Urban planning policies in Australia presuppose apartments as the new dominant housing type, but much of what the market has delivered is criticized as over–development, and as being generic, poorly–designed, environmentally unsustainable, and unaffordable. Policy responses to this problem typically focus on planning regulation and construction costs as the primary issues needing to be addressed in order to increase the supply of quality, affordable apartment housing. In contrast, this paper uses Ball’s (1983) ‘structures of provision’ approach to outline the key processes informing apartment development and identifies a substantial gap in the critical understanding of how apartments are developed in Australia.