Sydney’s younger generations aren’t happy to inherit the city’s new grey suburbs.Credit: Rhett Wyman
As Sydney replicates hectare after hectare of grey suburbia to meet its housing demands, it does so at the cost of genuinely liveable futures for the generations supposed to move into them. Or so says Amanda Eessa, a 22-year-old architecture masters student from Fairfield in Sydney’s west.
Eessa has a professional vendetta against the “grey houses, grey streets and grey methods” that she says will only “create more grey days” for Sydney’s future generations. She is referring to the clouds of homogenous new-build developments looming on Sydney’s periphery.
If you drive along the Cumberland Highway or simply Google the stories about Sydney’s sprawling small-lot, large-house, dark-roofed suburbs, you will see what Eessa is talking about.
Sydney’s younger generations have not designed the new suburbs they are likely to live in, such as Marsden Park, Menangle Park and Austral, though they will inherit their multitude of issues from rising heat, poor transport links and the absence of essential amenities that have all been copied and pasted from one suburb to the next.
Architecture master’s student Amanda Eessa wants to get rid of Sydney’s grey blocks.Credit: Nick Moir
Western Sydney University urban cooling researcher Sebastian Pfautsch believes these developments have been designed without any regard for their future inhabitants.
The most negligent, he believes, is their inability to withstand worsening heat waves. These urban sprawl lots typically feature large houses in dark colours sitting up to the edges of small lots with no space for trees to mitigate heat. Even if you retrofit these suburbs with trees in the small pockets of public space, Pfautsch said reaching target coverage is completely unrealistic.
Poor-quality construction using cheaper materials without consideration for architectural styles typically designed to combat heat further exacerbates an increasingly hotter problem.
Pfautsch said to consider characteristically warm cities like Athens, where architecture is designed for comfort: white houses with thick walls, small windows and flat roofs in light colours all aid in reducing heat. In western Sydney, the hottest suburbs in our city, we are doing the opposite.
“Who is responsible for having created neighbourhoods that have nothing to do with climate adaptation, with support for biodiversity, with human thermal comfort in mind? None of these things have been incorporated. It’s mind-boggling when you think about it,” Pfautsch said.
“I think what led to those suburbs is the appetite for profit by developers, the overruling of local government strategies and guidelines,” he said.
This hits the heart of Eessa’s grievance: suburbs designed for people without full consideration for the conditions they would need to thrive. The pooling of these suburbs in Sydney’s west means that not all of the city is impacted by poor design equally.
For a group of young engineers working in Sydney’s west, moving into the grey enclaves is seen as a necessity on the way to their eventual dream homes.
Darcy Elton, 21, one of the young engineers working at Horizon Engineers based in Parramatta that services the region, believes living in a homogenous neighbourhood may be one way to stay in the city.
“I think there probably will be some time in my life where I will be in those kinds of areas where it’s affordable,” he said.
“Previous generations have made a lot of money off real estate because of the increase in land value which I don’t think will happen,” Elton said of newer periphery suburbs. “I think to move from a homogenous house to a more luxury house close to the city is a lot harder than it has been traditionally.”
Two of his colleagues, Setarah Morad (22) and Hanady Al qayem (31), are both saving up to enter property markets in other Australian cities so they can afford to live in their own homes in Sydney one day.
Darcy Elton, Hanady Al qayem, Veronica Wenn and Setarah Morad are all young engineers working in Western Sydney who want an input into the future of their city.
Morad said she’d prefer to wait and build her dream home: “I would definitely like to buy my first property somewhere else and eventually build up my portfolio and be able to build my own dream house and definitely not do the homogenous look, the uniform look.”
Veronica Wenn, 24, said she doesn’t see herself moving into her own property anywhere in Sydney any time soon let alone the city’s newer suburbs – grey or not. But eventually, when she can afford to, she said she wouldn’t knock the idea.
“I probably honestly would live in something like that if it means having a big area to myself and if it’s more affordable as well.
“As much as we don’t like the look of these grey line suburbs, that is the best [the NSW government] can do with what they have; they’re supposed to build all these properties in a really short amount of time, build infrastructure, all those things. So, as much as I don’t like the look, something’s got to give.”
Each of the young engineers referred to economic pressures as the reason why new suburbs are so uniform. In their own work, they have seen first-hand the impacts of construction costs – a lasting effect of the COVID-19 pandemic – and gaps in regulations that allow for cheap and sometimes poorly constructed builds.
Asked whether we will ever look back on these new suburbs as being an aesthetic sign of the times similar to the way we view terrace houses in Surry Hills, Horizon Engineers director Hussein Naji said: “I don’t think so, they won’t last as long.”
Once seen as slums for Sydney’s poorest, terraced houses are highly sought after both for their vicinity to the CBD and because they are perceived by some as visually cool.
But Naji said the new builds in Western Sydney aren’t built like the city’s legacy architecture and won’t survive long enough to be remembered fondly.
“We are not building how we used to. We used to build structures that would stand the test of time. Now we’re using inferior products, inferior methodologies. We’re trying to save money,” he said.
Instead, Naji thinks these suburbs will die young and that some new builds won’t even last four years due to the quality allowed for by building regulations.
Eessa agrees: “Most of the newly built grey homes have been built less than 10 years ago, some are quite recent, and to see cracking in facades so early on is not normal, and the water damage to some you’ll encounter when driving near Camden is very sad to see.
“The housing crisis has become a dark cloud in NSW due to us building more haphazardly, which will only hurt us in the long term.”