around the world will compete to design Sydney’s next-generation terrace house and mid-rise apartment block as part of a “pattern book” approach to boosting housing supply in the nation’s most expensive city.

The NSW government is compiling a set of standardised designs for medium-density housing that can be rolled out across Sydney without going through the lengthy planning approval process. At least some of those designs will be selected through a public competition, Premier Chris Minns announced on Thursday.

Premier Chris Minns delivering the Bradfield Oration at the MCA. Credit: Louise Kennerley

“If a builder builds to the pattern book, then the development will be considered complying development, and be given an immediate tick,” he said. “We must make sure the pattern that we choose is beautiful, modern and eventually beloved by Sydneysiders wherever they are built.”

While the government did not say exactly where the pattern book will be deployed, it will likely apply to the three-quarters of Sydney currently zoned for low-density residential development, called R2. Minns noted on Thursday that only two of 32 council environment plans in Sydney allowed new terraces and low-rise apartments in their low-density zones.

Such buildings were essential and once part of Sydney’s DNA, but had been “defined out of existence” by councils, the premier told The Daily Telegraph’s Future Sydney Bradfield Oration.

The pattern book will comprise about four or five templates for each housing type, including terraces, semi-detached dwellings, manor homes and apartment buildings up to six storeys. Competition details will be announced next year and public feedback will be sought.

The move was welcomed by the Coalition opposition and groups including the Committee for Sydney and Sydney YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard). David Borger, spokesman for the Housing Now! alliance and former Labor housing minister, said it was vital the pattern book was implemented quickly and applied everywhere in Sydney.

“A great pattern book design should work whether it is in Petersham, Pymble or Parramatta,” he said. “This is a great way to build back design trust with our community.”

Former Greater Cities Commission boss Lucy Turnbull, another pattern book advocate, said six-storey designs would be “a radical way of delivering medium-density very quickly”, but smaller three-storey designs were more likely to be accepted by communities sceptical of more density.

“That’s how Paddington was built and how the whole inner west was built,” she said, noting European countries had designed cities with pattern books since medieval times.

President of the NSW chapter of the Australian Institute of Architects, Adam Haddow, said the devil would be in the detail, but pattern book design had a long architectural history. “You used to be able to buy a plan for a house out of The Women’s Weekly in the ’70s,” he said.

The government also wants to slash approval times for high-rise developments by cutting back on site-specific design excellence competitions. These will no longer be necessary if the developer chooses from a list of approved architects.

Urban Taskforce chief executive Tom Forrest, representing large developers, said the move would reduce planning assessment times by “well over a year”.

Minns said Sydney’s unmatched beauty meant people often treated it like a delicate object and wished to “let it hang in a museum, untouched”. But this was not sustainable, he said, and “that culture has to change”.

He also foreshadowed a new transparency regime which will publish housing approval times and delays for every state-significant development, and how long each NSW council takes to approve development applications.

There will also be a “a form of league table” showing housing completions in NSW compared to other states. Minns is fond of observing NSW typically builds six homes per 1000 people each year, compared to eight in Victoria and nine in Queensland.

Forrest welcomed the move but said transparency arrangements should extend to government agencies such as Sydney Water and Transport for NSW, who often took too long to respond to housing proposals.

Opposition planning spokesman Scott Farlow said he supported more data but “even if 100,000 dwellings were approved today, it would take years for the moving vans to arrive in the street”. He repeated the opposition’s call for Labor to slow immigration to allow housing to catch up.

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