Inside the Innovative Design Solutions for Melbourne’s Growing Suburbs

The iron lacework of a Victorian terrace bordering a bluestone alleyway. The ding-ding of a tram. The warble of a magpie at dawn and the flap of a fruit bat at dusk. A Hills Hoist whirrs in the breeze. The wail of a siren wafting from a footy oval. The fresh scent of eucalypt after rain and the burnt-toast odour of a coffee roastery.

All familiar signs of Melbourne, where much of life unfolds among the sprawling suburbs.

But the familiar landscape is changing: population is growing, housing is under pressure, and development is reshaping established neighbourhoods and pushing into undeveloped land.

The suburban model hasn’t kept pace with the Australian Dream: people are living longer and ageing in place, more people are renting, and the boundaries between home, work and care are blurring.

More than a human habitat, suburbia is an ecological, infrastructural, cultural and social system.

So what happens when we design suburbs around the lives people actually live — and the landscapes they share?

That question formed the spine of the Design session at the University of Melbourne’s Future Suburb Symposium, where host Delia Teschendorff and architects Pier Vittorio Aureli, Martino Tattara, David Neustein, and Lisa Garner explored what our suburbs might become.

The Victorian Government’s 10-year plan for new suburbs maps out 180,000 new homes across 27 new growth areas, alongside transport, schools, and community facilities.

Future Homes is encouraging medium-density housing in established suburbs.

The challenge isn’t just finding the labour, funding and land to build more homes. It’s designing a living landscape where people, plants, animals, and water can coexist.

For Tattara and Aureli, co-founders of Dogma, the ground plane is the starting point. Their thinking questions the assumptions that produced the suburb.

Their research into suburban Flanders traces a Belgian landscape shaped by private ownership, fragmented land and the ideal of the individual family home.

Their response to adding more housing is centred on shared space, challenging the idea that adding housing means adding more isolated private dwellings.

Aureli said, “Densification for us means especially cooperation… this could only happen in a proper way if there is also a decommodification of housing.”

For Dogma, that means reconsidering the suburban boundary itself: fences, private gardens and fragmented ownership become potential sites for collective use.

Tattara said, “Commoning becomes really this sort of principle through which any form of polarisation of private property is being offset by the fact that this benefit can only profit the community at large.”

Dogma’s projects explore how existing suburban land can accommodate more people by converting underused garages into assisted living spaces, creating shared facilities, and considering how portions of oversized backyards might support affordable housing.

The ambition is to accommodate more people by rethinking social logic: building more cooperation, shared ground and opportunities for collective life.

Through his practice, Other Architects, Neustein shifts the focus from ownership to the buildings themselves.

Neustein discussed the housing crisis, challenging the assumption that there’s a shortage of dwellings. He pointed to the uneven distribution of existing space, citing recent census data that identified 13 million spare bedrooms in Australian homes.

His 2015 Offset House project, developed for the Chicago Architecture Biennial, stripped back the McMansion’s cladding to reveal its potential for living with others and the environment.

The project treated the existing house as a framework that could be subdivided internally while opening the space between buildings as communal landscape.

“Start from consideration of the ground plane, incremental development over wholesale change, consider the in-between, and design the flexibility future occupants will rely on.”

That same approach appears in Other Architects’ 2024 NSW Housing Pattern Book proposal, developed with NMBW Architecture Studio.

The terrace-house model adapts to different sites, household arrangements and street conditions while maintaining gardens and shared landscapes.

Rooms can adapt over time — from living spaces and bedrooms to workspaces, granny flats, carports or workshops — while multiple entries and shared gardens create opportunities for different households to overlap.

Neustein’s La Mandra modular home takes this idea further, using a compact, prefabricated hempcrete structure that can be disassembled and reconfigured.

The idea is to design frameworks that can adapt as household arrangements change, without trying to predict exactly what those lives will look like.

Garner brought the question back to relationships, asking, “Who and what kinds of relationships are we designing those homes for?”

Through the Victorian Government’s Future Homes competition, her practice LIAN Architects developed a three-storey apartment model designed to fit suburban sites while retaining generous private open space.

The proposal accommodates different household arrangements, with adaptable layouts ranging from studio to four-bedroom apartments and 25 square metres of private open space per dwelling.

“Either connection to the ground or connection to the sky,” she said.

Garner’s practice is working with social housing providers to deliver 45 dwellings across three suburban lots in Gippsland, while retaining around 55% of the site as permeable landscape.

The project uses broken building volumes and pitched roofs to respond to neighbouring single-storey homes, while asking who — and what relationships — these homes are designed for.

Garner’s research into multigenerational living in Italy revealed households spanning three generations and arrangements that dissolve the boundaries between family and community.

In one example, a family home gradually divided into five apartments, allowing residents from 18 to 93 years old to live independently while remaining connected.

“A good intergenerational home is just a flexible one,” she added.

Privacy and autonomy were key, with independent entrances allowing family members to connect without living in each other’s pockets.

Other examples expanded the idea beyond biological families, including multiple young families choosing to share domestic life and informal childcare.

For Garner, liveability extends beyond the front door.

Walkable streets, shops and public spaces can bring generations into contact without requiring every form of care and connection to happen inside the home.