ABSTRACT
The suburban street differs from its urban counterpart in that it is not generally defined by built form. The street’s open space of circulation, which is also a conduit for electricity, water and other services, adjoins various other open landscape spaces, such as building setbacks, front gardens, nature strips and surface parking areas. This void-to-void adjacency means there can be a continuity of landscape from private to public realm. Questioning the role of the suburban street and its public–private interface has a long history in both design and everyday practice. All over the city, people expand beyond their boundaries and plant in the nature strip or occupy the public space outside their house. More recently, architects and landscape architects have looked to the suburban public street as a space of both social and infrastructural potential; as suburbs densify and become more culturally, ethnically and age diverse, a wider range of acceptable street behaviours and public-private interface actions can be expected.
We have reconsidered the public streets within existing suburbs as transforming in parallel to the transformation of the private building stock. In a series of ‘disaggregated precinct’ studies, the street space is conceived as a co-funded patchwork upgrade—a partnership between individual developers and council according to a strategic plan—gradually changing and personalising the street character over time.
