Khadija Alihashi has lived on Melbourne’s Flemington Estate since 2000. For nearly 25 years she has been part of the local community while working, raising children and supporting grandchildren. But in September 2023 Alihashi, alongside her nearly 1,500 fellow residents, found out – from a news broadcast, no less – that their apartments were set to be demolished as part of Homes Victoria’s ‘high-rise redevelopment‘ plan.

The State government’s program has marked 44 estates across Victoria to be razed and rebuilt, requiring the rehousing of tens of thousands of residents either temporarily or permanently. Much of the housing is set to shift from public housing to affordable housing, which has significant cost increases and management implications for residents. “To be honest it’s a disaster,” says Alihashi. “It’s not a good idea. People are suffering a lot, people are crying, they don’t sleep. It has impacted us all.” In addition to the significant social impacts of this plan, there are large environmental and economic implications that come with demolition.

Despite the many ways this plan will affect the local community, they were not spoken to, notified or given options by the government. “There was no consultation, no talking to us before they made this decision,” says Alihashi. “They don’t care about us at all.”

As such, the residents have taken the Victorian government to court in a Class Action, arguing that their human rights were not upheld in the process of planning. The case continues, delayed by documents that Homes Victoria is seeking to keep hidden. Whether the documents must be shared is set to be reviewed by a judge in December 2024.

In the meantime, however, OFFICE – a multidisciplinary design and research practice – began doing what the government had failed to do: talking to residents.

“It’s pretty basic stuff,” says Steve Mintern, who co-founded the not-for-profit practice in 2019 alongside Simon Robinson. “Go and ask the people who live there what they would prefer. Just go and see how they feel about it and what it is like in their community. Give them options.” Mintern lists a few simple ways that the government could, and should, have approached this process. He is frustrated by the lack of meaningful action combined with the government’s rhetoric of ‘we really care about these residents’ – “it’s ridiculous,” he says.

OFFICE’s team interviewed residents and held workshops and community consultation meetings. They found that, overwhelmingly, the residents of Flemington estate want to stay in their homes and have access to the schools, workplaces and communities they are part of. The government, though, persisted with the argument that this was not possible – that demolition was the only option.

OFFICE suspected this was not the case, finding that the government hadn’t produced any kind of evidence that they had investigated other options. “It seemed obvious to us that a refurbishment status survey should be conducted on any building that is set to be demolished, and it hadn’t been,” explains Mintern. “We had the skills to be able to do that quite easily and efficiently.”

As such, after conducting building analysis, consulting with other engineers, other experts and the community, and undertaking a rigorous design process, they produced a report. Retain, Repair, Reinvest offers an alternative design strategy for the estate which maintains the existing structures, questioning the assumed necessity of demolishing the high-rise towers.

The report demonstrates that the 1960s buildings could be upgraded to meet modern building standards through retrofitting while significantly improving access to space and ventilation as well as installing ground-floor accessible housing and community areas. Furthermore, OFFICE’s report and design approach would save the government $364 million and result in a 55 per cent reduction in carbon emissions.

The design would achieve all this through fairly straightforward interventions including adding enclosed balconies to expand the apartments’ footprints, fitting double-glazed windows, upgrading the wall linings for insulation and acoustics, widening doorways and installing split air-conditioning.

The report, Mintern says, “is proving what a lot of these communities and residents already know: that their buildings are fine and just need to be looked after a bit better.” In publishing the open-source document, OFFICE hopes to provide the residents with the tools to campaign themselves.” It gives them a body of work to then argue with the politicians and the government and say: ‘There is a better way of doing this. Why haven’t you looked at this? Why are you demolishing my home?’,” Mintern explains.

Retain, Repair, Reinvest was released in October 2024 and debated in the Victorian Parliament on November 8th. Whether or not it will change the course of demolition remains to be seen. In the meantime, however, “we’re changing the conversation,” says Robinson. “I don’t know if we can take credit for it, but prior to releasing the report a lot of the politicians were saying ‘it’s not possible to refurbish these towers’. Now that’s changed to, ‘even if you were to retrofit them, you still have to relocate the residents’.”

While OFFICE’s strategy does involve residents moving out of their homes temporarily, this would be an on-site relocation in stages and they would occupy the new build infills. These in turn would add density to the site and be completed first.

Furthermore, OFFICE’s entire proposed retrofit could be completed in an estimated 14 months, a stark contrast to the 2031 timeline the government has outlined. “Would this proposal disrupt them more than demolishing their homes and making them move to Tarnate for maybe eight years?” Mintern asks. “I would say this is a bad faith argument from the government trying to post-rationalise something they’ve already decided they are going to do.”

Related: Lacaton & Vassal in Sydney

The report is part of a larger movement of socially minded architects advocating for large-scale retrofits of social housing around the world. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Lacaton & Vassal’s refurbishment of an estate in Bordeaux in 2017 which contributed to them being awarded the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 2021. As they told The Guardian, “Demolishing is a decision of easiness and short-term. It is a waste of many things – a waste of energy, a waste of material and a waste of history. Moreover, it has a very negative social impact. For us, it is an act of violence.”

OFFICE, too, has had some success in this area in the past. A previous Retain, Repair, Reinvest report about Victoria’s Ascot Vale Estate, for example, successfully helped to convince the government not to demolish it but to refurbish it in 2022. Unfortunately, their Barak Beacon Estate report from the same year did not result in the buildings being saved.

Overall, their continued commitment to this work and advocacy is leading to a shift in thinking about how to retrofit estates in Australia more broadly. For instance, they are currently consulting with the City of Sydney about the potential for refurbishment on an estate in Waterloo.

Still, Robinson stresses the need for a case-by-case analysis of high-rise sites. “We don’t think every estate should be retained; there are some in bad condition that are structurally unsafe. The key point of this work is to say that each building should be looked at individually and the feasibility stage should be conducted prior to deciding that demolition is the only approach.”

That it has fallen to architects to advocate for feasibility reports and to conduct them without funding or pay feels like a systematic failure of policies around the build environment. It is OFFICE’s unique charity structure that allows them to do this. OFFICE only works for community organisations and government agencies – they do not have private clients and they do not work for capital. They believe this structure “has led us to look at landscape architecture and architecture differently,” says Robinson.

Yet they highlight that they are not wholly unique: “In every other part of the world there are lots of not-for-profit architecture design practices – it’s quite common,” he adds.  As an NFP, they “have to have a legally binding constitution,” they explain. “Ours is: to use the tools of design and architecture for the public good.”

To save Flemington Estate would seem to be a huge public good in so many ways. When I asked Alihashi how it felt to work with the OFFICE on the report and to see it published, she told me: “It makes me happy. I always have the hope.”

To instill hope and happiness is, perhaps, an unusual role for an architect. In their work across education, research, building and publishing, OFFICE demonstrates that this role is a worthy and realistic one. Through new working models, it is possible instigate projects that harness architecture to have real impacts in vulnerable communities. 

OFFICE
office.org.au

Photography
Ben Hoskins (renders by OFFICE)

Listen to this podcast episode featuring Greens MP for housing, Max Chandler-Mather