ABSTRACT
Increased urbanisation and a growing need for more sustainable ‘compact cities’ has placed considerable pressure on governments to unlock the potential existing in underutilised residential land – as opposed to continuing unsustainable urban sprawl (OECD 2011,2012). Internationally this has resulted in calls for greater rates of urban infill (Institute of Urban and Regional Development 2005; Landis et al. 2006; McConnell and Wiley2010; Newton 2010). While many land-scarce countries (UK, France) are largely attuned to this, land-rich countries (US, South American nations, Australia) are having difficulty in implementing it (Kelly 2010). This is largely due to the continued availability of greenfield development space and the range of planning, zoning and building codes that currently inhibit innovative precinct-scale medium-density redevelopment. A particular area of concern is the lack of attention being paid to greyfield residential infill over that of brownfield infill (typically abandoned industrial land) (Newton and Glackin 2014a). Due to the current availability of brownfield sites, their relative ease of development, the existence of well-known and understood processes for redevelopment, and the ease with which both the property development industry and regulatory bodies can assess these large-scale developments, brownfield projects have been the mainstay of government urban redevelopment strategies to date. However, though smaller in scale, and harder to capture, it is actually the smaller scale, lot-by-lot ‘greyfield’ (ageing, established middle suburb) redevelopments that are producing the majority of new infill dwellings (Newton and Glackin 2014a).
