Houses grow as gardens shrink in suburbia

Jason Tozer

15 May 2008: The face of suburbia is constantly changing, with current trends toward larger houses on blocks of land changing the configuration of the suburban landscape.

Landscape architecture lecturer Andrew MacKenzie is looking at this trend in relation to housing redevelopment in older garden suburbs and investigating the social influences that have caused this shift for his PhD thesis.
                                        

The latest imaging technology shows how building has encroached on green areas in Duffy between 2002 (left) and 2005

Mr MacKenzie’s PhD will critically look at values contributing to current development trends reflected in increasing house sizes, despite fewer occupants per house, and shrinking gardens.

His case study will investigate the rebuilding process in Canberra’s Duffy after the 2003 bushfires. This will allow Mr MacKenzie to study the redevelopment of housing in an existing suburb that dramatises the redevelopment impact on a much greater scale than would normally occur.

“In an existing suburb there is perhaps a maximum of five applications for housing redevelopment each year, but after the bushfires there were 300 applications in Duffy,” he said.

“This provides an ideal opportunity to do a proper analysis of the social actors that contribute to current development trends.”

Mr MacKenzie is using a number of innovative ways to visually present the data he is compiling. This includes selectively revealing satellite data using a Normalised Vegetation Difference Index (NVDI) images, with technical assistance from the CSIRO urban systems program.

The NVDI image above shows the patterns of distribution of vegetation (green), such as grass and trees, and manmade structures (white), such as housing and roads, in Duffy in 2002 and after the bushfires and rebuilding in 2005.

He is using the free geographical software tool Google Earth to gain an idea of people’s views on the changing face of their suburb by giving them the ability to look at the suburb as a whole.