Thirty-five years ago when I was in my 20s, I signed a contract for the construction of a pick-a-plan house in an outer suburb.
I was saved by luck not good management. I knew nothing of passive solar heating, but the builder did. Choosing one of the floor plans was easy enough. Putting it on the land was another matter. Most builders would have left the floor plan as is, banged the front door to the front of the block and that would have been that.
The trouble was that the front boundary of the block faced north-north-west. The only way to get north orientation was to turn the house 45 degrees. Radical stuff in 1972. Houses always ran parallel to the street – to show the world what a big house you have.
The builder turned the house 45 degrees and moved the large sliding glass door on the pick-a-plan to the northern wall. Total cost: nothing. It could be done because the block was big enough to accommodate the house’s diagonal across its width.
Then the oil shock of 1973 struck. While everyone else was shocked it made little difference in a house that was heated by the sun in winter and whose eaves shut out the harsh sun in summer. The energy bills were minimal.
It is not nuclear physics. It is obvious, easy and been known for four decades.
Yet here we are 35 years later. This week Australia was denounced as one of the most profligate carbon emitters on the planet. The ACT Government announced yet another review, revamp and rewrite of the planning process (this time the territory plan). And the ACT Government announced a costly retrofit of public housing to make them more efficient to repair the follies of the past. The refit is necessary but could have been avoided if an ounce of brain had been applied when the houses were first built.
The same mistakes are being made with new housing estates now – made more culpable because we know the importance of building dwellings with smaller water and energy footprints.
The great swirling roads of the classic National Capital Development Commission suburb of the 1960s denied good solar orientation to at least half the dwellings. The planning condemned people to commute inefficiently by road. And it failed to account for social and ecological change. A garage and an open-all-hours supermarket in every suburban shopping centre was fine in the 1960s, as was the centralised pub in the medium centres like Curtin and Jamieson.
But automotive technology changed so car services were needed once a year not once a month and people served their own petrol. Add changes to shopping hours, working mums, random breath testing and you can see the folly of some of 1960s Canberra planning.
But that was correctable. Garages could be converted. Restaurants and boutique pubs could be added to shopping centres and so on.
But it is difficult, if not impossible to alter bad orientation of a house and poor housing layout.
I have been looking at a booklet called “Climate Change Needs Housing Change” by Derek Wrigley published by the Nature and Society Forum. It shows some of the egregious efforts of past “planners”.
He says, “Solar effective planning is not fully understood by planners, designers, regulators or builders.”
Having blocks so that a house or block of units can have windows facing north is only part of the story.
He showed an aerial photograph of a recent Gungahlin development. He said, “The housing in this suburb is almost a modern equivalent of the 18th century Industrial Rrevolution terraces in the English mill towns which eventually turned into slums.
“These Gungahlin houses will almost certainly become the slums of the near future when the reality of heating fuel costs and poor thermal construction become evident within the life of these houses”
Lack of eaves results in sun hitting walls in summer and dark roofs result in heat absorption, ultimately resulting in the need for air-conditioning. Builders skimping on windows because glass is more expensive than brick results in the need for more heating.
The now fashionable complex hipped roofs make photo-voltaic collection more difficult. With better building houses would be more comfortable and cheaper to run. You can build a house that collects all its own water and electricity (provided you let passive solar do most of the work).
Wrigley bemoans the lost opportunity and the cost and discomfort inflicted on the poor sods who have to live there after the builders, “planners” and “designers” have gone.
Worse, it is almost impossible to retrofit these houses or use them effectively for solar hot water or photo-voltaic grids – as no doubt housing authorities will find when they try to retrofit Canberra’s public housing. You can only fiddle at the edges with dual-flushing loos and energy-saving light globes.
As to the new Territory Plan, it now has more versions than some Microsoft software. But it will not help if nothing is done about block sizes, the orientation of streets and the buildings on them and the ratio between the block size and the building size.
If you have a matchbox size block you can only have a small postage-stamp-size house, other wise you condemn residents to over-shadowing and ineffective passive solar heating.
Similarly, if you allow builders to crib on plot ratios by removing eaves.
This knowledge has been around for more than 40 years, yet Canberra, for all its planning, has produced a carbon-guzzling built form.
Worse, all the planning rules and regulations have added to building costs. The Australian Institute of Architecture rates the ACT as the worst jurisdiction for planning costs and delays.
You would not mind if all the planning had resulted in an aesthetically pleasing and energy-efficient built form. But it demonstrably has not.