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alternative_housing Housing as if people mattered. Exploring housing solutions that create livable cities

Housing is about creating communities, neighbourhoods, and livelihoods. Laurie Baker's colony housing provides all the...
16/09/2023

Housing is about creating communities, neighbourhoods, and livelihoods. Laurie Baker's colony housing provides all these.
Reach housing block consists of about 16 units of approximately 35sq.m. size. The units are stacked in a way that each unit in the higher level has an open terrace of approximately 14 sq.m.
These terrace spaces are more than just bonus areas. They are places where people who could grow plants, commune, celebrate, engage in a small cottage industry, and gives a breather compared to the small unit size that they could afford.
Laurie Baker shows us that innovative housing designs are possible within small budgets as well. How many housing schemes for the EWS and LIG people even approach housing as a community-building, livelihood-ensuring enterprise?
Drawings adapted from
Pictures from and

State of State-built housing in The lack of design and planning can be seen by merely visiting one of the numerous Sta...
24/11/2022

State of State-built housing in
The lack of design and planning can be seen by merely visiting one of the numerous State-built housing, especially for the Economically Weaker Section(EWS) and the Low Income Group (LIG). Even basic infrastructure such as water, light, and ventilation or access to open space are left unattended to.
Featured project is the housing by the in

Can we make our buildings environmentally less costly and at the same time enjoy certain benefits such as financial savi...
17/11/2021

Can we make our buildings environmentally less costly and at the same time enjoy certain benefits such as financial savings, resilience, and self-sufficiency?
The buildings we build have large environmental footprints - starting from when they are constructed which only increases over their lifetime.
Furthermore, buildings come with an average lifespan of several decades. By being aware and implementing certain measures we can have significant impacts throughout the lifetime of the building.

How much does constructing and occupying buildings contribute to global CO2 emissions? Quite significantly! Furthermore,...
03/11/2021

How much does constructing and occupying buildings contribute to global CO2 emissions? Quite significantly!
Furthermore, since buildings come with an average lifespan of several decades, our building activities have serious lock-in effects when it comes to GHG emissions now and in the future.
Awareness and acknowledgement of the scale of the problem are important first steps.

Cooperative housing is co-created housing. The cooperative model can open affordable, participatory housing within urban...
03/08/2021

Cooperative housing is co-created housing. The cooperative model can open affordable, participatory housing within urban limits for a wide range of people. In Uruguay, the Mutual Help cooperative scheme offers low-income families a chance to participate and be a part of a housing cooperative.
Under this scheme, the future residents construct their houses, offering manual labor in return for the 15% equity of the loan which they are mandated to raise. Most projects under this scheme are simple two-story structures built on the city periphery due to the unskilled nature of the members who build them. The COVIVEMA 5 housing is the first complex multi-story project within the city center to be built directly by its future residents under this scheme.
The project consists of 55 apartments built around the L-shaped plot in several stories. The high and open ground floor connects all the entrances and functions as the common space. Here, the members of the co-op meet to conduct their monthly assemblies and is open for various multipurpose events.
The biggest challenge in the project was the fact that the future residents were engaged in the planning and construction of the multi-story building. On average, each family in the cooperative contributed 30-35 hrs a week towards the construction over 3 years. A professional construction firm provided continuous education, technical assistance to the members and undertook the most difficult tasks. In this way, the overall building and the structure were built collectively, while the interiors of the individual apartments were left to the residents to finish according to individual tastes and means.

How we own one housing determines the kind of community we live in!In commercial real estate, individual owners have exc...
09/06/2021

How we own one housing determines the kind of community we live in!
In commercial real estate, individual owners have exclusionary rights to their property within the building along with proportional ownership of common spaces.
In cooperative housing, the people form a cooperative society, and the society, in turn, owns the land and the building with the members of the cooperative society given the right to occupy.

Collective ownership makes it possible to provide and maintain additional facilities that are equally accessible to all members of the cooperative society. In general, the ownership structure of the cooperative society puts community welfare and consensus over fragmented ownership.
Awareness and regulatory incentives towards collective ownership structures can help to reduce the cost of setting up cooperative housing and therefore a reduction in the cost of ownership.
For example, allowing cooperatives to come up with innovative mobility solutions for a discount on the mandatory parking regulations or by providing special financial solutions for these kinds of projects can encourage more progressive housing solutions

Sharing can reduce your financial burden, build a community and save the planet. Yet the consumerist narrative, for seve...
25/05/2021

Sharing can reduce your financial burden, build a community and save the planet. Yet the consumerist narrative, for several years, has insisted on private ownership - private cars, private houses, private what-not. In most cases, the attitude of sharing must be relearned.
While people can build a community around shared facilities and spaces. Sharing is economical because the cost of owning something is spread amongst different people. Sharing is environmentally friendly because it reduces the number of things that need to be produced.
Meaningful sharing requires strong, well-meaning communication amongst the stakeholders, active participation of the people, transparency , trust and self-management.
In her book, Doughnut Economics, Kate Raworth lays out concrete steps to make our economics more humane and fit to deal with the many issues that we face today from poverty to climate change. One of the key pillars is to shift our economy away from the idea of the ‘Rational Economic Man’ - an individual acting in self-interest which has been the driving force of economy as we know it - to socially reciprocating humans.

We are used to buying private houses within large apartment blocks. But would you rather have the entire apartment block...
18/05/2021

We are used to buying private houses within large apartment blocks. But would you rather have the entire apartment block as an extended house? What does it mean? - In addition to your private living spaces, every household will pool together and share certain essential common facilities among themselves - like the common children’s playroom which is larger and well-equipped than any household can afford individually, or the common sauna, or a common workshop with tools that you can use to repair or work.
The Wohnprojekt (Housing Project) in Vienna is quite literally an extended house where all the inhabitants collectively own the entire building and facilities of the subsidized development.
There are several advantages to this. For example, by legalizing the development as a collective house, it was possible to skip the mandatory parking regulations. Replacing individual car ownership with car-sharing means, forgoing all the hassle of car ownership while enjoying the benefits of car usage when required. The area, thus saved from mandatory parking requirements is used for commercial and communal facilities.
Several communal spaces offer the possibility for exchange and communication while the individual apartment units can be spaces for retreat. Everybody could plan his or her apartment individually, workshops were held for the community spaces and the interior of the flats. Like one resident put it, the project is ‘a village of seven floors’.

Gaining by Sharing - It is the idea that you have everything you need in your private flat, but also have access to grea...
10/05/2021

Gaining by Sharing - It is the idea that you have everything you need in your private flat, but also have access to great communal facilities that you share with your neighbours. By sharing spaces and resources, you will gain more than if you lived on your own the traditional way.

The project in Norway by illustrates the model. The project has a total of 49 housing units, along with large shared spaces that encourage social interaction between neighbours such as a garden room, rooftop terrace, family room, large communal kitchen, laundry room, storage room, greenhouse, guest rooms, amphitheatre, carpool, and playground.

Several of the future resident’s ideas as to the design and development of the common areas and functions were collected through participatory design workshops and were integrated into the final design.
The project itself was initiated by the architects along with other private developers. While not strictly a cooperative housing project, the project is an example of participatory design, sharing of resources, and the idea of co-living in a private residential development

How much more efficient and cost-effective we can live if we share certain commonly used resources? Instead of every hou...
14/04/2021

How much more efficient and cost-effective we can live if we share certain commonly used resources?
Instead of every house owning a washing machine as a necessity, a group of houses can share a few good machines collectively. Instead of building a spare room for the occasional guests, a group of houses can collectively manage a pool of guest rooms that can be rented out when the need arises. This can be extended to every other common requirement - a common toolshed, a common library, perhaps even a food garden - and to other common systems such as collective waste & water management, solar power, etc.
By sharing resources, not only the individual costs of households are reduced, but they can have access to a vast array of collective resources that they might not have been possible to access or own individually.
The La Borda Coop in Barcelona is an ideal example. A common space within the building not only houses the collective laundry space but also functions as an ‘extra’ space for various other activities. A common terrace and the toolshed are bonuses to the 28 different apartments in the cooperatively developed project.


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