Featureless houses in a monotonous splay of uniformity. Opportunities for beauty are gazumped by streets bleached of conviviality. Neighbourhoods that hold the promise of community and connection are entangled in webs of roading furnished with concrete, bricks and sand.

A life nestled harmoniously with nature is a foreign prospect here. Expansive land-clearing in favour of vast residential developments is the status quo. Housing estates, one after the other, spawn from the verges of a seemingly eternal freeway like decorations from a garland at a party where the topic of celebration is sameness.

Perth’s suburban sprawl outraged one local photographer and documentarian so much that he created an entire exhibition about it.

Harry Cunningham’s series, aptly named The World’s Longest City, had crowds flooding the Museum of Perth when it showcased earlier this year. Social media posts of his work have attracted over a million views, even prompting over 300 comments on a Reddit thread subsequently ‘questioning’ Perth’s urban design.

Cunningham said while bigger than expected, the response to his work was unsurprising:

“It struck a nerve with people frustrated by long commutes and soulless suburbs. Many recognised that these personal frustrations were signs of a bigger urban problem,” he said.

“I wanted to bring awareness to the hidden impacts. While the city is often portrayed as relaxed and liveable, this work shows a less visible side — one where development is driven by cars and private profit, rather than people and community.”

We only have to look out our windows, perhaps even down our own street, to see what Cunningham refers to as a “disquieting reality” and for many Perth dwellers, our neighbourhood norms. With an evidently growing basis of critique for this suburban praxis, a design alternative that aids communities that are built for connection and abets the negative outcomes of suburbs built otherwise, is surely being sought.

Neuroarchitecture

‘Neuroarchitecture’ refers to the mental and emotional wellbeing impacts triggered by our built environments. Professor of cognitive neuroscience at Canada’s University of Waterloo Colin Ellard conducted field research that revealed a significantly low level of physiological arousal — and a subsequently lowered mood — when study participants were exposed to buildings with plain, monotonous facades compared to the positive physiological responses among participants who were shown visually complex and aesthetically ‘interesting’ building facades.

Sarah Backhouse is a graduate researcher at Deakin University’s School of Built Environment and author of Embedding Mental Wellbeing in Architectural Practice: A Eudaimonic Perspective. She elaborates on the negative effects of unvarying building appearances, saying: “When streets upon streets of houses look almost identical, due to the cookie-cutter aesthetic approaches adopted by house developers, the absence of distinctive features can erode a sense of local identity.”

The ‘consequences’ Cunningham alludes to in his critique of suburban sprawl are supported by the findings of neuroarchitecture research like Ellard’s and Backhouse’s, that showcase the psychosocial costs of Perth’s current suburban design norms, where monotonous and unesthetic building facades are aplenty.

Stephan Barthel, a professor at Sweden’s University of Gävle, researches urban design through a socio-spatial perspective. In 2018, he co-authored an article analysing the experiences of residents across multiple municipalities in Stockholm to understand the design elements that were shown to support psychosocial wellbeing by optimising opportunities for social interactions between the inhabitants.

Concluding that the connection between suburban sprawl and compromised mental wellbeing were inextricable, Barthel said: “We discovered a 27% increased risk for depression related with living in suburbs and sprawled urban areas. Contarily, denser, social-centric and green urban landscapes produce the opposite — a relatively lowerered risk of that.”

Referring to a subsequent study of neighbourhoods in Denmark, Barthel’s research discovered the dominant urban design correlate of depressive disorder was across medium density, suburban regions. According to the Australasian Institute of Housing, ‘medium density’ is classified as neighbourhoods with 35-70 dwellings per hectare, which characterises a majority of Perth’s fringe suburbs. Barthel found that poorer mental wellbeing was thematic in these medium density regions compared to those living in more densely populated metro regions or in sparsely populated rural areas.

Barthel’s research also showed how public spaces incorporated in urban design influence social segregation, a factor essential to consider when we live in an increasingly detached society. The World Population Review reports 5.44% of Australia’s population as depressed, and according to the AIHW, 16% of adults report feeling persistently lonely and socially isolated. This renders the importance of the configurative properties in our urban design as critical to our collective wellbeing. And based on his studies in Stockholm, Barthel concluded that unless our urban planners want to promulgate avoidably high rates of depression, our current residential design practices need to acknowledge this.

Rerouting

Senior lecturer at Curtin University’s School of Design and the Built Environment Giles Thomson elaborates on the need for a reconsidered approach to suburban infill. Arguing that the outward expansion of suburbs increases our dependency on cars and inhibits optimal wellbeing outcomes for Perth’s population.

He said: “Everybody has different values, but for many people, I would argue that a higher quality of life would mean having better access to social space, nature, and amenities without our access being inhibited by the constant need to drive.”

Research has found a higher instance of adverse physical and mental health issues associated with frequent exposure to major roads. Any readers who regularly commute on the arduous freeways that hold us hostage as Perth’s primary means of timely transport can undoubtedly attest – spending hours driving from A to B is a highway to unhappiness.

An RAC survey of WA drivers found that on average, we spend 12 hours and 12 minutes per week in our cars. That results in 26.5 days per year spent driving, and 34 days per year for those who regularly commute during peak hour traffic. With an urban sprawl that stretches over 150km along the coast, and with infrastructural zoning segregating our central business districts and residential hubs from our industrial areas, car dependency is a hallmark of Perth’s suburban sprawl. Thomson explains that this is a result of ‘functional zonings’, a characteristic of modernist planning ideals, which he said is now “baked into both our culture and our urban planning system.” So, what’s next?

A framework constructed for wellbeing

Recently, the WA government announced it is partnering with developers to build 50,000 new homes in a new northward suburban expansion. With the upcoming suburbs of this northern corridor likely to mirror the same design philosophies of existing Perth neighbourhoods, Thomson suggests any design alternative would require a significant “planning paradigm shift.”

What would a more considered, community-centred approach to suburban development look like? We needn’t look far. Thomson refers to the One Planet development in Perth’s own White Gum Valley as an exemplar of ‘better’ local urban design. Based on the 10 design principles of the international One Planet Living framework, White Gum Valley is the first Western Australian community to adopt this model. Setting a benchmark for innovative approaches to urban design, One Planet White Gum Valley prioritises environmentally conscious designs that are constructed with a goal to promote a healthy, happy lifestyle for its inhabitants.

The headline principles of One Planet developments focus on fostering a sense of community through design. This involves shared spaces and initiatives that lower car dependency, like proximity to public transport links and even implementing community-owned vehicles for residents to share. Aesthetically, retaining mature trees and orienting properties for optimal sunlight exposure are among the designs used to create housing developments that promote the wellbeing of its inhabitants. Marrying communality without compromising privacy, these developments feature thoughtfully compact dwellings in complexes populated by shared public spaces. By favouring the ‘precinct’ formulation of these constructions, an achievable alternative exists to counter Perth’s sprawling fringes.

How living a community-conducive lifestyle has come to feel ‘countercultural’

In a living room awash with daylight, trees dance outside the window framing Annolies Truman and Barry Healy as they sit at their dining room table. As residents of a One Planet development in White Gum Valley for the past seven years, the couple can attest to the benefits of life among this design-centred, rather than profit-driven, residential model. Truman describes how the complex’s inclusion of shared garden beds, a centralised courtyard and communal kitchen amenities has stewarded a greater sense of connection among neighbours.

Truman said: “People love to feel connected — it’s a natural way to live. It also encourages people to look after their surroundings better — they will pick up rubbish, weed, do things to make their neighbourhoods neater. It builds good citizenship when people can rely on one another. They perform acts of service, water each others’ plants, care for their neighbours’ pets, house sit — all this has happened here.”

A concerted effort by developers to retain mature trees and a proximity to nature has also encouraged positive wellbeing outcomes for fellow residents, Truman observes.

Regardless of good intentions, Healy refers to “many a slip between cup and lip” in the completion of the complex, compromising its potential to be the flourishing hub of connection and sustainability it originally promised. For example, he said that giving residents the option to have their front doors facing outwards, rather than into the shared space reduced incidental social interactions among neighbours. He hoped feedback like this could could be considered for new developments.

And while the research suggests these structural improvements would likely enhance the wellbeing of residents, without an overarching governance structure to enforce the community-centred design ethos, the ‘opt-in’ nature of design recommendations means they risk becoming what Healy called: “a conventional housing development with solar panels on top.”

The goverance structures that have guided much of Perth’s development have historially omitted mentions of community-centred design, making make the pursuit of a socially connected lifestyle feel like radicalism.

Healy said: “People who are committed to One Planet principles have to live a countercultural life where we are swimming against the status quo in many ways – not just in our informal, social culture, but in the current policy and legal structures.”

Building a happier Perth

The bureacracy of planning policy is complicated. It involves state and local governments, zonings and approvals, along with long term strategy plans and dispute resoltuion processes that usually see the state government overriding local government objections.

A spokesperson from the Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage said developers must give “due regard” to the aesthetic recommendations outlined in the DPLH State Planning Policy.

The policy says decision-makers must give “due regard” to 10 design principles including community and aesthetics. Due regard means that it must be consciously considered and demonstrated to have been considered in the decision-making process, but it is less clear about what the result of those considerations needs to be.

Thomson warned that amid the upcoming construction surge to meet the current housing demand, unthoughtful designs executed by urban developers would present an existential threat.

He said: “If we do not design these houses well, we risk ending up with more places that fail to deliver a high quality of life, and that does not have to be the case. It’s a choice.”