25. Slowdown landscapes: Building blocks for care and repair of the city
By: Dan Hill
Tags: Housing, Architecture, Covid 19, Urban Planning, Cities

Learning from Vienna’s early 20th century, when the foundations were laid and built for their housing, Holleran points out the perhaps ‘inconvenient truth’ “that many are uncomfortable with: providing high quality and stable housing for all involves more than new financing techniques: it likely requires a decommodification of the housing market, large-scale building, and the appropriation of wealth from what we now call the ‘One Percent’.”

Yet it strikes me that “many” are increasingly comfortable with shifting wealth from the latter, given half the chance; that large-scale retrofits and adaptation can be the focus over large-scale building; and that the Slowdown’s destabilisation of property-as-investment could precipitate precisely the decommodification Holleran describes. The pandemic has shifted mental models here. Not fully, of course; events do not change things so straightforwardly, tending to move with lumpy, messy history. Yet, at the time of writing, were different models clearly articulated now, there may be many more takers than was previously assumed.

For the alternative is the fix that the UK has got itself into. Once capable of building housing of high quality, at scale, it is now producing housing of consistently low quality, at scale. UCL’s Bartlett School of Planning recently conducted an audit of over 140 housing developments built across England since 2007, and found them to be “overwhelmingly mediocre or poor”.

“Less affluent communities are ten times more likely to get worse design, even though better design is affordable; Low-scoring housing developments scored especially badly in terms of character and sense of place, with architecture that does not respond to the context in which it is located; The worst reported aspects of design include developments dominated by access roads and the poor integration of storage, bins and car parking, leading to unattractive and unfriendly environments with likely negative health and social implications”—’New housing design in England overwhelmingly ‘mediocre’ or ‘poor’’, UCL News, 21 January 2020

It’s not easy to read that, following the images of Vienna’s Alt-Erlaa, above. (For the Department of Dreams event in June 2020, Alastair Parvin wrote a wonderful essay on the centuries-old politics of land value underpinning the sorry story of British housing policy and practice.)

But here comes the Black Swan-ish variable of the virus once again, and the many crises it has precipitated, not least in the over-capitalised real estate sector, and within the fever dreams of city treasurers, suddenly desperate for alternative models. Kalagas interviewed Hofer about the Zürich co-op culture in 2018, who ends by noting, perhaps with some prescience, or just experience of previous crises, that the opportunity for cooperative and public housing rises under certain conditions:

“The housing market is inherently conservative and influenced by strong political lobbies. So a financial crisis, a social crisis — these can trigger a crucial moment of reflection. It is possible to change the system through reason, but humans often need a deep crisis to get reasonable.”—Andreas Hofer, interviewed by Alexis Kalagas for ‘Co-op City: Zürich’s experiment with non-profit housing’, Assemble Papers, 2018

Well, here we are. Perhaps.

Elsewhere in Deem, Hilary Malson describes the inspirational gentrification-blocking moves of Cooperation Jackson, who use the community land trust model “aiming to preemptively protect poor Black residents from removal and charter a democratic path to development without displacement by taking land off the speculative market and holding it in trust.” Jackson is one of the poorest metropolitan cities in the United States, in the poorest state, and yet as Malson points out, the city is beginning to see gentrification patterns in certain areas, leading to a displacement of poor people of colour, in a state with little legal protection for tenants. In the context of the Deep South, rather than those rather more amenable Mitteleuropean cities, Cooperation Jackson is particularly impressive work.

The cooperative model, and its many positive mutations, rebalances housing and living environments away the otherwise extractive modes typical of urban regeneration-led property development models, producing instead a diverse array of housing, infrastructure, amenity, environment. By virtue of designing with real people and their desires, they tend to be set within appropriately complex semi-public environments, emphasising sustainable biodiverse settings. By shifting the mental model of financing, of the purpose of housing—something that the public sector can also do, of course, noting Vienna above—cooperatives unlock urban spaces that were not previously accessible. By building with people, it can perform an alchemy of making the undesirable space desirable—and in the face of gentrification, they can make desirable space equitable.

There are huge questions to resolve within this, but interestingly they are rarely technical—in the traditional understanding—but instead concern our models, our approaches, our sensibilities, our values.

These issues can sometimes be more obviously visible in shared infrastructures. In that same 2018 issue of Assemble Papers, I was also interviewed, by then-editor Jana Perkovic, who closed with the (big) question, ‘What is the next challenge in urbanism?’. My somewhat off-the-cuff answer (though drawing on ‘Networked Urbanism’ and Grid/Non-Grid) was apparently this:

“The balancing act between the 20th-century systems and the 21st-century systems. Shared mobility. Microgrids and nanogrids, super-local renewables, storing and sharing energy locally. Baugruppen and co-housing. All these, I’d argue, are networked urbanism, organised on different principles to the 20th-century model, which also has virtues when done well, because it can handle the baseload of a four-million-person city like Melbourne. You will probably need a city-wide grid, but with microgrids in between, just like we need professional buildings, and then Segal Method or Wikihouse at the smaller scale. How do we design, own and govern that? New models enable a potent question of co-ownership of infrastructure, housing and energy. You could have development without property developers, energy without energy oligopolies, with energy co-ops instead. Does that create a sense of civics? It might not. It might create a sense of withdrawing into my own energy co-op bubble. How do we not withdraw into these individualised systems that network structures can enable? The balancing act is the biggest question we have.”—‘Dan Hill: Tactile Cities’, Assemble Papers, 2018

In that, I’m trying to foreground the less obvious political questions to resolve. How do cooperatives not become gated communities? How do they retain diversity? How do we balance between the individual, social, and institutional? These issues do not concern technologies as such, although the possibilities are changed by technology. But they concern how we build shared civic sensibilities and shared systems for the infrastructures of everyday life, and see the possibility of cooperatives, ‘participatives’, ‘collaboratives’.

Assemble Papers is based in Melbourne (and is produced by a developer with its own forward-thinking housing model), and the city has a very well-known and very successful recent example of new housing models. Nightingale is not formally a cooperative model, but has many of the trappings of slowdown dynamics: super-local resilient and sustainable infrastructure, rich biodiversity threaded through the building, highly engaged communities working in care-ful mode, and the buildings themselves artfully and sympathetically fusing across the gaps in existing neighbourhoods.

“The communal spaces encourage you to interact with your neighbours. We garden together, we make building improvements together, we go out together, we make dinner for one another … I have lived in multi-residential buildings before and not known a soul … but here we have created genuine friendships”.—Nightingale resident

In rejecting the ‘property as investment’ dynamics of the Acceleration, it epitomises housing as a place to live instead. This is hardly a radical idea, but one barely incentivised at all in that previous age. (Watch Nightingale co-founder Jeremy McLeod of Breathe Architecture’s lecture at the SLQ on all this, from a few years ago.)