To further understand the role of housing as a means to thrive in our places, Centric Lab help us connect with the idea that housing is more than the sum of its material parts, and should create the physical infrastructure for healing homes that restore and connect us to ourselves and one another, in connection with Health, Food, ‣ and more.
“The home is time-space. It is sacred because of all the activities that happen within it. We rest in the home. We create revolutions in the home. We care and move the next generations forward. We bond. We love. We cultivate our imaginations. We get, or we should get, our nourishment in these places; in this time-space.
The home has no business being for profit, because profit isn’t sophisticated enough or sacred enough to interact with something as important and essential to human life.”
—Araceli Camargo, Retrofit Reimagined
This dimension includes a range of considerations, from whether everyone has access to shelter, to the material quality of the building and its ability to protect us from stressors. There is a well-established evidence base that connects thermally-inefficient and poor-quality homes with our physical and mental Health, including respiratory, circulatory and cardiovascular diseases, and extending to conditions such as depression and anxiety (Marmot et al. 2010).
“Unfortunately, the dark matter that does shape buildings today rarely, if ever truly, has the thriving, or even the comfortable survival of life, landscapes, or communities at its heart. Rather than enabling the act of building to be used as a means of realising multiple facets of climate, health, intergenerational or spatial justice, it actively inhibits such efforts. The unsettling reality is that, until the thriving of life within planetary boundaries takes precedence over profit, construction shall continue to do damage to life and landscapes by default.”
**—Scott McAulay, What if architecture was reimagined for a new economic reality?
<aside> ➕ Scott McAulay, founder of the Anthropocene Architecture School has contributed to our Reimagining Economic Possibilities series with a piece called What if architecture was reimagined for a new economic reality? ****asking why it is that architecture and building have been so slow to respond to the climate crisis, and exploring what it would take to shift the field into the Doughnut, which you can read here.
What if architecture was reimagined for a new economic reality?
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The impact of poor quality housing is a massive cost to our society, inequitably felt by those at the intersections of socioeconomic class, race, gender and disability. We know the scale of the challenges in connection to housing are not only intimately felt, but also vast and systemic, so any routes out of where it falls short in our neighbourhood need to recognise these cascading impacts of our built environment, and to design strategies that take them into account with social, climate and energy justice firmly at their heart.
From sky rocketing bills and the soaring cost of living to the amount of energy lost in heating poorly insulated homes and the strain on the NHS, it is evident that intersecting crises are being played out in our homes in real time. Our ability to experience safety and security, recognised as a human right, is deeply threatened not only by our immediate environments but also in our homes. The entangled relationships of the built environment mean that our housing contributes to, whilst simultaneously suffering from, the broader impacts of climate breakdown.
“The cascading impacts of the energy crisis in the midst of climate breakdown are converging on our homes, streets and neighbourhoods, affecting every aspect of our lives.
The [current] approach is regressive and poorly targeted with those in the largest houses typically getting the most benefit and those already under-heating their homes standing to gain the least.”
—CIVIC SQUARE and Dark Matter Labs, The Great British Energy Swindle
In partnership with Dark Matter Labs, Architects Climate Action Network (ACAN) and zero carbon house we have been exploring how Energy, Health, racial and climate justice are inextricably linked, and designing deep street-based demonstrations for neighbourhood transition as a core area of our work.
Through this, we have been shaping an ongoing, open collective enquiry around how to meet the broader scale of reimagination required in our housing and built environment, with shifts from the current individual, fragmented, centralised, extractive system to more collective, accessible, distributive and regenerative practices. This question lies at the heart of this work: what if the climate transition and retrofit of our homes and streets were designed, owned and governed by the people who live there? In addition to existing explorations and materials, there will be many more opportunities to explore this together from 2023.
****Read more at ‣.
“There is no path to a prosperous, zero-carbon future for humanity that does not begin with fixing our property system. Almost every major economy in the world today has a housing crisis, driven by the inflating value of land. In truth, although we call it a 'housing crisis' it might be better thought of as an 'everything' crisis, in that our dysfunctional relationship with land and property – and the broken incentives it creates – sit at the root of almost every social, economic and environmental crisis that floods across our timelines every day.
Buildings account for 39% of all carbon emissions. Meanwhile land rights represent the single biggest store of private 'wealth', and rent is the single largest channel through which wealth is transferred from the poor to the rich.”
—Open Systems Lab, Fairhold
We are therefore exploring housing through this multi-faceted lens, acknowledging a systemic understanding of the wider political-economic implications of housing and land. For a more in-depth understanding of the framing and possibilities that come from understanding housing as part of a broken land system, you can explore more of Open System Labs’ ever-inspiring work here.