Planning for social failure or social cohesion

Erratic and short-sighted planning policies are not solving the affordability problem that is keeping the poor, the vulnerable and even people on average incomes out of housing in areas they would like to live. Instead, these policies may be driving Australia toward a divided and bitter society in the manner of Trump’s America. A society where people are more isolated, more fragmented, more resentful and the commons – the glue of social cohesion – ignored, devalued or privatised.

There is a chorus of politicians in Victoria, NSW and the Commonwealth – ironically mainly Labor politicians – who vilify communities expecting a say in how their neighbourhoods develop as NIMBYs. To vilify, attack, deny legitimacy to any groups that oppose your use of power is an old tactic but, in this era it’s pure Trumpism. The attacks disenfranchise communities through laws that deny their legitimacy while clearing a path for profit-driven private developers to shape our cities.

Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan casts NIMBYs as selfish people blocking access to new homes for young people. Federal Housing Minister Clare O’Neil argues NIMBYs are responsible for the segregation of Australian cities into areas of wealth and poverty. NSW Housing Minister Paul Scully accuses NIMBYs of “actively vying” to empty their suburbs of children. While academics from the University of Western Sydney accuse NIMBYs of fostering systemic racism.

It is argued that current planning changes will benefit people who cannot afford homes in a market where building costs and home prices have risen faster than the ability to pay.

In a “normal” market, this disequilibrium self corrects. Those who have ridden the wave of price increases take a big haircut until prices fall to a level the market can pay. In this market, those who have profited want a free hand while they cling to their failing business models and profits from decades of rising prices.

Confrontation is focused on high-rise development. There is little evidence of market support for high-rise living. Prices for inner city units in Melbourne have been flat for a decade.

Real Estate Institute of Victoria data show the median price for a unit in Fitzroy in late 2020 early 2021 in the low $800,000s. Currently, the median price is the same with prices falling below this level in the last quarter of 2025. For broader Melbourne, the situation is much the same. If anything, unit prices are lower now than five years ago.

Contrary to what O’Neil and Scully argue, the desire of families for a house with a back yard is driving demand and the urban sprawl needed to deliver on this desire.

Planning changes won’t create more backyards in inner city areas. An Ipsos poll for the Committee for Melbourne conducted in July 2025 confirmed this: “The findings reveal a clear public preference for outward expansion over upward growth.” It concluded that “for many, the traditional house remains the aspirational ideal for family life”.”

The poll finds “considerable resistance to apartment living”. Affordability might make apartment living more attractive. But the market isn’t delivering affordable, liveable apartments. The public sector will need to intervene. In my suburb, about 20 per cent of people live in public housing. Those same politicians want to knock them down to build private housing. A plan that will reduce open space, raise prices and relocate families.

In inner city areas, the private sector can only see profit in luxury apartments that can be sold to downsizers. While the theory runs that this will free up their older larger houses for families, the price downsizers will need to achieve will not make their homes accessible for young families.

There is an oversupply of apartments and sites with permits where no building work is going on. In my street, an apartment block has two mid-level units they can’t sell for $2.5 million. That price may be ok for a unit with a view. But who will spend that when at any moment the minister might approve a 14-story wall of concrete and glass over the road leaving you with no view and a wind tunnel for a street.

New approaches are needed

New York architect Vishaan Chakrabarti writes: “Many people, even if they are open to greater urban density, find most contemporary metropolitan growth to be soul crushing, especially when built by mainstream developers.”

Architects or “starchitects” have not helped with their focus on monumentalist buildings that stand out from the neighbours rather than blend and maximise the opportunity of the commons.

In a collection of critical essays titled The New Urban Condition, Leandro Medrano, Luiz Recamán and Tom Avermaete argue that architecture and planning lost their way in the rise of neo-liberalism in the 1970s and 1980s. The pre-eminence of individualism, prioritisation of the role of private for-profit agents over government, fuelled the loss of social spaces and a prioritisation of private spaces.

We need to rethink density and get away from the idea that the private sector will solve the problem. It will be important. But government will need to rethink how density should develop and be prepared to address the affordability gap more directly. This needs to be a collaborative venture with communities – not combat. A starting point may be the commons – what we share – rather than private space.

Flemish architectural historian, Tom Avermaete has argued that the concept of the commons offers a new perspective on the architecture of the city allowing “each intervention in the built environment to reach beyond its own confines.”

It invites consideration of the architecture of the city as a collaborative process between professions and “lay people who hold important knowledge about the city.”

Building for community … not aloneness

In his essay, The anti-social century (The Atlantic), Derek Thompson argues our society is being transformed into “an experience of homebound reclusion and even solitude”.

This started in the 1970s with embrace of unbridled individualism and the emergence of ubiquitous technology, cars and television, that drew people toward “remote life” and away from community life. In the 21^st century, this accelerated with phones and streaming.

Residential architecture, he argues, reflects this and has become more anti-social. Every room is built to accommodate maximum screen time. One builder explained, “we are building for aloneness”. The impact is not just on individuals “strong reduction in self-reported happiness”, negative physical and mental health. All this “alone at home on the phone time” is making society weaker, meaner and more delusional.

Silicon Valley tech bros are part of the problem funding YIMBY groups to promote apartment living. There are no guardrails around their proposals, no consideration of commons and liveability. Knock down what is there to build stackable boxes. Social isolation of the boxes feeds a dependence on technology removed from reality. Residents become captives of technology, not part of a community.

German philosopher Martin Heidegger saw humans becoming captive of technology and losing their authenticity. Rather than freeing us from the daily stuff of life, technology enslaves.

Anthony Lack writes that Heidegger saw our relation to technological tools, techniques and gadgets as “taking us away from more fundamental experiences”. This leads to disenchantment, alienation, and estrangement “from living in a world, drained of meaning and reduced to calculation, technique and systemisation”.

Marc Dunkelman argues the real missing middle is “the village”. Technology may assist keeping in touch with family and promote adherence to a tribe based on whatever information bubble the algorithm assigns. But it misses connection with community where we learn tolerance and social stability. “The village is our best area for practicing productive disagreement and compromise – in other words, democracy”.

Thompson writes the “anti-social century is as much a result of what’s happened to the exterior world of concrete and steel as it is about advances inside our phones.” In particular, he points to the decline of public spaces, the commons. He argues the socially isolated see chaos while the virtual tribe encourages them to rip it all down.

The influential book Abundance accepts the mistaken notion that we live in a world of limitless resources. Authors Klein and Thompson offer a binary view: abundance versus scarcity. Technology they say can resolve scarcity. The same thinking fuelled the “Great Acceleration” that sent our world to the limits of planetary boundaries and beyond.

The problem with Klein and Thompson’s housing argument is not that they criticise regulation that constrains innovation or institutions that have passed their use-by date. Their questioning of why we can’t provide enough housing that is affordable for people working in the essential services needed by our communities is correct.

The failing is their faith that the private sector and Adam Smith’s invisible hand will provide what is needed by simply removing regulation. We need to do more than that.

Vishaan Chakrabarti argues that “if all we can manage to build is a technocratically performative yet culturally repellent world, doesn’t the entire urban project unravel?”

Planning for the commons

For Chakrabarti, urbanity must speak “to the grittiness of the commons”.  “In this era of widening spatial, social and technological tribalism, few ideas could be as important, as galvanising, and as filled with civic delight as that of urbanity instilling a collective, pluralistic, and necessarily friction-filled sense of cultural belonging to a physical commons.” The insular “starchitect” culture will not address this challenge.

As Tom Avermaete argues “an architecture of the commons will require that we start to conceive of the architect no longer as a solo player but rather as a commoner; an urban agent who explicitly situates his/her agency in relation to other urban actors. … Drawings and models might become less the media of seduction … and more a matter of negotiation” perhaps requiring “new tools … more fitting to the role of a commoner.”

Government, planners, architects, communities and developers, have a role in creating, maintaining and stimulating affordable housing that has a strong focus on commons. While planning laws are failing, so too is the market. Innovation will be required to maintain building quality at lower cost.

Getting this wrong could condemn our cities to generations of disillusioned and alienated inhabitants disconnected from community and “the village” and for whom “tear it all down” has a strong resonance.

The Committee for Melbourne survey showed support for greater density is softening as government ramps up advocacy for high-rise housing.

Density is losing its attraction as a source of “more diverse housing options”. As the authors of the report note: “This finding serves as a warning: to maintain public buy-in for urban consolidation, the tangible benefits must be clearly communicated and, most importantly, realised.”

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