Accessory Dwelling Units and Incremental Urbanism: Becoming 'Urban' or just 'Intensive Suburban'?

As suburban environments are increasingly brought into the purview of urban planning, there is an emerging narrative of the importance of 'incremental urbanism' (Pinnegar et al., 2015). For some (Dovey, 2014) this presents an opportunity for a gentler approach to catalyse change in neighbourhoods with established communities and fragmented ownership patterns. Such change is hoped to overcome the perceived shortcomings of car dependency and housing homogeneity that typifies established suburbs. The Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) has entered the policy lexicon as an incremental pathway – or blending – from pre-existing suburban environments, where the 'sub' dissipates to leave just 'urban'. This paper presents an analysis of ADUs in Sydney, Australia, where we identify a series of challenges created by the introduction of policies to encourage ADUs in established suburbs. This includes increasing tenure informality and precarity, poor suitability of neighbourhoods for diverse people and households, and increased dependence on shared amenity. We argue that in the absence of any major effort to improve services and infrastructure, there is little evidence that neighbourhoods experiencing a high take-up of ADUs are transitioning to becoming more 'urban'. The fetishization of density in urban policy and development is leading to more 'intensive suburban' blendscapes that encapsulate the worst elements of both suburban and urban morphologies.