With Australia’s population tipping over 24 million this week (take a look at ABS’s video on this milestone by clicking on the image to the left), ABC’s Phil Staley and I, in our regular catch up, looked at where we would put all these people and how we might be living in the future.

The great Aussie 1/4 acre block dream was the trophy many of aspired to prove a life well lived and earned is now on the decline for economic, demographic, work, culture and lifestyle reasons and even in Far North Queensland, where land is in abundance, we see the beginning of a movement to smaller properties,  multi generational homes and multi purpose dwellings.

As we grow our population, increase our housing prices, change our demographics, see more young adults live at home longer, have numerous generations living together under one roof, and see many other co-habitating models rise we are slowly beginning to talk ourselves out of the necessity to live on a detached block complete with garden and garage.

Instead we will increasingly choose to live in semi-detached, row style and apartments, predominantly 4 – 6 stories high, in mixed purpose buildings (shops, offices and residences) which is a return to the 1940’s and 50’s when many people lived above the shop, but then the great dream was to get out of there and into a stand alone dwelling and now it is to return to it.

That’s not to say we won’t have stand alone houses, but rather that the great cultural norm of having to have it will disappear and it will increasingly not be seen as necessary, or important.

This is not just a question of housing, but it speaks to a changing life and work style where we will not all work 9-5, where more people will be using the home throughout the day for a multitude of purposes, where technology will be able to digitally change the internal decor to suit the immediate needs before instantly changing to suit the next set of purposes.

In this new world of housing it is also likely that we will adopt the Asian habit of eating out more and using our neighborhood and its parks and infrastructure as our backyards, where local shops become important as meeting places and the people around us become our extended family.

A fascinating discussion that we have to continue if we’re going to get our planning right, so have a listen now (13 minutes 46 seconds) and then share your thoughts on tomorrow’s homes.