Article : housing
The death of the 1/4 acre block
Farewell to the great Australian dream of the quarter acre block, we will
miss you – you served us well, sheltered us wonderfully, helped bring our
family and loved one’s together and sent a message to the world that we had
succeeded in life by attaining you, but this is where we must part company.
A
s we grow our population, increase our
housing prices, change our demographics,
see more young adults live at home longer,
have numerous generations living together under one
roof, and see many other co-habitating models rise
we are slowly beginning to talk ourselves out of the
necessity to live on a detached block complete with
garden and garage.
Instead we will increasingly choose to live in semi
detached, row style and apartments, predominantly
4 – 6 stories high, in mixed purpose buildings (shops,
offices and residences) which is a return to the 1940’s
and 50’s when many people lived above the shop, but
then the great dream was to get out of there and into
a stand alone dwelling and now it is to return to it.
That’s not to say we won’t have stand alone houses,
but rather that the great cultural norm of having to
have it will disappear and it will increasingly not be
seen as necessary, or important.
These new dwellings of tomorrow will be smaller in
size and have to pack a lot of purpose into smaller
spaces and to achieve this we will borrow heavily
from our Asian neighbours who through necessity
have lived in smaller spaces that perform multipurpose uses.
This is not just a question of housing, but it speaks
to a changing life an d work style where we will not
all work 9-5, where more people will be using the
home throughout the day for a multitude of purposes,
where technology will be able to digitally change the
internal decor to suit the immediate needs before
instantly changing to suit the next set of purposes.
In this new world of housing it is also likely that
we will adopt the Asian habit of eating out more
and using our neighborhood and its parks and
infrastructure as our backyards, where local shops
become important as meeting places and the people
around us become our extended family.
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