Nightingale Village
2023 ULI Global Awards for Excellence Winner: Nightingale Village
Nightingale Village
The steady rise in global home prices over the last 15 years has made shortages of affordable housing an increasingly high-profile issue, with both governments and private sector builders seeking ways to reimagine traditional approaches to mass-market accommodation.
For the most part, though, proposed solutions have fallen short, victim both to lack of imagination and an inflexible commitment to real estate development as a revenue-generating commodity rather than fulfilment of a social need.
Nightingale Village, located in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, provides a new model for affordable housing that breaks the traditional mould in terms of both its design mentality and as a social experiment to bring residents together as part of a self-supporting community.
Nightingale was conceived as a collaborative, effort by a group of local architects, and applies design solutions geared to maximising residents’ interests rather than developer profits. A medium-density precinct built in a former industrial neighbourhood, it comprises 203 homes (for both families and singles) in six buildings, each designed by a different firm of architects.
Adopting a simple design approach that is at once both unified and non-standard, the fossil fuel-free development prioritises environmental and financial sustainability. Living areas are oriented north/south towards the street, while bedrooms with operable windows face into light courts, allowing cross ventilation and providing acoustic havens on a site otherwise impacted by train and road traffic noise. There are landscaped internal areas, rooftop gardens, EV charging stations, bicycle storage, and a focus on fresh air circulation.
Comprehensive insulation means apartments can dispense with aircon and offer only limited heating facilities, with positive implications for both construction and operating costs. Private carparks, individual laundries, and second bathrooms have also been omitted, thereby increasing living space and further lowering construction and maintenance expense. At street level, eight commercial tenancies have been installed for convenient use by residents.
Apart from these aspects of physical design, architects also prioritised creation of an inclusive, varied, and inter-connected community. They did this in a number of ways. First, they avoided the usual high-density approach, leading to significant improvement in living conditions and a variety community-focused outcomes.
Access for lower-income residents was assured by requiring prospective residents to bid for apartments, with applications assessed subjectively by ballot (thereby avoiding estate agent’s fees) according to both applicants’ personalities and bid value. Some 20 percent of homes are reserved for affordable housing and housing-at-cost on an anonymised basis, providing access to those who would not otherwise be able to buy in this location.
Negotiations with the local council resulted in a deal whereby some of the site’s less valuable land was given away, allowing authorities to redevelop it as open space and green areas, creating family-oriented facilities that have since become valued and well used.
As one juror observed: “Time was a friend to the developer in negotiating with the city council a range of outcomes that most other developers would never attempt, such as a street closure, urban park, and most importantly, design solutions geared to maximising residents’ health, safety, comfort and sense of ownership and belonging.”
Overall, Nightingale Village is an example of how innovative solutions to affordable housing can be derived by avoiding the standard, maximal-profit development model and opting instead for creative, low-cost, design-led approaches that prioritise the interest of end-users.