As Melbourne’s population races to 9 million, these young architects have a plan

On the edge of a new housing estate west of Melbourne, a freshwater pool invites residents to its banks to relax and swim. The pool is filled by a network of drainage channels that are filtered and cleansed by native grasses.

Beyond the pool, sits a cluster of duplex houses, built around shared outdoor space. The houses have no driveways. Residents park their cars in a common car port nearby.

While the housing estate is hypothetical, it’s seeking to solve an urgent issue for Melbourne as Australia’s fastest-growing city races towards a population of 9 million.

The design, which is for an actual development site, was the winning entry in a $15,000 competition for emerging architects and urban designers.

Competitors based their designs on a six-hectare greenfields site on the southern side of Ballan train station, 78 kilometres west of Melbourne on the Ballarat line, which is due to be developed for housing by Victorian developer Ample.

The decision to have a design competition for the greenfields site with a cash prize was a deliberate ploy to engage the next generation of city shapers with the challenge of fixing Melbourne’s outer-suburban growth corridors, which are being developed at a faster pace than anywhere else in the country.

According to data published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in March, four of the five fastest growing suburbs in Australia are located on Melbourne’s urban fringe, where population growth is driven exclusively by greenfields housing development.

Greenfields housing is in desperate need of a fresh approach, says Andy Fergus, advocacy lead for the Urban Design Forum, which launched the competition.

“When you’re turning a paddock into a new neighbourhood, nothing is set in stone, so the opportunity to do something that really transforms the quality of liveability is pretty key,” he says.

Instead, the opposite happens. Most greenfields housing being built today is essentially designed to the same template, whether it is built on the fringe of Melbourne, Cairns, Adelaide or Bunbury.

This is partly a function of the economics of housing. Greenfields housing is simpler to build, and cheaper to buy, than infill housing in established parts of the city. Engineering standards around vehicle movements also dictate street designs, which are built around waste truck movements, traffic volumes, driveways and garages.

“So places are not responding to heat risk,” Fergus says. “We’re not getting enough canopy trees. We’re not getting enough garden areas. We’re not protecting and supporting biodiversity. We’re not creating environments children can walk around or ride a scooter around. We’re creating car-based environments that are perpetuating the problems.”

Competition entrants were challenged to “think seriously about these environments not as an ever-expanding edge but as the centre of community life for those who live there”. They were expected to design a place that integrated nature and adapted to climate change.

Research published in 2024 found the urban heat effect raises the temperature in Melbourne’s growth suburbs by more than 10 degrees.

Gillespies Lane, in Ballan, was chosen because it abuts the town’s train station, meaning the estate could be less car dependent. Developer Ample contributed to the prize pool, though there is no commitment to build the winning design.

Entrants did not have complete free rein. They had to design an estate with housing density in line with state government targets for the greenfields.

These targets are delivering large houses on smaller blocks, with minimal yard space and no tree canopy.

Lot sales in Melbourne’s outer-suburban growth corridors have shrunk just over 20 per cent in the past decade, from a median 441 square metres in 2015 to 352 square metres by 2025.

Winning entrants mostly addressed this issue by clustering housing together, replacing private yards with communal open spaces.

Oliver Harris, of runner-up entry Common Interest, said his team had grounded its design with the goal that a developer could build affordable housing and make a profit.

“Some of the ways we made efficiencies were by narrowing street widths – that was a big component – and having shared driveways, which reduced crossovers and unnecessary driveway spaces,” Harris said.

The winning entry, A Seed for Housing, began with a goal of rehabilitating the site’s native grassland, which once covered Victoria’s western volcanic plains but is critically endangered and 99 per cent cleared today, including at the subject site in Ballan.

Team member Audrey Avianto said rehabilitating the grassland and restoring the wetland into a natural pool was “stage zero” of their design, with housing intended to follow.

The pool serves two functions: responding to drainage requirements and giving the estate a drawcard.

“What is the actual thing for this suburb which is exciting and fun, and makes people think about and be like, “Wow, this is cool! I want to live here’,” team member Tom Hastie said.

Student category co-winner “Blackwood Fields” was awarded for a design that included a double-sided pavilion, with one side facing the local oval and the other a wetland for bird watchers, who could observe the Latham’s snipe, a migratory bird that flies between Japan and Australia’s south-east coast, which visits Ballan.

The outcome of November’s state election will influence the future direction of Melbourne’s housing growth. Under Labor, planning approvals for new greenfields housing estates have declined, and the planning system has been overhauled to encourage multi-storey housing in “activity centres”, close to public transport.

The Coalition has promised to ramp up approvals in the greenfields, ending Labor’s push to densify Melbourne’s suburbs.

In October, The Age and the University of Melbourne will host Melbourne Assembly, a conference bringing together some of the world’s brightest international and local minds in city planning, innovation, education, arts and sport to discuss ideas for the city’s future as we accelerate towards a population of 9 million by 2050.

Urban planner Rob Burgess has studied the trajectory of Melbourne’s housing growth, and says 20 years of state-based policy aimed at diverting housing growth away from the fringes and into Melbourne’s established suburbs has mostly failed.

More than 50 per cent of new housing for Melbourne was built in the growth areas in 2025, despite a long-standing target of 70 per cent in established areas.

Government had also failed to build infrastructure such as transport, schools and hospitals at a pace that kept up with growth in the greenfields, creating social problems that would not be resolved by attempting to engineer housing growth in established suburbs, Burgess said.

“There’s a very simplistic position as to what our city should be, which doesn’t in any way align with the practical realities of the way in which development occurs, and I think that is now coming at a significant cost,” he said.

Melbourne Assembly will be held from October 19 to October 21. More information is available on the Melbourne Assembly website, including special offers for Age subscribers.