Australia is experiencing a period of elevated demand for housing, and supply is not keeping up. Population growth, the size of households, and consumer preferences for housing types has all impacted on demand. The shortfall of new market supply adds to the already significant undersupply in the system impacting on affordability. In 2019, The City of Sydney launched a design competition to address these challenges. The intent of the challenge was to think about our existing attitudes and approaches to housing in positive new ways to come up with solutions that are replicable and scalable for use by the broader community. Stephen Varady discusses how this iterative competition process was designed to encourage collaboration amongst competitors to enhance strategic and innovative thinking.

Image from interview with Stephen Varady, City of Sydney website.

The City of Sydney Alternative Housing Ideas Challenge sought to uncover alternative housing strategies that may not have been previously considered in Australia. It encouraged strategic thinking and looking beyond the physical domain to include finance, zoning, urban land supply, management and ownership.

It was outside the usual way a design competition might be prepared. As there was no specific site, this was to be about positive ideas for improving housing issues in Sydney (and Australia) – ideas that could be applied more broadly on multiple sites. It was to be open to ideas from anyone, not just architects, and there was to be more than one ‘winner’ selected. The intent was for shortlisted teams to participate in a series of workshops and learn from each other to improve their ideas. Ideas lodged as part of the challenge were intended to inform the development of the City’s future community strategic plan and housing policy under a new Sydney 2050 plan.

Launching the Challenge

The Alternative Housing Ideas Challenge (AHIC) was launched on 26 March 2019 with over 1,000 registrations received from around the world. Following probity and eligibility checks the City received 231 eligible proposals.

An independent jury comprising a mix of six leading professionals, with experience in finance, housing, policy, planning, architecture and design were invited to evaluate the Stage 1 Proposals. They were briefed on what was expected and then given 3 days to make their selections (quite a generous amount of time). They diligently read all proposals in detail and debated the merits of all ideas, eventually selecting seven proposals to proceed onto a Stage 2 collaborative workshopping process.

To begin the workshop process, the authors of those seven selected proposals presented to the jury and City of Sydney staff. To prepare for presentations, the jury provided specific comments to each of the shortlisted teams as an additional form of briefing to assist in the development of each proposal. Each team was asked to think about and address the areas of their proposal not fully explored and how they believed they might develop their ideas for the next stage.

An iterative process of design

AHIC Workshop 2. Image courtesy of Stephen Varady

Stage 2 comprised of four workshops with all seven teams meeting regularly over a 6-month period. The workshops were an iterative process where the selected teams presented to the entire group and received feedback, benefitting from the broad range of knowledge and expertise present, and allowing each proposal to be developed to its full potential. During the six weeks between each workshop, each team developed their ideas to present again for further feedback.

An example of the responsiveness of this process was that during early workshops funding was identified as a common problem or obstacle. This led to a subsequent workshop devoted entirely to funding inviting representatives from various major and minor financial institutions to present and interact with all teams to help evolve the proposals.

AHIC Workshop 2A focused on finance. Image courtesy of Stephen Varady.

To share ideas and to encourage broader discussions, the City of Sydney had committed to presenting outcomes at the Alternative Housing Ideas Challenge Exhibition in Sydney where shortlisted teams would present their developed ideas through exhibition panels and via public presentations. The intent was to encourage and enable the community to give feedback to the City about all of the ideas presented. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic marred the possibility of an exhibition and further development of this process.

The AHIC process offers an alternate approach to a traditional architectural design competition. A common complaint from architects about a competition process is that there is usually no feedback loop with the client. This process allowed for feedback from the client, as well as the jury and all the other shortlisted teams, resulting in a more satisfying progression through each team’s ideas ultimately leading to more innovative outcomes.

---

To learn more about this process and see the shortlisted entrant’s proposals, a summary of the seven finalist’s schemes are here. The AHIC brief and shortlisted competitor’s entry panels can also be downloaded below.

---

Stephen Varady is an Australian architect, designer, writer and educator. He curates the Australian and International Brickworks Architecture Speaker Series and is a design competition advisor, registrar and organizer. He has prepared and run multiple successful Australian architectural design competitions including the City of Sydney Alternative Housing Ideas Challenge.