Next City, September 30, 2019: The Shape Of (Housing) Things To Come
What if we could collectively create our cities and share resources as easily as we can edit Wikipedia pages? This is what architect and WikiHouse co-founder Alastair Parvin and his colleagues have set out to facilitate.
I met Parvin at 00’s Hackney studios, where he drew wonderful little pictures on tracing paper demonstrating how the horizon of the sky and sea may have been the only straight line known to humankind in ancient times.
“What most people call bad design isn’t bad design,” said Parvin, “It’s really good design for a totally different set of economic outcomes, which is producing real estate.” Until we start driving housing production with the goal of housing people rather than producing real estate, it will continue to be badly designed for the social, environmental, and economic needs of everyday families. “The housing crisis is mis-framed as a numbers game when it’s not,” Parvin explained.
Highly developed nations ranging from the U.S. and U.K. to China and Australia are not experiencing housing crises because it’s technologically or financially impossible to build the required housing — these are some of the world’s largest economies. It’s because we are approaching the problem the wrong way around. For decades, we have relied on speculative, debt-dependent development. And the speculative development housing machine works by making a profit on land values. It’s a system rigged to prioritize packaging housing units into smaller portions with higher price tags, planned obsolescence rather than good quality, and profit above well-being.
The housing crisis is not just a crisis of supply. It is a crisis of unaffordability, inequality, and poor quality — resulting in environmentally, economically, and socially unsustainable buildings. The housing crisis is the failure of a complex system. A perfect storm.
