As John Lennon once wrote, "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans", so there may be good reason for Melburnians to be feeling Planning Policy Fatigue. Over the course of 16 years we've had four Melbourne Plans: Melbourne 2030, Melbourne @5 Million, Plan Melbourne, and the recently launched Plan Melbourne Refresh. That equates to roughly one for each term of state government.

Other than some large, chunky bits of infrastructure, these plans are not dramatically different from each other. The constant subtext is the contradiction between containing the footprint of greater Melbourne while tiptoeing around community sensitivity to density in the suburbs. How do you protect the suburbs, contain the urban growth boundary, and still provide for growth and liveability?

Plan Melbourne Refresh provides an indication of hope for housing affordability, density and maintaining the current urban growth boundary. Discreetly tucked away on page 57 is the use of a new term, "Greyfield development". We know Greenfields are the land on the urban fringe, Brownfields are the old industrial areas, but Greyfields? Well, according to the Plan Melbourne Refresh glossary, they are "residential areas where the building stock is near or ending its physical life and land values make redevelopment attractive".

So where might Melbourne's Greyfields be? My sense is that they lie just on the outer edge of the middle-ring suburbs about 15 kilometres from the central city – in the western, northern and north-western suburbs. These suburbs tend to sit either side of the Metropolitan Ring Road. They were the growth areas suburbs of the 1960s and '70s.