The law of unintended consequences

The American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene asserted that in India 46,000 people are dying from snakebites annually.  Back in the days of the Raj the British government sought to address the problem and offered a bounty on cobra skins. Initially and for obvious reasons in a poor country this was a wildly successful scheme. However enterprising Indians began to breed cobras for the income but when this was realized the reward program was quickly dropped. The now worthless Cobras were set free in great numbers and their population increased to even larger numbers than before. This is the law of untended consequences

As a practicing architect I am often asked to advise about selecting a block of land on which to build a house. Most primary school children and even blind Freddy himself would understand that building a north facing house in this climate makes sense. To meet this need would suggest that blocks of land with the long sides pointing towards the winter sun should be ubiquitous. One would imagine that the experts who carve up virgin land to produce our new suburbs would be many steps ahead of Freddie…apparently not! 

For example even the most cursory review of the new suburbs of Lawson and Moncrieff reveal a staggeringly high proportion of blocks facing the wrong way.  Most owners will be denied that halcyon patch of winter sun in which to lie and read the Sunday Canberra Times and in the off-season they will be blowtorched by the dreaded late summer sun. How can this be so?

With the best of intentions, but poor outcome predicting skills, the new ‘solar fence’ legislation has been introduced in recent times. Although the ACT planning pantheon already had some of the most stringent solar controls in the nation, it was thought necessary to extend these controls further. A shadow cast by anything higher than ones normal paling fence is now seen to be a serious infringement to a neighbour’s amenity.

There has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth from those charged to deliver the built outcomes to comply with these well intended rules. The front page of the Canberra Times recently showcased hobbit-like examples of houses that have become subterranean when responding to the now required standards.  Rows of houses have appeared where all have been mandated to surrender much of their northern yards to comply with the dictates of the solar fence. What I find most disturbing however is the big picture subdivision pattern.  Whole suburbs will be populated with houses which are quite simply pointing in the wrong direction. Counterintuitively poor block layouts are now being araldited into history.

The subdivision designers complain that they are forced into these illogical layouts in order to comply with ratios, quotas and complex compliance tables. Both the Land Development Agency and ACTPLA who have carriage of the rules recognise this as an issue but say it is driven by policy imperatives. Their political masters openly say that it was never their intention to have these outcomes, so please don’t blame them for implementation; and the band is still playing on the Titanic.

For what they thought were good motives, America armed Islamic insurgents in Afghanistan to fight the Soviet occupiers and I think we all know how that turned out. My fear is that the law of unintended consequences is now being writ large and indelibly across all new Canberra suburbs. Poor Freddie; not just blind but both miserably hot and cold too.