“The challenge isn’t in knowing how to design better apartments, it’s in delivering these design innovations in a private apartment market that is not geared towards families.”
Thousands of Australian children make apartments their homes, yet apartments are seldom designed with children in mind. One in five households living in apartments in Australia are families with children. The highest proportion is in New South Wales, where a quarter of all apartment households have kids [1]. While families with children in apartments can be found across Australia’s major cities, the number and proportion of households with kids in inner-city areas is growing particularly rapidly, with many of these households living in larger buildings of 4 or more stories.
Good quality apartments that are well designed can make excellent homes for families with children. A review of existing research on designing apartments with children in mind tells us that the following considerations are very important.
Within the unit:
Within the building:
To understand how we can work towards this vision for child-friendly apartment design, we need to understand how apartments are delivered in Australia and why children are often overlooked when designing them [17]. There are a few reasons:
All of these reasons mean that the child-friendly apartments are not necessarily seen as a particularly viable or competitive market for developers.
Another important consideration is affordability. While families might need and want larger units to meet their needs, more floor space comes at a cost that some families cannot afford in the private housing market. This is the broader context in which we need to consider how to better meet the needs of families with children in apartments.
Design regulations that require child-friendly design at the building scale, as well as across all units, will help to ensure that new apartments are more child-friendly [21]. Planning at the neighbourhood and building scale with children in mind can also have a positive impact. Including families with children in the planning process should assist in this [22].
Planning incentives (financial or otherwise) to encourage the provision of a proportion of family-friendly apartments in private apartment developments may go some way to meeting the needs of those families who can afford to rent or buy those units [23]. But without further regulation, we can’t guarantee that families with children will live in those units rather than other households.
For planning regulations like this to work, they would need to be accompanied by other planning interventions like inclusionary zoning to ensure a proportion of affordable housing in new developments, along with allocation procedures to ensure that affordable child-friendly apartments are allocated to families with children [24].
Alternative housing delivery models also provide some promise of better matching families with children with appropriately designed apartments. These include co-operative rental housing [25], collective self-build owner-occupied housing (such as the Nightingale model) [26] and build to rent housing in both the private and not-for-profit housing sectors [27].
Many families with children make apartments their homes. Apartments can make excellent homes for children, but because they are usually not designed with children in mind, they often fall short of this potential. We know a lot about how to better design apartments to meet the needs of children and their families. The challenge isn’t only in knowing how to design better apartments, it’s in delivering these design innovations in a private apartment market that is not geared towards families. We must do better to deliver safe and comfortable homes for children and their families.
—
Hazel Easthope
Hazel is Scientia Associate Professor at the City Futures Research Centre at UNSW Sydney. She has qualifications in sociology and geography and has been researching in urban studies and housing for 17 years. Her current research focuses on the development, management, governance and planning implications of apartment buildings and estates and the lived experiences of their residents. She is a leading researcher in this field, and is regularly consulted by industry, government and peak body organisations in Australia and internationally. Underpinning her research is a deep concern with how to enable people to feel at home in the places where they live.
Hyungmo Yang
Hyungmo has a M.D.S from the Department of Architecture at Hanyang University in South Korea. He is currently a PhD candidate and research assistant at the City Futures Research Centre, UNSW Sydney. He has over 12 years experience as an architect working on national and international projects in South Korea and has worked as a senior researcher at Korea Institute of Registered Architects. Hyungmo’s key research interest is the relationship between housing design and human experience, with a particular focus on designing apartments that balance the needs of families with children, and developers.