We Need a Housing System Designed to Deliver

5 months ago — the Victorian Government released its Modern Methods of Construction statement.[1]
50 years ago — a federal government report was already making a similar case.[2]
100 years ago — Le Corbusier was already calling for the spirit of mass-production housing.[3]

The argument is not new.
The urgency is not new.
Even the proposed direction is not new.

For at least a century, modern societies have understood the same basic truth:

If housing must be delivered at scale, then building must also be organised at scale.

And if that still sounds like a modern proposition, we can look much further back.

600 years ago — the Forbidden City was built with a level of coordination, repetition, logistics and assembly that still overwhelms the imagination.[4]
1,000 years ago — Yingzao Fashi had already turned building into a governed system.[5]

From ancient China to modern Europe, from imperial coordination to industrial theory, people have been grappling with the same civilisational problem:

How do we enable large numbers of ordinary people to live in well-made housing?

The answers have varied with time.

In one era, that required centralised administrative power.
In another, it required industrial mass production.
Today, it requires something harder: standards that align, regulation that works, supply chains that connect, and a delivery system designed as one whole.

The question is no longer whether prefab can work.

It can. It already has — in different ways, across different civilisations.

And today, the conditions are in many ways more favourable than ever.
Not because the problem is smaller, but because the technical means are now broader, faster and more connected. What earlier societies achieved through state coordination or industrial concentration, we can now attempt through global supply chains, integrated manufacturing, digital control and regulatory alignment.

We can take Australian timber to China and process it in integrated factories. We can dry it, treat it, cut it and assemble it into frames in one coordinated production environment. We can use Italian fittings, American membranes and British coatings. We can manufacture building products that comply with Australian standards and are ready to enter Australian projects.

The question is no longer technical. It is systemic.

Can government create a framework in which approval pathways are clear, certification is legible, demand is stable, and procurement is coordinated?

Can industry move beyond isolated prototypes and boutique exceptions, and instead build around shared standards, shared interfaces and repeatable delivery logic?

Can finance, insurance, training, logistics, compliance and public procurement be reorganised around industrialised housing rather than around the assumption that housing will still be built piece by piece on site?

This is the real challenge of the present.

That system cannot depend on goodwill, isolated pilots, or a handful of determined manufacturers.

It has to be designed.

Government must do more than endorse MMC in principle. It must define the framework in which industrialised housing can reliably operate: common approval pathways, clearer compliance logic, portable certification, coordinated procurement, and a stable pipeline of demand large enough to justify serious investment in factories, tooling and capability.

Industry must do more than produce components faster. It must learn to design around interfaces, tolerances, logistics, sequence and responsibility — not merely around products. The real task is not to manufacture more parts, but to build a repeatable delivery model in which design, production, transport, installation and approval work as one system.

The supporting ecosystem — finance, insurance, training, accreditation, digital coordination, freight and project procurement — must also be reorganised accordingly. An industrialised product cannot succeed if every adjacent system still assumes housing will be built piece by piece on site.

Manufacturers should not each be forced to invent an entire world from scratch. They should be able to compete within a common framework: different structural systems, different enclosure strategies, different levels of integration — but shared standards, legible interfaces, and a compliance environment that rewards quality and repeatability rather than punishing difference.

And the result would not simply be more prefab factories.

It would be something far more important: a housing sector that can deliver with speed, certainty and quality — without sacrificing design quality.

That is the task now.

Not to prove that prefab can work.
But to build the system that lets it work.

We know how to standardise.
We know how to manufacture.
We know how to coordinate supply chains across continents.
We know how to certify complex products.
We know how to assemble buildings from precisely made parts.

What we have not yet done is organise these capacities into a housing system strong enough to make them ordinary.

We do not need another rediscovery.
We do not need another promise.
We do not need another fragment.

We need a housing system designed to deliver.

Notes

[1] The Victorian Government released Shaping the Future of Construction in Victoria: Modern Methods of Construction in December 2025. The statement says Victoria is advancing MMC through reforms and initiatives aimed at building more homes more quickly and more affordably.

[2] ABC reported in March 2025 on a 1974 federal report on “modern housing techniques,” noting that the earlier report argued modern methods were key to solving the housing crisis and urged national standards to boost prefab housing. ABC also noted that, five decades later, prefab remains more associated with taskforces and reports than with mainstream delivery.

[3] In Towards a New Architecture, Le Corbusier wrote:

“We must create the mass-production spirit. The spirit of constructing mass-production houses. The spirit of living in mass-production houses. The spirit of conceiving mass-production houses.”

[4] UNESCO dates construction of the Forbidden City to 1406–1420. The complex covers about 72 hectares, or roughly 720,000 square metres — about 100 soccer fields. Some historical accounts describe a final concentrated building phase of just over 3 years from the fifteenth year of the Yongle reign, following 11 years of preparation that included both off-site production and major on-site foundation and drainage works.

[5] Yingzao Fashi was compiled by Li Jie and published in 1103 as an official state building manual covering methods, materials and manpower standards. Scholarly sources describe it as the oldest extant Chinese technical building manual and a handbook of government standards for building methods, materials and manpower.