Marmalade Lane’s car-free shared space. © David Butler.

I got a strong sense of Span déjà vu visiting the site of the £8.3 million Marmalade Lane custom-built cohousing scheme, in Cambridge. In the north of the city, it is set in Orchard Park, an urban extension built from the early 2000s with easy access to the A14, Science Park and the city centre, full of families and young people. In the 19^th century the area had orchards, which attracted Chivers, the marmalade making firm to install itself there.

Marmalade Lane began life when a 0.97ha K1 site at Orchard Park owned by Cambridge City Council became available after its sale to a housebuilder fell through in the 2008 crash. With the plot on its hands, the council studied its feasibility for cohousing. The goal was to establish an innovative community-led housing model with high quality design and environmental performance and an imaginative layout to produce a capital receipt. An enabled cohousing model was adopted in 2010, and when in 2012 the Council’s Cabinet members formally committed to the plan, they gave K1 Cohousing group, which had been seeking land, the opportunity to show that there was an appetite for this model of living to justify setting such a precedent for Cambridge.

Marmalade Lane © David Butler.

Over the following two years K1 Cohousing group members worked with expert advisors C2O Futureplanners and Instinctively Green, to establish the feasibility of the development. They developed a vision and staged workshops to advance the brief, prepared leases and built their member base through publicity and open events. They issued a tender to find an innovative developer to translate their vision and brief into a deliverable scheme, and in June 2015 selected the developer-architect team of TOWN, Trivselhus and Cambridge-based Mole Architects. Working with K1, the team prepared a full planning application to the South Cambridgeshire City Council, and K1’s members took part in various working groups on energy, housing, common spaces, landscape and community cohesion, and attended many design team meetings. The bid document contained very high expectations: it set a requirement for Passivhaus code 4 compliance and London Housing Minimum Standards, explains Meredith Bowles, founder of Mole.

Marmalade Lane © David Butler.

TOWN, a UK-based development company founded by Jonny Anstead and Neil Murphy in 2014, makes distinctive homes and neighbourhoods, working with residents to make sure they are happy about their living spaces. Trivselhus, TOWN’s enabling development partner, which provided the equity finance, is a leading Swedish building company expert in using sustainably harvested wood to build homes and commercial property. Trivselhus UK (Newcastle) was set up in response to growing demand for Scandinavian-style quality and efficiency, and has been the construction partner for the K1 site, producing the highly energy efficient, Swedish factory-made timber panel homes there. Award-winning Mole Architects produces modern designs appropriate to their local context blending traditional materials and techniques with a contemporary approach to design and building.

Marmalade Lane © David Butler.

The site was acquired by a special purpose vehicle – a UK limited company – wholly owned by Trivselhus UK and with a contractual joint venture agreement with TOWN, the lead development managers. A fixed land purchased price was agreed with Cambridge City Council based on full market value, taking account of the cohousing brief, with payment of land price deferred to be paid out of sales revenue, to support development cashflow.

The deal TOWN made with the council stated that if they couldn’t sell homes to cohousing members, they could sell them on the open market. K1 Cohousing members who legally committed to purchase early were granted discounts, reflecting the developer’s reduced sales risk, and were able to exercise the greater choice over their homes. Residents pay a service charge to equip and maintain shared facilities, and are expected to contribute to the management of the community through participation in one of several committees and fifteen working groups looking after the different aspects of the life of the community. In 2016 after workshops were held by the K1 group with the developers and architects to revise the design, full planning consent was given with Section 106 for parking and public art. Construction began in 2017 and the scheme was completed between Dec 2018 and Jan 2019, by which time only 8 were unsold.

Marmalade Lane © Jim Stephenson.

Mole’s design is an eye-pleasing street-based development of private and shared spaces that knits into the surrounding streets of the wider neighbourhood of Orchard Park. Some front doors face these existing streets, and the design is respectful of a pre-existing street pattern. There are gates on two minor parts of the scheme, but you wouldn’t discern this. People wanted communal outdoor space. The original brief was in fact twice the size, but the scheme needed to feel intimate. It has a strong European character to it, with shared outdoor space replacing the typical private areas of housing developments (in which play is inevitably constrained or not possible), and residents leading and managing every aspect of community life together.

Marmalade Lane © David Butler.

Cohousing – ‘intentional communities, created and run by their residents’ (the UK Cohousing Network definition) – as a term originated in Denmark in the late 1960s, before being exported to the US and influencing Swedish, Dutch, Germany and the UK (the first UK cohousing scheme was completed at Springhill, Stroud, in 2004) other European city developments where residents were impacted by housing shortages or a lack of affordable homes. ‘My main driver has always been our four children’, says Marmalade Lane resident Hannah Shields. ‘I really feel that cohousing will be hugely beneficial to them with increased freedom and a sense of extended family. I also think growing up in a community where tolerance, respect and compromise are practiced through consensus decision-making will be a fantastic education in how to be an active member of society’.

The 42 homes – 30 houses and 12 flats – are arranged in terraces enclosing The Lane, a child-friendly, car-free street. A large shared garden with retained mature oak trees and new allotments has an open aspect to the south, and a peripheral area to the east of the site includes communal waste stores,146 cycle parking spaces and car parking.

The Common House at Marmalade Lane, Mole Architects for Town. © Jim Stephenson.

The Common House at Marmalade Lane © David Butler.

Key to the shared spaces and facilities in which all members of K1 have a stake is the central, two storey freestanding Common House facing south onto the garden. A cross-laminated timber structure, it has a double height ‘great hall’ for shared meals and parties, quiet library, a play room, three guest bedrooms, laundry facilities and meeting rooms, and it shares a lobby and lift access with ten large dual and triple aspect two bedroom apartments over three storeys, and a triple aspect one bedroom affordable flat. This versatile typology is very well used. On the other side of the garden are a gym and a workshop.

Marmalade Lane © David Butler.

Marmalade Lane © Jeremy Peters.

The scheme is a custom-build development aimed at a diverse mix of residents from downsizing couples to families with, or intending to have, young children. Buyers select one of five different ‘shell’ house (1-4 bedroom; 3 storey; type A, 108m2; B, 123m2; or C, 1-2 bed; 51 and 61m2), in 3 different widths, or flats (D; 2 bed, 75m2) which they have then configured, floor-by-floor, floorplans, kitchen and bathroom fittings, and one of four external brick colour specifications (not necessarily coordinated with one’s neighbour’s brick colour). Learning how to select options in Google Docs was easy for customers taking advantage of the customised options, and already used to the idea from watching Grand Designs. The wide and narrow house and ‘paired’ flat shells share a 7.8m-deep plan, enabling them to be distributed in any sequence along a terrace. This customisation is balanced with the cohesive appearance of the homes’ repeating wall and window proportions, porches and balconies.

Marmalade Lane © David Butler.

The homes apply Trivselhus’s Climate Shield closed panel timber frame system, manufactured in Sweden, which ensures exceptional thermal efficiency and airtightness, and a consistently high build quality allowing the floorplans to be configured to suit each occupant’s needs. The triple-glazed composite aluminium and timber windows and electrical ducting are factory-fitted, so construction on site is rapid ie. a single house can be erected in two days. MVHR systems mean the homes have a comfortable environment, and air source heat pumps provide low carbon electricity.

Marmalade Lane © David Butler.

The homes are contemporary versions of the townhouses and apartments traditionally found in Cambridge, and all of them are generously proportioned, and have high ceilings, large windows, light-filled open plan living areas and private gardens or balconies. ‘The scheme includes a lot of housing types but you don’t necessarily know it from outside’, says Jonny Anstead (TOWN). Downsizing options are limited by the availability of flats coming up for sale, as the homes are owned by people and that dictates a certain longevity.

Marmalade Lane © Jim Stephenson.

‘We’re like a little village, a neighbourhood’, said one of the residents at the site visit in 2019. As a cohousing scheme Marmalade Lane is a resounding success, creating a strong sense of ownership, and one of the nicest housing developments in the city, delivering a true community that is mixed intergenerationally, and combats social isolation. Up to 42 units is a ‘sweet spot’ for cohousing – RUSS in Lewisham is 33 – apparently; you need a specific volume.

From 2000 when the original community group was formed to completion in 2019 made it a long job but after almost a decade, everything came together in the end. ‘It’s not a top-down approach, but one that is bottom-up’, says Alice Hamlin, project architect at Mole Architects. The team made trips to Denmark, Sweden (Copenhagen; Malmo), Germany (Vauban, Berlin’s Baugruppen schemes) and the Netherlands, looking at European examples with similar levels of communality and analysing their attitudes towards public space.

‘It’s easy to forget, when talking about Britain needing thousands of new houses, that it is primarily houses that create places, and become communities. To work with a determined group of people whose main aim is to create community to live in has been inspirational’, Bowles feels. ‘It was great to be involved with the whole journey of design and development’, Frances Wright, a lawyer who lives at Marmalade Lane, and since 2019 has worked with TOWN as Head of Community Partnering. ‘It means you move in with a real sense of ownership beyond your front door and you have already got to know many of your neighbours. The sense of community on moving in was instant’.

Marmalade Lane © Jim Stephenson.

One year on from completion, Marmalade Lane is almost fully occupied. People eat together twice a week and the allotment in the shared garden is coming along. The resident group has set up a mini-‘library of things’, tools and appliances they share, and there is a ‘growing corridor of items for recycling’. It is starting to buy fruit and vegetable boxes and wholefoods together, and has begun an internal shop. In Cambridge more widely there is an initiative to create a circular economy around food, for local people to collectively purchase what they need and arrange its distribution. ‘It’s been great to explore these initial steps’ says Wright.

With TOWN they have looked how part of the outdoor areas could be ‘subtly changed’ so that they can be used in wider ways. In 2019 the resident group bought an electric cargo bike shared between ten households on a membership basis: ‘the way to meet your neighbour is to do things together’. This includes activities which involve the wider community, for example, through a monthly ‘rubbish ramble’, and has entailed conversations exploring the boundaries between spaces exclusively for residents and those people from Orchard Park can also use.

Marmalade Lane © David Butler.

The group is working with some existing cohousing groups to help them unlock solutions for shared living. ‘We’ve been keen to help other groups’, and how they can establish co-living principles in the very early stages of a development, rather than only focussing on obtaining the land. Wright wants more mainstream developers to include cohousing in their schemes. ‘Cohousing could be a mainstream not a niche option’. It has to be done at the beginning, and not done speculatively, but pre-sold, to reap the full value.

There are currently 21 cohousing communities in the UK, with a further 32 in development and 17 forming their membership, a total of 70, according to the UK Cohousing Network. This begs the question: will more mainstream developers enter the cohousing market? What has stopped it happening so far? How do developers get the land? There is a role for councils here, says Bowles, to allocate land for cohousing groups, and reap the benefit in palpable social value and cohesiveness. If cohousing does start to become part of mainstream, or build-to-rent developments, a key question about the process is, what are the transferrable principles? ‘There’s a temptation to think about what buildings you need’, but, says Wright, ‘creating a sense of ownership, and how you get future resident engagement in a meaningful way’ is equally important.

The Marmalade Lane post-occupancy report published by TOWN, June 2024, is here.

Along with other top priorities for the borough and its communities. Check it out! Available to buy online here or you can read the story in full (without illustrations) on the Meridian Water website.

Front cover of New London Quarterly, winter issue, published Dec 2019, editor David Taylor, featuring (l-r) Enfield Council’s Ian Davis (Chief Executive), Sarah Cary (Executive Director, Place), Nesil Caliskan (Leader) and Peter George (Programme Director – Meridian Water). Photo © Grant Smith.

Today there are multiple possibilities open to communities to realise and look after their homes as social capital assets. That might sound improbable in today’s skewed housing market, but the presentations and discussions about alternative models of affordable and community-led housing projects at the conference, Future Homes for London: Alternative Models, staged at the Royal College of Art in April 2018, underlined the potential of this route out of reliance on limited and dysfunctional mass housebuilding programmes.

Curated and co-chaired with Dr Adrian Lahoud, Dean, School of Architecture, by the Royal College of Art’s Dr Tarsha Finney, Programme Leader, MA City Design, School of Architecture, the St Ann’s Redevelopment Trust, Haringey, The Architecture Foundation and the Baylight Foundation, the event offered inspiring insights about progessive global exemplars, including Swiss projects based on nineteenth-century co-operative legal structures such as Kraftwerk I and Mehr als Wohnen, Zurich, Berlin’s Baugruppen, La Borda, a new Spanish architect-led co-operative dealing with community ageing and the Melbourne-based Nightingale.

Dr Tarsha Finney, Programme Leader, MA City Design, School of Architecture, RCA.

Dr Adrian Lahoud, Dean, School of Architecture, RCA.

They might apply different legal frameworks, cooperative models and land tenure systems and participation, management and governance models, but nonetheless provide valuable insights into how cooperative housing projects are financed; how they deal with patient capital and the perception of risk; how they operate their procurement structures; and deploy architecture, especially in applying design to negotiate difference.

With its high calibre of international speakers – practitioners involved in developing, building, designing, delivering and living in new projects globally – and at a time when Brexit discussions continued to drown out social welfare priorities, Future Homes for London was an ideal forum in which to consider which models work, how and why, and could be adopted by the UK’s housing scene, and adapted to its specific legal jurisdiction, financial structures, and cultural limitations. A number of people in the UK are aware that multigenerational co-housing is now increasingly built in countries like Germany. But while community groups are actively advancing projects of this kind, psychological barriers remain, including the perception that it is too difficult, or something only others can do.

The first day, Global Precedents of Community-led and -owned Housing, consisted of series of presentations by architects and housing activists operating globally. Cristina Gamboa (Lacol), La Borda, Barcelona; Jeremy McLeod (Breathe Architecture, Nightingale), The Commons, Melbourne; Christoph Schmidt (ifau. Berlin); Christian Roth (Zanderroth Architekten); Claudia Thiesen (Mehr Als Wohnen, Zurich) and Paul Karakusevic (Karakusevic Carson Architects), London. Their stories of specific projects included experiments in shared amenity both at the scale of the building block and the dwelling unit.

All these cooperative models respond to different conditions. ‘All use the design process as a mechanism for difference, which allows norms of behavior to be questioned’, said Finney. ‘Often policy makers and developers see community participation as no more than glorified consultation, or as a way to navigate the planning process’. Whereas when actual community group members talk of ‘community-led’, they mean full community control of housing and amenities, including the design process, full ownership of the property on completion, the occupants, and the fixing of rental and sales prices in perpetuity through covenants in ownership contracts, and ongoing management.

When it works, the cooperative design process led by architects, or members of coops who are architects, enables the negotiation of difference amongst the parties. Competing desires and ambitions are successfully mediated in ways that bring innovation to shared spaces and amenities of housing projects, overcoming the norms of developer-led 1-3 bedroom apartments. What, then, are the features of the participatory relationships, including conflict and negotiation, and terms realised between community and housing development and its different national contexts?

La Borda, Barcelona

La Borda was the first housing cooperative built on public land in Barcelona, which has developing a social amenity in addition to housing for aged care facilities. Founded by a group of architects, including Cristina Gamboa, who studied formal housing access, informal housing access, housing price, right to the city, and evictions.

Gamboa explained that now in Spain people paying more than 50% of their income on housing and energy costs are very high. While formal housing access is almost always through ownership, the city has a higher percentage of rented accommodation (30%). 2% is public housing, and there are no mechanisms to control the market. Salaries are lower than before the bubble crashed, so many people leaving the city.

Cristina Gamboa (Lacol), La Borda, Barcelona.

The Sants neighbourhood of Barcelona, formerly an industrial area, has a long tradition of cooperatives. 30 years ago the municipality promised green spaces but the plan was halted in the economic crisis of 2007. In 2012 La Borda started to think how they could have an active role and provide housing ourselves. They implemented the cooperative system with 50 people of different ages and backgrounds as a non-speculative model, setting their sights on public land but open to private land possibilities.

La Borda’s principles included promoting equal relationships to realise human-scale self-managed neighbourhood based on social commitment and develop another way of urbanism making the most of existing resources. The intention was to engage the participation of people to better understand their needs and create a resilient open infrastructure and make a big effort to reduce costs by also including some self-construction.

This vision broke with the standard family model in favour of living in different ways not included in housing regulations. Some of the participants were formerly living in a squat, so they needed flexible typologies. They set environmental goals for energy, water and materials including the waste of the construction, raising consciousness about actions.

The development has 280 m2 of community areas (kitchen, dining room, co-working commercial area, multipurpose area, laundry, guest room, health area, area for bicycle) and 28 units of 10m2 each, for which participants make an initial down payment of 18,500 euros and the monthly payment is currently 450 euros per month, which is half of the market average for a 60m unit and community areas, and the land will to return to the public in 75 years time. To take care of all aspects of the projects, La Borda has three sets of general assemblies: legal, commissioning, funding, architecture, administration, shared living and project management. It has five projects ongoing and is going to increase its scope in future.

Mehr Als Wohnen, Zurich

Claudia Thiesen, architect co-founder of the Mehr Als Wohnen coop (MAW), is a resident in Kraftwerk 2, their housing project, and has worked for the coop developing projects over the last 16 years. It’s important to establish good neighbourhoods and ‘participatory discussions should be fun’. The system in Zurich for cooperative housing is derived from a big tradition in operation for more than 100 years, and building coops which have 20% of all apartments.

The MAW coops are not a closed system: they have a network to which everyone can apply. Funding comes from the banks (in Barcelona they have less money from this source), with only 6% from the inhabitants, and Zurich has a municipal pension fund which puts money into the coops. The City can’t build itself but must give land to the coops. A cost rent model means long-term affordable rents. No profit is taken out.

Claudia Thiesen, Mehr Als Wohnen, Zurich.

In Switzerland housing coops are really private, and land and properties are removed from speculation. They are non-profit due to rents calculated on the effective costs, and have about 10% subsidised flats (social housing) with limitations on tenants’ income and assets. From the 1990s onwards young innovative coops have sprung up, advancing participatory processes and solidarity systems. With a maximum of 35m per person, low energy consumption, they have animated ground floors so the buildings contain not only flats but stores and offices, kindergartens, and foster different alternative living arrangements.

At Kraftwerk 2001 there are 250 people with offices, retail and common spaces, with scope for 12-14 people to live together, and a double level apartment with an enormous library, while Kraftwerk 1 Heizenholz, with 26 flats for 100 people, is a multigenerational project, with the elderly and children. Thiesen explained the notion of ‘clusterwohnung’, a shared kitchen and living room, with at the back more private rooms, and then more communal rooms and a common terrace for all, where you can easily visit your neighbours.

The Kraftwerk 1 coop moved outside the city to Zwicky Sud, creating here a mixed cluster site, with two storeys of common rooms and working spaces. Bridges across street connect the houses with their different typologies, including a bridge-cluster split into two houses, with small studios on the other side of bridge.

Thiesen explained that they could invent different types of living together for the very engaged people who live in these kinds of households. Experts advise them on how much common space they can afford and 35 groups have been established over 2 years, encompassing childcare and cultural groups. The homes have a lot of roofs people can occupy and all the balconies are connected so people can decide how to organize activities together across the mix of public and more private space. People pay rent but also money for solidarity funds, given to people to fund their projects, for example, more green facades.

R50, ifau und Jeske Fezer/Heide & von Beckerath, Berlin

When Berlin starting to suffer from big global capital investments, with rising costs, cheap housing became much harder to develop and come by unless you go to the private sector which is very expensive. A problem was that that the cooperatives were not able to build as it was so expensive to get land. The social housing problem needed to be managed but with a lack over 35 years in the city of social housing all the other programmes supporting coop projects have also been on ice.

Berlin has many open spaces dating from the post-war period on its periphery. Perimeter blocks bump into the modern layers of the city and there’s land where no-one interested in living. It is in this context that the Senate of Berlin encouraged baugruppen (housing coops) to apply, from 1980s onwards, for 1% of the land for concept-based processes. Applicants regarded them as an interesting opportunity, on the basis that the coop model offers something back to the city, such as a kindergarten, through a typical public-private partnership. Car-free cities has been a major principle but the most important priority is to create cheap living spaces.

Christoph Schmidt from ifau, Berlin, explained that they are now focusing on big housing projects outside the city. He showed R50, in Kreuzberg, a building for a community land trust, a group of freelancers, journalists, academics with a strong desire to be a community, where ifa und Jeske Fezer/Heide & (Verena) von Beckerath have created a supporting structure where the infill is made by the user, with a circular running balcony to bring the garden closer to the apartments.

Christoph Schmidt, ifau, Berlin.

Through a free floor plan they studied how people want to live and how they want to make their layouts, imagining what could be shared. Different people made reports on how they wanted to live (some didn’t want separate rooms), outlining what kind of functions and social needs could be loosely connected.

Using diagrams, the quantitive survey evolved into a qualitative one, with variations, like a Rorschach test. The building has a raw cement floor, concrete ceiling and walls, very simple pinewood frames and a pinewood façade so everyone has to vanish and polish their own part of it to help it endure for 20-25 years. The architects had broadly the same methods as La Borda, with common functions (25% of budget of each party went into the common spaces) and a blog where everyone could comment and give ideas. In Jessica Bridger’s 2015 article, ‘Don’t call it a commune: inside Berlin’s radical co-housing project’, in Metropolis, elaborating on R50, she observes that Germany is ‘where new models for housing have emerged, ones that take ideas about communal living out of the realm of hippie collectives or alt-squats and into the pragmatic territory of pooled finances and homeownership’.

Zanderrott Architekten, Berlin

Christian Roth, founder of Zanderroth Architekten, together with SmartHoming GmbH, started looking at plots in Berlin to build a house and get new projects off the ground, building for less money and shared and lower costs for the community and neighbourhood. They have been looking at cross-financing a public square, common faciities, integrating a supermarket and a school.

Christian Roth, Zanderroth Architekten, Berlin.

With one project they were aware of the quite difficult conditions of the location, a site facing north surrounded by Prinslaurburg. Families tend to move out of town so children can play outside. So how could they combine this need with the advantages of being in the city? The solution, a very unhierarchic building, has 3 different typologies including a townhouse with separate entrances, a penthouse with patio, a 3 storey garden house organised with split levels, over 4 storeys to get more light in.

Inside people can choose what they have, but outside is determined by the architects. The project includes some guest apartments, a sauna, kitchen, communal facilities and a grassed roof. At Liebigstrasse their structure is adaptable by adding modules, with the possibility to downsize and to rent one out. At their Mendelsohn high rise prefab buildings there will be a school building on first two floors, and a community roof terrace.

In Berlin there is no funding for land purchase so the land used by the housing coops belongs to the county. Over the last 20 years discussions have been held on how land in future can be provided for other concept-based projects and the city could get a benefit for the quarter, with the developer providing something so the city can reduce the price, a possible model for London.

Karakusevic Carson Architects, London

In the UK since the Localism Act in 2011 there has been community benefit land, but huge government cuts have made it really difficult to achieve. From 1946 to the 1980s a large number of housing completions – council houses – were delivered by the UK’s local authorities.1968 was a peak year in the UK for the delivery of homes, with 425,830 built. By 2002-3, 35 years later, this number had plummeted to a mere 180 council homes. And since then? Of the 140,660 homes that were completed in the UK in 2016, only 1.5 per cent were delivered directly by local authorities. This is in stark contrast to 1970, when local authorities in England delivered approximately 45 per cent of the 291,790 permanent dwellings completed.

But the last 13 years has seen an upsurge in councils delivering housing by themselves for themselves, and a record number of social and council homes are planned, according to the GLA. Architect Paul Karakusevic, founder of Karakusevic Carson Architects, is one of the most appropriate professionals to discuss the development of high quality housing for the public sector set against the historic context of UK housing delivery.

Paul Karakusevic, Karakusevic Carson Architects, London.

KCA has regenerated Colville Estate for Hackney Council, which had previously seen failed attempts to rebuild it, and residents and developer fighting. It has designed schemes like Dujardin Mews for Enfield Council, working with McCreanor Lavington, to create a range of typologies and the Bacton Estate, for Camden Council. And the first three phases of Kings Crescent estate, for Hackney, a mixed tenure neighbourhood, 100% social rent, with gardens designed by muf architecture/art, one of the few council and resident-led regeneration estates in London to combine refurbishment of existing council blocks with new homes for social rent, shared ownership and private sale.

The key challenges of mixed use development in London, said Karakusevik, include: can B2 industry remain in the city, when property values are high? How do we keep employment and industrial spaces in London, and the lack of recent precedents – few people have created work and live districts. Short leases just perpetuate insecurity. Camley Street Neighbourhood Development Plan in King’s Cross, where residents created a Neighbourhood Forum, is an excellent model.

Designated by Camden Council in 2013, following the Localism Act 2011, the Forum formed a Community Land Trust, now constituted as a limited company called Camley Street Sustainability Zone, which includes the Cedar Way Commercial Area with existing businesses including A-Models, Alara and Smithfield Daily Fish Supplies, with employee numbers rising over 3 years from 350 to 500. It was key to prevent a dominance of private sector student housing emerging in King’s Cross, and to provide truly affordable housing for residents.

The Forum has created a Neighbourhood Plan, locking in a lot of low cost housing to help keep low cost employment and food production and housing (100% affordable 900 homes and up to 1700 jobs). Conceived as a 50:50 partnership with the local residents, the Zone has entailed discussion with the Council, looking at how the CLT can work with the Council in a creative way, for best value, with a lack of central government support.

In supporting high quality affordable housing here in central London, Camden Council is seen as trailblazing. The project also increases the amount of local green space, low carbon residential and employment space, and becomes an environmental exemplar.

The Camley Street Sustainability Zone, for which some design work is evolving, is also advancing the area’s identity as a food centre (otherwise easily ending up being outside London) with premises to be rented out as most affordable rates possible. Rather than the Council taking a quick check, it is a long-term partner in the creation of lots of new affordable residential they would co-own with the trust, and lots of new jobs.

In realising the land value, there is long term revenue from rental stream of B1/housing and increased income to council from local business and residential rates. Businesses pay more rates than residential properties but that money will help local councils and to keep libraries and schools open.

Nightingale, Melbourne                                                                                       

Architect and developer Jeremy McLeod created quite a stir when he spoke about his Melbourne housing projects realised under the auspices of Nightingale, his firm. He also gave the full low down the night before the RCA conference at an engaging event hosted by Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios. FCBS Partner Peter Clegg invited McLeod to London after making a trip to Australia earlier in 2018 and getting to know ‘the amazing work’ being done by Nightingale. For Clegg, the Nightingale projects stand out because ‘the architects have taken charge of development. They buy sites, raise finance from banks ethical funds as well as individuals, in some cases their clients’, and ‘seem to be able to make a 15% return on investment of borrowed money’.

Jeremy McLeod, Breathe Architecture, Nightingale Housing, Melbourne.

Clegg described how Nightingale’s team members ‘tap into an extensive database of people interested in buying into co-housing schemes. They have social and environmental sustainability principles that run through all their schemes: shared open space and laundry facilities, and low energy design with renewables. They then develop the sites and run them pretty much as co-housing projects with a strong architectural lead. They seem to make it hugely financially attractive – approximately 30% less than open market housing – by cutting out marketing and development costs and by putting architects in charge.

Melbourne, in the state of Victoria, started as a series of villages. Now the city is spread out as one massive sprawl. Its housing model is broken, explained McLeod. In Australia there is an incredible attachment to home ownership and housing has now become an asset class. People generally won’t buy in apartment buildings so buy small, cheap and poorly built houses, with all risk on the builder. There is urban compression, with densities in some cases higher than in Hong Kong, and urban sprawl. You don’t know your neighbours. Decision makers in property development set the goal posts. The entire city has been delivered for investors over the last 20 years. Property development is a business, not an urban housing provider.

Only 3% of all housing in Australia is designed by architects, said McLeod. He started out in his career working for developers under the control of project managers, but when he dug in his heels about sustainability issues it was a non-starter, even though taking things like the plastics manufacturing out of the equation made perfect sense. For the first built Nightingale scheme, The Commons, they took a strongly sustainable, affordable, ecological and reductionist approach. Before the 2009 financial crisis Australia was a veritable land of milk and honey but then things got really hard. Everyone was pulling finance deals out of projects, so they had to find an impact investor for theirs. ‘Build more with less’ was their mantra.

Nightingale asked people what they wanted, for example, downlights, sinks, space, light, views, sun – ‘a lot of those things are free’ – rather than ‘what the marketing agents thought would sell’. The firm took the ceilings out of the scheme, exposed all the services and introduced cross ventilation so air conditioning was not needed, a big saving. Instead of chrome door hardware, they chose raw brass, and recycled timber floors, and avoided ceramic tiles as they have embedded energy.

The biggest issue was taking out the cars, a big political fight, because private homes and private car ownership in Melbourne have been intrinsically linked. This saved 10% of the construction budget. Instead of a roller door and a driveway, they put in a wine shop, sold it and used the revenue for a garden. Instead of individual laundries, a communal one was out on the roof where there were plants growing.

The Commons is sited in the Lebanese block of a suburb in Brunswick, 6 km north of the city, a melting pot of different cultures with lots of brownfield plots under renewal. Nightingale 1, their second project encouraged by popular feedback to The Commons, occupies a site across the road one back from the street and diagonally for which they paid 1.7m dollars.

McLeod can’t help but feel that Melbourne is ‘under siege by property developers’. To democratise the whole process the architects at Breathe make decisions in tandem with the people they are housing, which sounds so easy, but they raised 2.7 million dollars in equity when everyone mortgaged it (100,000 dollars each) against their own houses, and borrowed 500,000 dollars, a stressful process.

All their buildings after the Commons are mandated to be zero carbon and McLeod’s practice Breathe is both its architecture firm as well as energy supplier, buying green energy at wholesale rates (30% cheaper). ‘As architects we think we can build the armature but, at the end of the day, it’s up to the community to do’. Their work started a big discussion about car ownership, and since then in Melbourne 15 housing projects have been granted with zero cars and the Appeals Tribunal says it is ok not to have cars, a big deal in Australia.

We ‘kept looking at Baugruppen to see how they did it’, said McLeod, buoyed by the possibilities: ‘wouldn’t it be good if we could do an Australian Gropius?’. They went to impact investors and five of them put in funds. After ‘taking it out to tender to three good builders and chasing a fair and reasonable price’, each month the resident group were taken to see the builders and site, where they learned a lot about alternatives and had lots of discussions.

‘Extroverts tell you what they want – roof parties; introverts – a series of spaces’. The climate can be very hot in summer, and very cold in spring, so ‘how do you want to use your deck?’ (in the south facing building) and the plan for the winter garden. Melbourne has a temperate oceanic climate so residents needed windows that open.

They used recycled bricks at 75 cents a brick; created simple plans, with terraces facing south; open stairs, all Australian timber; used a lot of concrete; designed the building to be carbon free, with thermal mass over time to keep the building stable, no air conditioning required. The bathrooms have some Victorian bluestone on the floor, some recycled bricks and recycled Victorian ash floors. On the roof are productive gardens on the north side; in the middle, a common laundry, water tanks, a potting shed, a bee hive, landscaping on the staircase, and soundproofing.

‘I’m interested in how we house millennials’. The Commons is 65% female, Nightingale 1 is 76% female, McLeod says. ‘Some people are downsizing’. With 6 babies in the building, people wanted grass and sandpits. They also wanted a pocket park in front, to do something more, and tear up all the asphalt there, so Nightingale started lobbying the council as it was a dead end street.

When it was completed the architects moved in on the ground floor, where there is a not-for-profit cafe working with Launch Housing, a homeless charity that helps people transition into the workplace. The building opens at 7am with the cafe, and is open all day with bike parking at the back. ‘Our cities become more and more privatised so hard to find public toilets, so we have them in the café’.

The waiting list for Nightingale homes was 11 people; now it is 5200 for N2 in Fairfield, N3 and a future Nightingale Village. They have recently bought seven sites. The ‘hardest thing is finance’, McLeod admits. ‘We’re in the business of housing provision, as city makers with agency in our city. We can be architects who build housing’. At the beginning ‘we had no idea and couldn’t believe there wasn’t a better housing system. The question is, where is the real housing model?’.

There are now 15 community housing providers of affordable housing subsidised by the Australian government, as the state of Victoria doesn’t do it anymore. After 26 years of uninterrupted growth there are growing numbers of homeless people in Australia (105,000 in 2011). The housing market is volatile, and the risk averse approach generates ‘uninspiring vanilla units’. Nightingale is taking the volatility out of the process by having the buyers up front (5000 people on the list). But the biggest single risk is turning these into pre-sales and they can take a long time.

If the market turns down more than 10%, and the waiting list dries up, they will stop, he says, as it’s hard. Residents are carrying the risk up to the point the contract is signed, so that’s why they get more discount. For McLeod, the real risk lies in not sorting out our society.

Peter Clegg wanted to know how we might apply some of Nightingale’s principles in the UK even though he is ‘under no illusions about the problems of making this type of initiative work’. Would the more progressive smaller housing developers be able to extend their business model to do this?

Is it happening in Bristol, for example, where there are a number of renewable energy suppliers. On 11-12 May 2019, householders across the city opened up their homes for Bristol Green Doors, showcasing how they’ve made them more comfortable, cheaper to heat and kinder to the environment. Or how about in Blackpool where, as revealed by BBC Question Time, locals mostly hate fracking and want renewable energy industries to grow?

Today’s housing system in the UK is clearly dysfunctional. Few people believe the mantra that ‘the market will provide’ the homes they need. They understand the irony that affordable housing is very often not within the reach of many people. As the delivery of genuinely affordable and community-led housing has risen up the political agenda, this begs the question of what is genuinely affordable as well as who should housing be owned and managed by?

How can alternative models of housing be scaled up to match demand in the UK and what financing and procurement models are needed? Can public and private capital work with community organisations and philanthropy to achieve this?

St Ann’s Redevelopment Trust (StART), Haringay, London

The work of the St Ann’s Redevelopment Trust (StART), Haringay, provides an excellent answer to the question of what constitutes and legitimises a community taking control of housing projects. A group of local residents and workers who want to see the 17 hectare historic St Ann’s Hospital site there used permanently for the good of all the local community and supporting all its vulnerable members initiated a community-led process in June 2015 for 800 units of housing, community resources including shared green space integrated with health and social care facilities. They had witnessed loads of development coming on stream in run down Haringay, resulting in friends and family being forced out of the area.

Vanessa Ricketts from StART (who opened the UK Context: Community Control and Financing of Housing session with Tony Wood, StART, and Stephen Hill, National CLT Network and UK Cohousing Network on 14 April), called herself the lay person on the panel. St Ann’s Hospital was a very beautiful site, and has served the community for over 100 years. Local people all know the hospital and have attended it at one time or another. In 2018 the Barnet-Haringey Mental Health Trust decided to sell 2/3 of it to the GLA, and StART is working with the GLA to influence a community-led development on the site.

Vanessa Ricketts, StART, London.

To date they have done huge amounts of consultation, and developed a masterplan. They want to make the project so well known they can’t be ignored, and raise £50m through crowdfunding/donations as funds are very tight. At the community consultation a number of principles were agreed. Firstly, the Trust’s members control the land in perpetuity – it must not be lost to the private sector – by owning the freehold.

Homes on the land should be genuinely affordable, and based on the incomes of local people not the market. They want to control who lives on the site by ensuring a mix of people living on the site with a range of housing need responded to, as many local people live in cramped conditions, facilities in one room, and/or with young people living at home. Management should be by the community, Ricketts said. For the design of the units they have instructed architects on a brief written by a local architect, a member of StART. Green spaces and supported housing are a vital priority, so people feel interaction with the hospital site is maintained.

StART’s specific priorities include to maintain the integrity of the site, with the mental health patients part of it, to support their enablement into society, and the hospital members of the group are keen about StART’s interest in this, hence the plan for shared green border with an allotment. A private developer would put up a big wall!

The community members spoken to by StART said were happy to have high density so long as 100% affordable, so the masterplan is for 800 affordable homes. The site currently has one entrance and one exit. Where to put the cut through was an issue so they tried to design one to allay their fears about crime.

Ensuring that all these initiatives are by StART rather than working with a developer was far more likely to strengthen community cohesion. Ricketts explains that StART members are teachers, nurses, not developers, and that she’d like to see a new type of developer that doesn’t insist that they need to own the land. A Sept 2019 news update on the project is here.

Marlene Barrett (StART) explored the expectations that StART should become developers themselves, citing the inspiration of Colin Ward’s 1996 book, Talking to Architects, which explored attempts by non-architects to challenge dominant narratives of the built environment, as well as the Land Justice Network of groups and individuals which works to raise awareness of land and turn it into actions to change the status quo. She cited examples where regeneration has effectively wiped out housing, poor doors segregation, and the need to achieve genuinely affordable solutions so that no more than a third of household income paid for housing. Could the developer profit margin not could be cut out in the creation of homes, rather than remain as profit for shareholders?

Marlene Barrett, StART, London.

Stephen Hill, National CLT Network and UK Cohousing Network Community Land Trusts (CLTs)

Stephen Hill, a board member of the National CLT Network and UK Cohousing Network, elaborated on the identity of CLTs. A form of community-led housing, they are set up and run by community members along with other social assets important to them, such as community enterprise, food growing and workspace. ‘CLTs act as long-term stewards of housing, ensuring that it remains genuinely affordable, based on what people actually earn in their area, not just for now but for every future occupier’.

Stephen Hill, National CLT Network and UK Co-housing Network.

The National CLT Network, was established in 2010 and became the official charity supporting CLTs in 2014. It got startup help from a group of charitable funders, which has contributed to the growth of the movement, along with local enabling hubs, a professional training scheme and improved technical resources. Currently in England and Wales there are over 320 Community Land Trusts and the largest Community Land Trusts have over 1000 members each. CLTs have developed 870 permanently affordable homes to date and 250 are working to develop an additional 5800 homes in the next few years. This represents a six-fold growth to the sector over the last six years.

The reason Hill, author of the paper, Property, Justice and Reason – Reconnecting the Citizen and the State through Community Land Trusts and Land Reform (April 2015) is so committed to CLTs is because of the value in the idea of all land being used for the common good, and in the public interest, as a result of individual citizens and communities doing the right thing for their place.

Central government didn’t initially make people aware of the initial funding for this sector, but then it was replaced by the Community Buildings and Housing Fund, which Hill calls an extraordinary opportunity to create housing market innovation. Through the Fund the government is making £163 million available up to 2020/21. While CLTs also rely on charitable foundations to help support new local enabling hubs and their pilot programmes, and social impact finance (applicants must prove their project will have a positive social impact), the Fund is significant because the CLT movement has managed to get government to make a national policy to enable enable local solutions.

In the mid-70s during the IMF crisis under Labour, Hill said, the Treasury was part of the bailout and happy to say state no longer had a say in funding council housing infrastructure – the party was over. Invest in infrastructure first, with a sufficient supply of social housing in any market to withstand volatility. It hasn’t ended well, and the country never got back from the situation, viewing social housing as a cost.

The problem is that no Chancellors know about land economics, he pointed out in an amusing, and galling, history of the UK’s political efforts to take action on housing. Infrastructure could be more fully financed. No-one invests it in a way that facilitates development. Whereas with state assets, under Macmillan (Prime Minister from 1957-63), 300,000 homes were being built per year, but the government could have built anything.

The state was able to capture the uplift and that’s how the New Town Corporation started. However if the state doesn’t act as the assembler of land, no-one else is going to. There is a role for the state, to acquire at a sensible price. Social housing debt is not a debt being paid back, and not being accounted for as with other countries in Europe.

Hill wants to see the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals put at the heart of communities, particularly SD Goal 11: ‘Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. Cities are hubs for ideas, commerce, culture, science, productivity, social development and much more. At their best, cities have enabled people to advance socially and economically. However, many challenges exist to maintaining cities in a way that continues to create jobs and prosperity while not straining land and resources.

Common urban challenges addressed by SD Goal 11 include include congestion, lack of funds to provide basic services, a shortage of adequate housing and declining infrastructure. The challenges cities face can be overcome in ways that allow them to continue to thrive and grow, while improving resource use and reducing pollution and poverty. The future we want includes cities of opportunities for all, with access to basic services, energy, housing, transportation and more’.

A key Sustainable Development goal is that ‘by 2030, enhance inclusive and sustainable urbanization and capacity for participatory, integrated and sustainable human settlement planning and management in all countries’. SDGs come with a complex set of indicators, said Hill, but CLTs need to do the measurements behind them.

Hill’s advice to new CLT groups is to work to develop a compelling narrative for what they are doing and the confidence to project that. He is full of admiration for the Camley Street project, and all similar initiatives working with councils to maximise long term value in what he calls the new long cycle era, moving to a low carbon economy, and re-regulation, and cited Building Cycles: Growth and Instability (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), by Richard Barras, urban economist at the Bartlett School of Planning, UCL, as still of value today.

Dinah Roake, Brixton Green, London

Community control contributes hugely to social sustainability: that was one of the key messages in Dinah Roake, Chair of Brixton Green’s informative talk. Brixton Green is a south London-based CLT that has been in existence for over a decade, with over 1300 members, and is now aiming to get planning permission for ‘a homegrown solution’ for 300 homes on a 1.7ha site in Brixton, an ‘increasingly diverse’ place. ‘We are many communities’, she told us. They are 100% for rent, for all ages and abilities, built sustainably with an energy centre, and the development provides training and employment, a community hub, shops and a community theatre and cultural hub.

Brixton Green has been trying to introduce community-led housing to local authority councillors, and Roake flagged up the Cooperative Councils’ Innovation Network (CCIN) led by Croydon Council, which has a practical focus to encourage local authorities to foster cooperative, community-led solutions to the housing crisis. Local authorities can support CLTs through a mix of policy and resources: the right leadership, policy environment which includes making land available through planning policy. They can help resource CLTS through council asset transfer or sale, funding and by enabling support in the form of impact evaluations and other solutions.

Framing community control in its wider historical context, Roake started by locating us in the 1890s when Ebenezer Howard’s garden city vision was launched, taking shape most successfully in Letchworth. Why is it still relevant? Today the garden city concept – a holistically planned new settlement – remains of paramount importance to social sustainability because it redefines how we citizens value land. It is based on a local ‘cooperative of common wealth’ and land value capture for the benefit of the community, through formalised community ownership of land and the long-term stewardship of assets.

Garden city principles are vital to bear in mind, Roake said, at a time when garden towns and villages are being planned by government (an initiative was announced in the spring 2016 Budget making it easier for local authorities to work together to create garden towns with between 1,500 and 10,000 homes), through a modernisation of the New Towns Act (1946). The National Planning Policy Framework guidance (2012) originally included garden city definitions as aspirations, but apparently no longer does, leaving the term ‘garden city’ or ‘garden town’ as more of a brand. It falls to the Royal Town Planning Institute to promote them, Roake said. See planner Matthew Taylor’s article, Why we need garden villages (2016, RTPI website).

In more recent decades we have experienced the financialisation of the housing system, through structural changes leading housing to be treated as a commodity, and means of accumulating wealth. The introduction of the 1957 Rent Act and its decontrol of rents of more valuable houses and associated property profiteering helped to spur the process. But, as Roake pointed out, fast forward to today’s housing crisis and clearly ‘market forces cannot resolve housing supply, however much your political ideology wants them to’. In this context, CLTs provide security of tenure, and apply the principle of ‘common wealth’: holding land in trust for the community for 250 years. Access for all to adequate, safe and affordable housing and basic services is a UN Sustainable Development Goal (target 11.1).

Roake defined the building blocks of social sustainability as flexible, adaptable housing; neighbourhood networks; community assets; collective services; community champions; participatory decision making, and community-driven stewardship (as custodians). These principles are about the contribution community control makes to social sustainability, from space to grow, voice and influence, social and cultural life amenities and social infrastructure, connection to the local and regional economy and green building, environmental innovation, and incentives for pro-environmental behaviour.

The bonding element of social capital is fuelled by feeling in control and that residents are cared about, and Roake elaborated on what local people want, based on the participatory workshops staged by Brixton Green, in an area of London where 70% of residents rent. The wants include:

* affordable housing for rent or sale, allocated to local people.

* to provide, own or manage property for their own household.

* to be able to take control of, or to refashion, local housing services.

* to manage green spaces next to homes.

* to create resident-led housing options for older residents.

* to build new property for one or more household.

* to create eco-sensitive, low impact and green accommodation, and reduce utility use and costs.

* to live together with others sharing religious, political and other beliefs.

* to build intentional communities, places for group living and other utopian lifestyles.

* to design and build shared or intentional neighbourhoods.

* to revitalise existing neighbourhoods, and increase their quality and inclusivity.

* to generate funds to help deliver broader community services and innovation.

Adopting the solutions proposed by local people, Brixton Green accordingly operates to a principle of households paying the rent they can afford, with security. Social and market housing is not separated: all the homes are built to the same standard; everyone has the same rights and quality of service, and people on different incomes live side by side. The landlord is the Brixton Green Community Trust, which is accountable to the residents and to local people, and locks in the assets for community benefit, guaranteeing the objectives. 100% of the homes are for rent, and a long term approach to governance and finance is essential.

How would having a thousand community trusts in London influence the city? It would:

*help make sure London remained a mixed income city.

* capture the financial value created by public property to benefit the local community, through community businesses.

* help to properly maintain the buildings, so residents aren’t waiting for 30 years.

* improve access to public services.

* build social cohesion, and the expectation of active participation.

* create a backbone of neighbourhoods and help to improve their wider areas.

The scaling up of a community-led approach to new garden cities, towns and villages is possible, Roake felt, if we have:

*local experts who understand the socio-economic context, evolve solutions collaboratively and include future potential residents in discussions and engagement.

* local authority-facilitated co-production, enabling community building through community control of decision making and accountable governance of stewardship arrangements, including the use of the New Towns Act (1946) powers regarding access to land, and plan making designating land uses in an appropriate way.

* long-term ‘patient’ investment enabling lower rents, by retaining ownership, and using leasehold/CLT/cooperative.

* true affordability for all ages and abilities, with rents linked to income, not housing scarcity, and flexibility in rents applied to specific dwellings.

* land value captured for social value and benefits by using planning powers to define the needed physical, social and community infrastructure.

Totnes Community Development Society, Totnes, Devon

Frances Northrop, Principal Director for Communities and Localities, New Economics Foundation, is also involved in the Totnes Community Development Society, which takes a community wealth building approach to providing the homes society needs, giving everyone a share. Community shares and locals can become members, 1 member, 1 vote with a maximum £20K investment.

Frances Northrop, Principal Director for Communities and Localities, New Economics Foundaition.

The Society began life in a milk processing plant, led by professional people with skills. She explained the NEF campaign to save public land, because of all the land being sold off by councils, and due to the fact that only one in give of the new homes forecast to be built on public land and sold off is likely to be classified as ‘affordable’, and only 6% is likely to be social rental housing. All public land sales should be stopped, Councils should exercise their CPO powers, and a national land bank set up: ‘It’s the family silver, when it’s gone. We are tearing apart our social fabric”, she said.

Peter Gladwell, Public Sector Partnerships, Legal & General Investment Management

Pete Gladwell, Head of Public Sector Partnerships, Legal & General Investment Management, said L&G stewards a lot of society’s capital with customers paid annuities for as long as they live. He invests into assets, finding things that generate long term income streams matching the money he is paying out in annuities. L&G takes share of the blame for the broken system, he says, and is trying to create something of a new system. He quoted Barack Obama’s comment that what will replace the capitalist system is now in transition.

Pete Gladwell, Public Sector Partnerships, Legal & General Investment Management.

Gladwell talked about the intersection of long term social needs, and identifying and quantifying these. If investment goes to meet these, it is long-term, and can be used to pay pensions, and fund housing, care and health. The NHS needs a lot more long term patient investment. It is about getting out of our ivory tower and taking more risk, engaging more directly with community need. Local authorities sharing that vision are bringing in partners to help direct society’s long term needs.

Over the last 10-15 years there has been lots of offloading of surplus land to private developers: it’s seen as the norm. Stopping sale of public land is controversial. The NHS (which has lots of land, and is in dire straits) and Councils need to sell at the highest price, and say there is a need for fund public services, so there is a real dilemma if there are no land sales. But the LAs need income not capital receipts. He felt sure more CLT hubs will emerge so the question is how to aggregate so can access finance.

Roundtable comments

Hill pointed out the fact that land value is being used as a substitute for global taxation. This was an abdication of the government’s responsibility, said Karakusevic. In the rest of Europe housing is seen as city infrastructure, while here it is not seen as vital, if you consider London’s history of active support from bodies like the Guinness Trust established in 1890 to improve people’s lives.

10 years ago no-one cared about sustainability in real estate, but now social impact indicators represent a big consultancy sector. Social impact, and how we can create it, will be very important in the future.

After a 150 year break, do CLTs and entities such as the Sutton Trust promoting social mobilities mark a new spirit of philanthropy? Build to Rent doesn’t replace this, but is a step in the right direction. On the issue of CPOs, for example, made at the Aylesbury (CPO confirmed 2018) and Heygate estates (CPO, 2012-3) in Walworth, south London, lots of local authorities are using these powers, added Karakusevic. In the 1940s-60s they were very good at CPOs, but now it is a heavier legal process.

Since this event there has been a stepping up in the number of public discussions on UK housing as social infrastructure. Sustainable housing for Inclusive and Cohesive Cities, for example, a conference at the GLA on 10 May 2019, looked at what role housing plays in the sustainability and cohesion of a community, and what it means for local people to be in the driver’s seat. Leading figures in the community-led housing sector explored the agency and identity of CLTs, and their social impact and benefits to local economies, in the context of the emerging municipalism, with communities, local and national goverments working together.

Future Homes for Londoners opened up a compelling vista of possibilities for creating community driven homes and hubs, inspired by well chosen international examplars. For those wanting to take part in advancing UK’s growing cooperative and co-housing movement, now is the time to act.

Paul, which of these do you regard as the most important and achievable within the next couple of years, as a way of alleviating the housing crisis? What are the pros and cons of each one?

Bacton Estate Phase 1, Gospel Oak, Karakusevic Carson Architects. Client: Camden Council. @ Tim Crocker.

Paul Karakusevic (PK), Karakusevic Carson Architects: Lifting the borrowing cap can happen immediately and it is great news that this is finally in motion. We have been advocating it for many years. On the plus side it means much needed financial liquidity for councils, which means more projects of scale can be delivered. On the other hand, however, it means councils taking on more debt, which many will not rush to embrace, especially those with low performing housing revenue accounts. Also, given the precarious state of local government finance across services, the banking sector may view substantial increases as a potential credit risk in some areas of the UK. So higher borrowing levels will not solve the problem of affordable housing on its own.

Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPO) powers exist and are being used, but the process can be troublesome. When it works, CPO enables effective land assembly, which means getting more out of a development and ensuring obstacles to more capacity, integration and local links are removed. But it can be legally costly and time-consuming to pursue, so not without risks and potentially divisive. As democratically accountable bodies, councils have to tread carefully on this to avoid clumsy and slow moving processes that could take years to resolve and hold up delivery.

Paul Karakusevic, founder, Karakusevic Carson Architects, speaking at the Future Homes for London: Alternate Models conference, Royal College of Art, 2018.

I think councils embracing development corporation powers is potentially the most important for housing. But what we should really be doing is simply giving our local authorities the powers they need to act for the common good, especially at a large urban scale. Local government should act to ensure a mix and type of housing where it is needed rather than where it is easiest. This should be a fundamental principle of an urban democracy.

King’s Crescent, Hackney, Karakusevic Carson Architects. Client: Hackney Council. © Jim Stephenson, 2018.

However, any proposed legislative planning change will only be effective if local authorities have resources at their disposal to make things happen. Preparing land, drafting development parameters and parcelling land for a variety of developer types needs proper funding and well managed design and procurement processes from the start. Councils can also take on the risk of multi-tenure development including council, shared ownership, market rent and for sale.

LB: When you say that public housing should be treated as city infrastructure (your talk at the recent V&A event, Ten Futures for Social Housing, 20 Sept 2018), does this mean treating housing as an integral part of the tasks of properly structuring a whole neighbourhood, and prioritising discussions about the civic nature of how we dwell and mixed-use inhabitation (proximity of homes, work and community amenities),responding to changing lifestyles and needs and perceptions of public/private thresholds, and how they are reflected in those structural processes?

Exploded axonometric of block, King’s Crescent, Hackney, Karakusevic Carson Architects. Client: Hackney Council.

King’s Crescent, Hackney, Karakusevic Carson Architects. Client: Hackney Council. © Jim Stephenson, 2018.

PK: Imagine housing in the way that we see Crossrail 2 in London progressing. Here we have public money being lined up for a project of real ambition and scale that will be delivered because it is in the national interest to do so and the incredible economic benefits of doing so. Imagine instead that the transport secretary announced plans for a new urban railway with faster trains with more capacity, without a commitment to building track or buying any trains. That’s what the government has done for the past 15 years with housing. Announcing targets without delivering the real finance or developing a coherent plan for where it will be or what it will look like.

We have planning frameworks that promote almost everything: greenfield, brownfield, garden cities, eco-towns, the greenbelt, not the greenbelt, modular, traditional, beautiful, modern. It’s baffling to me. We need a robust plan for housing. One that is ambitious and intentional. It’s simply not enough to raise targets, miss them and raise them again to demonstrate how tough you are. This is pure politics, not planning.

Dujardin Mews, Karakusevic Carson Architects. Client: Enfield Council © Mark Hadden.

A city cannot function without infrastructure. We all understand this. We need sewers, drains, transport and schools, but what about where the people that work on these live? That is why housing needs to be treated as an integral part of urban infrastructure. Successful cities need thriving populations. To thrive, people need affordable and secure housing.

Dujardin Mews, Karakusevic Carson Architects. Client: Enfield Council. © Emanuelis Stasaitis.

LB: Do you agree with the Centre for Cities (Anthony Breach, Analyst, Centre for Cities blog post, 6 Oct 2018) that lifting the borrowing cap won’t address the biggest issues cities face, and that the key problem is a shortage of land in the planning system that can be developed? If so, what are the answers?

PK: I agree raising the borrowing cap will not be the solution to everything, but it will be a huge help. If we are to match the numbers and standards of developed countries like France – similar in size and wealth – cities like London need strong and well resourced local government. We have billions of public money committed to private sector projects like Help to Buy. If we scrapped this and instead spread it across devolved government in the UK our cities would reap a development bonanza. They could deliver transport projects themselves, they could purchase land, they could prepare brownfield and prepare masterplans and release it onto the market with progressive criteria.

There is no shortage of land in London or the UK, only a surplus of people repeating a market version of the city. Developers have told us they are not interested in tough sites and that they are expensive or unviable. It is the role of government to turn that around and to step in. Make it viable, create a market and if they are still not interested, do it yourself or find people who want to via co-housing groups and smaller developers.

Dujardin Mews by Karakusevic Carson Architects, Maccreanor Lavington. Client: Enfield Council. © Jim Stephenson.

LB: ‘The future success of social housing requires multiple agencies and a diversity of suppliers acting in tandem’, you write in your book Social Housing: Definitions and Design Exemplars (Paul Karakusevic and Abigail Batchelor, RIBA Publishing, 2017). What is the potential of local authorities ‘doing it by themselves, for themselves’, as you have described it in your public talks, as well as Community Land Trust (CLT) models such as Camley Street in King’s Cross, London, to achieve this higher level of creative shared responsibility that you call for?

PK: The potential is huge, but it needs to be unlocked and resourced. Countries across Europe have a strong tradition of direct action in the market to shape development and get the outcomes they want in order to create the cities they need. Vienna, for example, enables and pre-develops land and then parcels it up for market delivery, but instead of handing sites to those able to put in the highest financial offer, they invite bids and design submissions in response to four pillars of good development encompassing social purpose, levels of affordable housing, design quality and economic viability. This process supports a range of developer types which include community and resident-led approaches. Like many alternative models, CLTs need enabling. Under the current government there are billions in market enabling funds such as Help to Buy. If we could redirect that money into alternatives and de-risk the process local authorities would be able to explore it further.

Nightingale 1 housing, inspired by the principles of the Baugruppen movement in Germany, Melbourne, Breathe Architecture. Client: Nightingale, 2014.

LB: What were the most striking takeaway points for you about the progress of the emerging CLT movement in the country from the debates and presentations at the RCA’s Future Homes for London: Alternate Models (organised by the RCA City Design with St Ann’s Redevelopment Trust (StART) Haringey, The Architecture Foundation and Baylight Foundation) event in April 2018? 

PK: Seeing the Swiss and German co-housing groups Mehr Als Wohnen, ifau and Zanderroth Architekten producing beautiful, generous and robust low cost housing and Jeremy Macleod’s incredible Nightingale model, a collaborative movement for sustainable, affordable housing in the city of Melbourne, Australia.

LB: Your book Social Housing: Definitions & Design is an inspirational call to action to create positive change in the delivery of public house through innovation and ambition shared across sectors. In broadening the range of routes to housing delivery, what are the main possible pitfalls and past mistakes the local authorities and Community Land Trusts need to be aware of in order to avoid?

Aneurin (‘Nye’) Bevan (1897-1960), Welsh Labour Party politician, Minister of Health, UK, 1945-51.

PK: If you take a look at the long history of public housing building in the UK, one of the reoccurring themes is the decline of quality and standards in pursuit of numbers and savings. Numbers and efficiencies which have usually been promised by over-excited and opportunistic politicians. We saw that in the interwar years with cottage and tenement estates, we saw it in the 1960s with building systems and we saw it with cuts to public housing in the 1980s. In all cases the result was substandard housing that the next generation had to pick up the bill for. In 1951, the then Labour minister for housing Nye Bevan famously said,‘We shall be judged for a year or two by the number of houses we build, we shall be judged in 10 years’ time by the type and quality of houses we build.’

Bacton Estate Phase 1, Gospel Oak, Karakusevic Carson Architects. Client: Camden Council. @ Tim Crocker.

This is as applicable now as it was then. So the mistake was to over promise and to capitulate to profit centred contractors. Councils need to be ambitious and fight for quality, politicians need to be honest with people. Architects and planners need to design timeless and high quality housing and stick to their principles rather than operating in the interest of low grade developers and builders.

LB: As part of the reform and rebalancing of housing provision you discuss in your essay in the book, what desirable processes are needed to ensure all estate regeneration projects work well for all residents, including the making of a residents’ charter, and in what ways should they be applied?

PK: The process of redeveloping an estate is complex and no matter the scale of intervention it is going to impact on people’s lives. It is essential therefore that councils are up front and honest about the scale of works and why it’s happening. Most people are simply unaware of the dynamics of housing politics, planning and finance. I think it’s crucial that redevelopment programmes talk to residents as early as possible and develop strategies that accommodate local need and aspiration. A Residents Charter is important, it can ensure communication and project protocols are adhered to, but it is only as effective if the council is willing to follow the charter in the long term. As architects we ensure that our communication is straightforward. Plain English and honesty goes along way and so do legible drawings and clear models.

Bacton Estate Phase 1, Karakusevic Carson Architects, @ Tim Crocker.

Bacton Estate Phase 1, Karakusevic Carson Architects, @ Tim Crocker.

Site plan, masterplan, Bacton Estate Phase 1, Gospel Oak, Karakusevic Carson Architects. Client: Camden Council.

LB: What breakthroughs has KCA successfully achieved through early discussions and straightforward communication in improving local quality of life, enabling residents to get the best out of public space, in its estate regeneration projects, for example, the Bacton Estate in Camden?

Unit plan and section perspective, Bacton Estate Phase 1, Gospel Oak, Karakusevic Carson Architects. Client: Camden Council.

Location plan, Bacton Estate Phase 1, Gospel Oak, Karakusevic Carson Architects. Client: Camden Council.

Axonometric, townhouse, Bacton Estate Phase 1, Gospel Oak, Karakusevic Carson Architects. Client: Camden Council.

Site plan, Bacton Estate Phase 1, Gospel Oak, Karakusevic Carson Architects. Client: Camden Council.

At Bacton we were working with residents who had firm ideas about what new homes should look and feel like. For years they had grown up with a functionalist and worn out utilitarian estate and so many were keen on embracing traditional domestic features and layout. However, they also understood that the typologies they had in mind would struggle to work on the site and achieve the same densities that would make the scheme viable. Therefore the challenge was to develop designs which could balance the expectations of home, domestic scale and character, while also getting the numbers on site. We worked closely with residents on this brief and through large scale models and sets of big and clear drawings could demonstrate that the numbers on the site could be achieved, while maintaining a strong and characterful domestic scale.

Dujardin Mews, Karakusevic Carson Architects. Client: Enfield Council. © Jim Stephenson.

LB: And how did you effectively test new dwelling types with the residents of the Alma Estate in Ponders End, Enfield, who moved into replacement homes at Dujardin Mews, KCA and Macreanor Lavington’s scheme of 38 residential units for Enfield Council?

Dujardin Mews, Karakusevic Carson Architects. Client: Enfield Council. © Tim Crocker.

PK: The site requirements at Dujardin Mews led us towards a robust street-based solution and it was one that the residents embraced immediately. The narrow site meant we needed to create hard working typologies incorporating a variety of home types and sizes, while the need for car parking necessitated the use of the street as both function and social amenity. So it was a happy marriage of things. We used big 1:25 models so that residents could see inside unit types and get to grips with the proposition. They were excited by the prospect of living next to their friends on a new street and the new types of spaces we could create around it.

Ground Floor Plan 1. 750, Dujardin Mews, Karakusevic Carson Architects. Client: Enfield Council.

Bed Townhouse plans and axo, Courtyard Apartment plans and axo, Dujardin Mews, Karakusevic Carson Architects. Client: Enfield Council.

Courtyard Apartment plans and axo, Dujardin Mews, Karakusevic Carson Architects. Client: Enfield Council.

Sectional axonometric, Dujardin Mews, Karakusevic Carson Architects. Client: Enfield Council.

LB: What are the clear benefits of remasterplanning the Camley Street neighbourhood in King’s Cross as a Sustainability Zone led by the Neighbourhood Forum (NF) and in what way could it become an exemplar for a future Labour government? What could the NF’s powers help to avoid, or to mitigate? (a dominance of private sector student housing, for example)?

Exploded masterplan, Camley Street neighbourhood, King’s Cross, Karakusevic Carson Architects. © KCA.

PK: It is basically good city making. The benefit of remasterplanning the Camley street neighbourhood in the way that we are proposing is that the area will benefit from new activity, but that the new mix will not mean the end of the industrial spirit and diversity of what’s there now. It’s not just jobs, it’s urban life, linkages and social infrastructure. We are proposing a way in which these can work together.

Mix is why people love cities and building this into any development will future-proof neighbourhoods and towns. In the 2000s, too much of what was urban revolved around spectacle. The image of the city via a developer’s ‘place-making’ brochure, all neat potted plants and well behaved cafes with everyone subscribing to identical living, consuming and working patterns. That urban model is broken and its effects are nullifying. City governments need to read and embrace the city in its layers and nuance and seize the opportunities of such. Therein lies resilience.

Sketch view, masterplan, Camley Street neighbourhood, King’s Cross, Karakusevic Carson Architects. © KCA.

Section strategy, masterplan, Camley Street neighbourhood, King’s Cross, Karakusevic Carson Architects. © KCA.

King’s Crescent, Hackney, Karakusevic Carson Architects. Client: Hackney Council. © Tim Crocker.

Location plan, King’s Crescent, Hackney, Karakusevic Carson Architects. Client: Hackney Council.

Drawing 1.1000 at A4 ground floor plan, King’s Crescent, Hackney, Karakusevic Carson Architects. Client: Hackney Council.

LB: 11 years ago you won the then Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s commission for affordable pilot council housing as part of central government giving local authorities  the right to build and invest in their own stock. How did the brief for this pilot project seek to realise credible improvements? Do you recommend new pilot housing projects today as ways to test out alternative methods, and if so, can you give a few examples of what is currently missing?

King’s Crescent, Hackney, Karakusevic Carson Architects. Client: Hackney Council. © Mark Hadden.

PK: Absolutely, Gordon Brown was visionary in this respect, reversing 30 years of local government underinvestment in its own housing stock. Design and quality was all important in the briefing and the council officers at Barking & Dagenham Council were incredibly inspired in terms of the environment targets and living standards for new homes. The work that the GLA has done on design standards and officer training through initiatives like Public Practice should pay dividends in the coming years to ensure the local authorities have the highest calibre of staff.

King’s Crescent, Hackney, Karakusevic Carson Architects. Client: Hackney Council. © Peter Landers.

Smaller developers and co-housing groups and not-for-profit groups should be encouraged through government and GLA support to innovate on alternative routes, but ensure that design quality plays a major component in any evaluation. By doing this the wider industry will adapt and improve the housing it offers and the process it takes to produce it.

It is fair to say I am not an advocate of the big house builders in the UK and worryingly some of their crude approaches to housing are infiltrating Housing Associations (HA), which for me feels morally questionable and disappointing. HAs should be alongside local authorities in reclaiming their historic roles and leading the charge for innovation, quality and delivery.

King’s Crescent, Hackney, Karakusevic Carson Architects. Client: Hackney Council.

The laying of rooftiles on a house in Grimsbu, Norway, 1933. © Museo i Nord-Østerdal CC PDM.

The laying of rooftiles through tekkie-dugnad, Norway. © Hvamstad, Per/Musea i Nord-Østerdalen CC BY-NC-SA.

As power has moved away from politics to other centres of power, especially economic ones, important decisions for the future are made outside democratic control. With no real power, governments are left to ‘hive off, outsource, or contract out the growing number of functions traditionally entrusted to the governance of national governments to non-political agencies’ (Bauman, 2012).

Instead of the state providing for its citizens, now multinational corporations, financial and economic elites answer to the demands of shareholders and consumers. Architecture is built utilising natural and human resources and contributes to the paradigm of growth and financial speculation. The ability to decide how to build, who gets to build, where to build and for what purpose – these are all questions relating to power.

According to community organizer Eric Liu, power justifies itself by ‘creating an ideological narrative of why things got to be this way’ (Liu, 2017). Power also accumulates, and when left to itself, ‘a market economy will eventually put a massive share of total wealth into a very small number of hands’. Power is also self-legitimising as ‘the powerful will tell the tales about why they deserve their status,’ whether it is true or not, as when their stories are believed by the people they gain agency. In a world threatened by increasing human and natural disasters, accelerated by excessive exploitation and extraction of resources, it becomes increasingly important to find alternative understanding and narratives to existing decision-making structures that do not belong to the paradigm of economic growth.

Mutual work building a seterhus (log house), Norway, 1921. © Rachel Haarseth, Museo i Nord-Østerdalen, CC BY-NC-SA.

Collaborative traditions, largely in rural parts of the world, have offered a different perspective on how to get things done and how to decide what needs to be done. In Norway, the tradition of dugnad has been used for restoration, maintenance or for the management of organisations such as foreninger and lag. Historically, it has contributed to shape Norway’s modern-day labour unions and indirectly the welfare state. It was also used in the reconstruction efforts after the Second World War (Lorentzen and Dugstad, 2011).

Preparatory groundworks for building a cooperative in Høvik, Norway, 1915. © Oslo Museum, CC BY-SA.

Dugnad is a part of a tradition that predates the market economy. It is arguably as old as human culture. In organisational theory, dugnad is referred to as mutual aid, a voluntary reciprocal exchange of resources and services. It is differentiated from charity as it does not create a division of giver and receiver as people invest in a cause that mutually benefit them. Mutual aid exists in many forms around the world and has been a means to support each other through different seasons, natural disasters and conflicts.

Planning and programming of a study centre in Tagpuro, Philippines, 2016, a process inspired by dugnad/bayanihan. © Alexander Eriksson Furunes.

Collaborative design process inspired by bayanihan, 2010. © Alexander Eriksson Furunes.

Construction of a roof of a study centre in Tacloban, Philippines, 2010. © Alexander Eriksson Furunes.

Another example of mutual support is the Filipino bayanihan which is mainly practiced whenever local communities need to make a collective effort to build schools, host weddings and funerals among other things. The term mutual support was first introduced by activist and philosopher Peter Kropotkin to stress the value of cooperation over that of the Social Darwinists and their description of individual struggle and competition (Kropotkin, 2012).

Modelmaking for new textile cooperative, Lung Tam, Vietnam, 2018. © Alexander Eriksson Furunes.

The building process in Vietnam is very similar to the Norwegian tekkjedugnad, 2018. © Alexander Eriksson Furunes.

Mutual support has throughout history been a mechanism for survival amongst animals as well as human societies and contributed to the evolution of social institutions such as trade unions, cooperatives and other civil society movements. This tradition is rooted in solidarity and reciprocity and has been central in giving shape to the anarchist movement in the late 19th century. On the other hand, mutual support has also been used by neoliberals as an argument that communities can provide for themselves, and that government support is not needed. The 2011 Localism Act of former UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s Big Society is one such example where government delegated its own responsibility to the community.

Mutual work to design and build a school in Hariharpur, India, 2013. © Alexander Eriksson Furunes.

Although mutual support has been used as a means for both leftist and conservative agendas, it reclaims decision-making power for the local communities where resources belong. In mutual aid societies, buildings were built through access to environmental and social capital. Depending on the building materials available, you could mobilise members of the community to come together and help with construction. The operation and maintenance of buildings relied on the ability to sustain environmental and social capital. Food and celebration were part of the process of building because they strengthened social ties, and the materials used would be replenished years or sometimes generations in advance, to ensure access when renovations or changes are needed. Knowledge and craft were passed on through generations in the forms of stories and collective work. The inter-generationality of dugnad, the knowledge exchange between different competencies of participants both create conditions for a deliberative process necessary to battle alienation, apathy and the delegation of responsibility.

Building an orphanage in Tagpuro, Philippines, 2016. © Alexander Eriksson Furunes.

Mutual support gives value to solidarity and reciprocity over monetary currency, reflecting social relations, knowledge and natural resources present in the specific locality. This model of organisation can give shape to new power structures that can trigger dialogues with an equal standing to powerholders such as the government, international organisations, aid organisations or outside interest groups acting on behalf of the people. This is because mutual support can give voice to those who normally do not have the power to influence decision-making.

According to anarcho-syndicalist Rudolf Rocker, this power shift caused by mutual support is exactly what happened when the working class started to organise themselves into labour unions during the first Industrial Revolution (Rocker, 2004). In today’s world, it is crucial to create a new power structure where local communities can hold national and global governing bodies accountable in order to address inequalities and social injustices weakening our delicate social fabrics.

Bankoff, G. (2007). ‘Dangers to going it alone: social capital and the origins of community resilience in the Philippines.’ Continuity and Change 22 (2): 327-355.

Bauman, Z. (2012). ‘Times of interregnum.’ Ethics & Global Politics5(1): 49-56.

Kropotkin, P. (2012). Mutual aid: A factor of evolution, Courier Corporation.

Liu, E. (2017). You’re More Powerful Than You Think: A Citizen’s Guide to Making Change Happen, PublicAffairs.

Lorentzen, H. and L. Dugstad (2011). Den norske dugnaden: historie, kultur og fellesskap, Høyskoleforlaget, Norwegian Academic Press.

Rocker, R. (2004). Anarcho-syndicalism: Theory and practice, AK Press.

Francisco Pardo (FP): This was a programme developed not more than five years ago. Major cities in Mexico went through 30 years of exponential growth, especially towards their peripheries, that combined with the effects of the government leaving developers free to do as they wanted. We ended up with millions of housing units located far from city centres and from services.

This is a big problem, and the only logical solution is to demolish these units and relocate people in central city areas. The second best thing is to improve the public spaces to change social dynamics and get services to them. The worst solution is do nothing.

LB: What is most important for us to understand about your perceptions of Mexico City?

Havre 69, Colonia Juarez, Mexico City, Francisco Pardo, 2013. A 19th century house converted into 12 new homes, offices, a bakery, a restaurant and public space.

FP: I have always seen Mexico City as a layered city. Not in metaphor, but in reality and I place this order one on top of the other: Mexico Tenochtitlan, Aztec Empire, the colonial city, built on top of the Aztec ruins, and a series of new cities built on top of fallen structures from earthquakes. If you think of this, mixing a city floating on top of a lake with the seismic condition, you find a fascinating surreal urban condition.

Havre 77 ReUrbano, 2015, Colonia Juarez, a conversion of a 19th century house into into 6 commercial spaces (offices, restaurants, two new floors with offices on top, and a new office building at the back of the house, all of them connected, AT103 Julio Amezcua + Francisco Pardo.

Havre 77 ReUrbano, 2015, Colonia Juarez, a conversion of a 19th century house into into 6 commercial spaces (offices, restaurants, two new floors with offices on top, and a new office building at the back of the house, all of them connected, AT103 Julio Amezcua + Francisco Pardo.

LB: You’ve been working in Colonia Juarez, a once affluent suburban area of the city with a dramatic history including revolution, and earthquakes scarring the neighbourhood with empty lots. It is now being renewed after being almost abandoned for decades. Which bodies are leading this renewal – public and/or private – and what is their commitment to greater social equity?

FP: They are mainly private sector bodies working in this area. It’s interesting that the private sector is the first to change the perception and the interest on the public sector. Colonia Juarez is geographically located in a fantastic place in between two major energies: on the south side is the Roma neighbourhood, the place that gives the title to Alfonso Cuarón’s new film, and where galleries, new restaurants, artists and most of the hipster life is happening.

On the north side is Reforma Avenue, a major financial corridor with huge bank headquarters and institutional buildings; to the west, Zona Rosa, which is the epicentre of gay culture and Korean immigrants; to the East – the historic downtown. And all these tribes merge like a little melting pot in Colonia Juarez.

Roma (2018), directed by Alfonso Cuarón. Set in Mexico City, the film’s production designer Eugenio Caballero constructed a 1970s style six block stretch of a busy Mexico City street, Avenida Insurgentes, in Colonia Roma. © TNS.

LB: Is this the most significant neighbourhood in Mexico City currently undergoing renewal, or are there others which are notable for positive progress as well?

FP: To explain its position, Colonia Juarez is the epicentre of change. You can also see some renewal going on in the surrounding areas I just mentioned and in more specific places such as Santa Maria la Rivera and San Rafael just north of Reforma Avenue. My take is that Doctores – east of Roma – will go under some important change in the next decade.

LB:  How do the public aspects of the buildings contribute to the regeneration of the neighbourhood’s fractured fabric?

FP: It is the most important part, because buildings have to be alive 24 hours so the city can start to live again. If you only place housing, or only offices in a series of blocks in a city, that area is only functional part of the day, with housing areas becoming sleeping cities, and office areas open during business hours. If you mix these uses – the street, then the block and then the neighbourhood become alive, helping to reduce crime in the area and reducing car use for transportation. It helps in every way you see it.

Havre 69, Colonia Juarez, Mexico City, Francisco Pardo, 2013. A 19th century house converted into 12 new homes, offices, a bakery, a restaurant and public space.

LB:You describe the new elements as ‘missing parts’ and ‘prosthetics’. Why is it so important to create a relationship with what has been lost over 100s of years of history?

Havre 69, Colonia Juarez, Mexico City, Francisco Pardo, 2013. A 19th century house converted into 12 new homes, offices, a bakery, a restaurant and public space.

Havre 69, Colonia Juarez, Mexico City, Francisco Pardo, 2013. A 19th century house converted into 12 new homes, offices, a bakery, a restaurant and public space.

FP: I’m not so enthusiastic about creating a ‘tabula rasa’. I believe that everything is the result of another thing, and in the urban condition it is super important to think like this, as cities evolve and are in constant change. There is not a finish line – actually the finish line always moves. I think that is fine. Then also I think that every addition has to talk about its time, and the layers like you see in a section of a tree. I joke but it is serious when I say that architects should not design new buildings any more. As humans we need to stop adding more square metres of buildings. We could use the existing built and densify it, especially in the terms of housing and work space.

LB: How would you describe the housing sector in Mexico City now? Is there a crisis of lack of affordable housing that is improving, or getting worse? Is it more easily solved by converting old buildings, or by new build, or by a mix of the two?

FP: I think that the best approach is the mix of both, but the big problem we are facing in Mexico City – and I guess every major city has the same issue – that we cannot grow horizontal anymore. This was a tendency in the last part of the 20th century, but now it has to stop. We need to go up and inside, above the existing and inside the unused.

Multifamiliar Presidente Aleman, housing, Colonia del Valle, Mexico, Mario Pani, Salvador Ortega and Bernardo Quintano, CUPA, 1947. © Ulises Moreno.

LB: How does your thinking about housing design in Mexico City contrast to the schemes built in earlier eras, for example, designed by architects like Mario Pani and others?

Havre 69, Colonia Juarez, Mexico City, Francisco Pardo, 2013. A 19th century house converted into 12 new homes, offices, a bakery, a restaurant and public space.

FP: I think that all that modernist approach was fine for that time – they were experimenting on building BIG. We have the data now and in retrospective we know it was not the best move but they did not. Mexico City went from having a population of 8 million to 20 million in a couple of decades so the need for new building was important. Now that the population growth is stable we need to be more efficient with regards to the infrastructure. When cars appeared more than 100 years ago, it changed the perception of a city, but now we now we need to go back a little to make a leap forward, and it’s by getting closer and tighter.

Milán 44, Francisco Pardo, 2017. The conversion of an old four storey warehouse originally home to an auto-parts shop into an urban market reactivates a neighbourhood and connects two entirely contrasting areas.

LB: Another of your projects, Milán 44, is a conversion of a car warehouse in the same district into a two-storey market with restaurants and other commercial spaces such as a barber’s shop and a yoga studio. What were the most important things to achieve in the process of adaptation for public uses?

Milán 44, Francisco Pardo, 2017.

FP: Even our first sketches of this project had housing units on top, a full mixed use. We couldn’t make it happen for reasons of code, but the idea was that. The most important thing is to understand what kind of spaces go on ground floor and above floors. As an example, ground level is for commercial areas you pass through, a coffee bar, let’s say, while upper floors are for destination areas, such as a yoga studio, a doctor’s surgery, a restaurant. Higher floors are for office space or housing. The higher you go the more private it gets.

Milán 44, Francisco Pardo, 2017.

Milán 44, Francisco Pardo, 2017.

LB: Were you also creating a neighbourhood landmark building to change the metabolism and character of the district through the identity and functions of this single structure?

Milán 44, Francisco Pardo, 2017.

Milán 44, Francisco Pardo, 2017.

FP: Yes, it is a system of little pieces. All these buildings in the area we have done are for the same developer, so they work as a network generating tension between them.

Colinas del Sol park, Los Héroes Park, Calle Fray Servando, Fraccionamiento Los Héroes, Toluca de Lerdo, Mexico, 2018. Francisco Pardo. © Jaime Navarro.

Colinas del Sol park, Los Héroes Park, Calle Fray Servando, Fraccionamiento Los Héroes, Toluca de Lerdo, Mexico, 2018. Francisco Pardo. © Jaime Navarro.

Parque Colinas del Sol, Francisco Pardo, 2017, Unidad Habitacional Los Héroes II, Toluca de Lerdo, Mexico. © Jaime Navarro.

LB: How have you changed community perceptions of public space at Parque Colinas del Sol and Parque Héroes, projects which are part of a wider programme of rethinking public space to improve the poor conditions of social housing of the last 30 years and heal the scars of abandoned properties and social segregation affecting the marginal urban areas of the country?

FP: I was there last week, after 6 months of finishing the project. I talked to kids, mothers and fathers. They are super happy and feel like it’s theirs. That is the most important part of public space: you have to get the community to adopt the space, because if not, it becomes adopted by – as it was before – gangs and abandonment.

LB: Did you create the brief with the clients or with them and also with the local people through discussions and workshops?

FP: We did, we explained the main idea and the federal budget for the regeneration of public spaces ofhousing units. We discussed these with the community and got feedback, not on the formal aspects but about the aspiration part. We think we were almost in alignment with them. This is the reason that they have an ownership perception of their space.

LB: What do you feel makes these park projects valuable as systems potentially applicable in other contexts, as well as especially valuable for the city?

Aerial of Colinas del Sol park, Los Héroes Park, Calle Fray Servando, Fraccionamiento Los Héroes, Toluca de Lerdo, Mexico, 2018. Francisco Pardo. © Jaime Navarro.

FP: Although they were designed according to specific natural and social conditions, both projects feature common elements ensuring a harmony between the built and natural environment that can be repeated or integrated in a system potentially applicable to any other context.

One is the floor cement block, that can be easily adapted to any layout both natural and artificial. The creative combination of the blocks and in-situ poured concrete filling generate new patterns like a sort of urban tapestry.

Colinas del Sol park, Los Héroes Park, Calle Fray Servando, Fraccionamiento Los Héroes, Toluca de Lerdo, Mexico, 2018. Francisco Pardo. © Jaime Navarro.

The second one is the replicable playground system, suitable for any surface. The different concrete walls and metal bars can be arranged in multiple configurations, designing different spaces suitable for various uses or circumstances.

Colinas del Sol park, Los Héroes Park, Calle Fray Servando, Fraccionamiento Los Héroes, Toluca de Lerdo, Mexico, 2018. Francisco Pardo. © Jaime Navarro.

We can introduce these into any public area, and, depending on the budget and the area, we could implement these systems which will need almost no maintenance in the future.

More than just escapes to help citizens reconnect with nature, the parks are tools for engagement and environmentalism. Through the transformation of these marginal areas into green recreational spaces embedded in the city fabric, the parks are fast becoming a favourite urban spot for residents.

It is important to change not only the physical condition but also the perception of the space: as a designer I believe that supporting local communities to get better public spaces for their families helps the greater community.

The loss of active buildings and spaces even in the urban centre of Riga, the largest city in the Baltic, can’t have encouraged some; but for others it meant much more space for creative expression and community life, as I talk about my interview with Forbes magazine this summer, Cultural Renewal Drives Economic Regeneration in Riga, Latvia, and Will Mawhood, editor of  Deep Baltic, the magazine for travel and culture in the Baltics, discusses in his perceptive 2016 essay, ‘The Capital of Empty Spaces: Dealing with the Shrinking of the Great Baltic City’.

While some planners may still pine to turn the clock back and fulfill the promise of the earlier boom years, ‘as a city, we are shrinking, so that means we must do smart thinking’ on all fronts, says Guntars Ruskuls, the Acting Head of Riga City Council’s Strategic Management Board when I meet him in his office in January 2019. Some of those working the hardest to change things for the better, never left, have returned, or keep a foot in two countries, in the modern way.

In the period of Latvia’s occupation by the Soviet Union after the Second World War the population was nearly 1 million. There was no metro back then, and a lack of planning. Then the Soviet Union collapsed, population figures nosedived to 640,000, yet Riga had an infrastructure designed for 1 million people which was not easy to maintain, especially after Latvia’s independence in 1991. The answer to the dilemma is incentives to stay including improving the environment for young people so they can return, or stay and enjoy an urban lifestyle that is more liveable.

Riga, Latvia. © Stijn Hüwels.

Riga Restaurant Festival 2017. © Karlis Dambrans.

There is strength in Riga’s ability to compete, but the economic city is monocentric and the wider regional cohesion is not so strong. 30,000 people live in the city centre, and the economic crisis brought in ‘a lot of empty windows’, a time preceded by a decentralised economic plan taking energy away from the city centre.

In 2013, as Riga was getting ready to host European Capital of Culture in 2014, the Occupy Me! sticker campaign was carried out by NGOs to promote the creative reuse of abandoned buildings, as part of the 2013 Survival Kit arts festival. This led to city-wide mapping of more than 350 empty buildings and a wider coalition being formed and a partnership between the municipality and an NGO, Free Riga, dedicated to temporary use, reviving disused buildings with a mix of open spaces for creative and social activities.

Tallinas Street Quarter Riga, Latvia © Free Riga.

Free Riga’s projects include 16 buildings reopened on Tallinas Street as a creative quarter with rooms for a wide range of activities and artists’ residences, and at 57 Kalēju Street in Old Riga, an apartment building from 1930, to host a bar, a museum and international creative residencies. Cofinanced by the occupants of the spaces,  and following the successful opening of several properties besides Tallinas – Zunda Garden, D27 and Lastadija – Free Riga report that ‘the number of potential residents and stakeholders is growing, and it is expanding the team to launch new projects for the efficient use of empty buildings’.

Cooking up Resilient City Economies, URBACT Festival, Riga, 2015 © URBACT.jpg

The new local strategic planning ideas emerging today are about Riga as a community-friendly, compact city, with green corridors, more green areas in any developments to improve the air quality, a housing policy to try to keep people local. And mobility based on cycling and pedestrian quality of life in the Riga’s wide streets, many of which were built in the 19^thcentury. Ruskuls says ‘it’s good we (the municipality) are not dealing with a polycentric model anymore’, but are instead revitalising recreational territories, and managing urban sprawl.

For the last 12 years the Council has been working with two or three NGOs, but now works with more than 20 of them on locally produced ideas and activism. The Board responsible for Riga’s sustainability strategy includes architects, geographers and a sociologist to strengthen the city’s 58 local neighbourhoods to make them more balanced. Now is a good time to support their social capital, Ruskuls and his colleague Justine Pantelejeva, a young strategic planner, feel, and they see the younger generation becoming increasingly active in trying to break the old planning rules by applying their skills in alternative, bottom up urbanism.

Riga smart city sustainable energy plan, 2014-20.

This social paradigm shift has an ecological imperative attached to it, and Riga is evolving as one of the world’s greener cities in terms of renewables, with biomass and district energy systems. Latvia shares scope for renewable energy resource building with the Baltics and their maritime territories more widely, and this new wave of industrial activities will be increasingly reflected in the make up of entrepreneurial activities in Riga’s technology clusters in the future. But the fabric of the city matters profoundly and must be navigated with skill: ‘we still feel this post-communist heritage’, says Pantejeva.

The historic city has developed by annexing different territories, artificially expanded‘, and all the ‘developers wanted to develop shopping malls’. Factories were also left in the middle of the city as it expanded. ‘Community used to be a strange word’, but now ‘we have a broader vision – diversity is the greatest value of Riga’, she says. ‘Social integration is happening in all those neighbourhoods (the 58 were defined by the munipality in 2007).

Open green landscaped spaces at VEF/Vefresh innovation district, Riga, Latvia. Spatial concept by Eter.

Much more than a mere cluster, the VEF innovation district and its surrounding territories close to the centre of Riga is a significant piece of the city taking shape in a former Soviet industrial and residential area. It has been billed as Riga’s Silicon Valley, and you can see the point, due to its build up of tech businesses, but, building on a rare cultural heritage and the deployment of diverse ideas in its strategic planning makes VEF – and its overarching Vefresh open innovation movement – much more of a unique indigenous model and phenomenon.

Before the Second World War, VEF (Valsts Elektrotehnikā Fabrika, or State Electrical Factory), the legendary manufacturing giant of the Minox miniature (‘spy’) camera invented by the German-Latvian Walter Zapp, a firm founded a century ago when Latvia began its first phase of independence, had their factory there but people haven’t lived in the area for a century, Viesturs Celmins, Chief Executive of Vefresh, told me. Celmins is one of the figures Pantelejeva had in mind when pointing out the proactive role of younger placemakers in the capital. Celmins is a social anthropologist who is managing to fit in the completion of his PhD at Cambridge University alongside his city-making role in Riga.

Jaunā Teika, Vefresh, Riga.

Jaunā Teika, Vefresh, Riga.

The developer Hanner is creator of the pilot mixed use district Jauna Teika on the northern part of the site. At Jauna Teika the playfully designed multi-level interior spaces of the first operational co-working building are full of people at work, and about 85% of them live locally – either as members of 600 families, or on their own – along with other employees in the district, just a walk away in new apartment blocks.

Open green landscaped spaces at VEF/Vefresh innovation district, Riga, Latvia. Spatial concept by Eter.

Open green landscaped spaces at VEF/Vefresh innovation district, Riga, Latvia. Spatial concept by Eter.

The liveable urbanism here, relying on good landscape architecture plans for the public areas and a wide range of community amenities, makes the liveable urbanism approach much better than at California’s Silicon Valley, where workers are shuttled in on National Express buses. Smart transport points and pedestrian crossings, bikes, park and picnic sites, playgrounds and outdoor public space are in the works for the site around VEF.

Vefresh – a name combining the words VEF and ‘refresh’ – is a joint venture between Latvian Mobile Telecom (LMT), ICT firm Accenture – the third largest employer in Latvia – developers New Hanza Capital, VEF Cultural Palace, a local cultural centre run by Riga’s municipality, and Jauna Teika (Hanner). It is an open innovation movement which will enables a pilot demonstrating how to improve the area, for mobility, public transport, education, drone technology and so on.

VEF/Vefresh innovation district, Riga, Latvia. Spatial concept by Eter.

The district is sliced by Riga’s main transport artery – Brivibas street, intersected by 15 different public transport routes, has an active cyclist flow and in a 5 minute walking distance is the Čiekurkalns train station, for which an intermodal transport hub plan is in the offing. Celmins also explains that the VEF district also has one of Latvia’s first operational 5G base stations ready for work, and land that can be used for testing mobility innovations requiring a less intensive traffic flow.

Viesturs Celmins, Chief Executive of Vefresh, at the launch of the open innovation movement, Riga, June 2019.

‘It’s a microcosm in which things can be checked and turned into products’, he announced at the launch of Vefresh’s open innovation movement in Riga on 6 June 2019, an official event for the signing of the Memorandum of Cooperation between the businesses involved, Riga municipalities’ and state representatives. Juris Bind, president of LMT, regarded the area as one with the right ‘aura’, where ‘people are prepared to go’ and the group invites other companies to participate in the movement. This concept lends credibility to the Vefresh brand, for which 85m euros in taxes and 43% of Latvia’s IT exports are at stake.

‘We are looking at inhabitants moving to the area to either rent or buy. Just five years ago (2014) there were very few and far between – as well as companies moving or opening their offices in the area’, explains Celmins, which he says means they are measuring impact to date by ‘head count, and the amount of companies present.

VEF is currently already a hotspot of ICT firms, in addition to Accenture, including MikroTik, one of the largest service providers of wireless technologies in the Baltic States, Tieto and LMT (which provides 5G connection to its neighbour Mikrotik as they are actively involved in testing it for the locality’s wireless infrastructure), employing a total of around 4,000 ICT professionals (summer 2019). Latvia is holding up well against its traditional IT competitor, Estonia, with in 2017 exports of ICT services from Latvia worth 779 million compared with Estonia’s 751 million export market. This gives government officials confidence that the district will keep growing, according to Guntis Rubins, Head of the Office of the Latvian Investment and Development Agency in the UK.

Totaldobže arts centre in the VEF district, hosting electro-acoustic music and sound installation.

At the moment the VEF district as a whole is predominantly a place for work. The earlier inspiring wave of cultural activities which took place at arts centres there, like the renowned Totaldobze, set up 2008 by artist Kaspars Lielgalvis in an old factory building in 2008, ended after rents were raised, and the revived industrial buildings reconstructed after VEF decided to make the area a creative industries hub. Totaldobze was one of those which stayed active; it moved to alternative premises to collaborate with a network of other cultural bodies and then to Liepāja, Latvia’s third largest city on the coast 200km away, but is hoping to return to Riga in the near future.

The imperative for the VEF in its latest plans to deliver an affordable high quality of life is strong, if it is going to create a genuine community legacy for the city. The current commercial make up of VEF is not solely limited corporations – Tieto, Siemens, DNB Nord Bank, but includes SMEs, including start-ups, too. Celmins says that ‘by this time next year (summer 2020) there should be 5500 ICT professionals working in the area’ (a year-on increase of 1,500 people), and ‘by 2021 there might be another 1,000 added with New Hanza Capital finishing up their renovation of the historic VEF quarter’, where Accenture and Mikrotik are based. ‘We plan to assess innovative capacities too’, adds Celmins, ‘by tracking how many startups are started here and how much progress is made among them’.

The launch of the Vefresh open innovation movement, Riga, 2019.

VEF is ‘encircled by railroad tracks and criss-crossed by one of the busiest streets in the city’, he explains, so ‘the main goal of mine for Vefresh (overall) is accessibility and (a) humanised environment for pedestrians, cyclists and people with disabilities. As long as we are able to ensure safe pedestrian crossing, introduce ‘green corridors’ and improve public transport infrastructure (which he reckons will take five years at least) – we are going to stay relevant’. How else will the scheme stay relevant as a poeple-friendly place? The second major area of intervention is to involve teachers and students at local secondary schools in learning about technology firsthand from the companies operating in the area.

This vision for local learning is especially geared towards IT and design subjects because ‘we have some of the lowest rates of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) applicants in the EU. Whether shadowing employees once a year (on site) or a designated ‘maker space’ for students or modern hackathon events for IT teachers from local schools, we will continue the work that Accenture has started with IT education at a local level’. Accenture, he explains, has created free online/video courses for primary and secondary school students in Latvia, and are embarking on running courses for teachers in autumn 2019.

In their gameplan Celmins and his colleagues have been careful to foreground cultural regeneration of the whole area through the making of ‘third spaces’, the term American sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined in 1991 (see his book Celebrating the Third Space, 2000, to refer to ‘regular, voluntary and informal’ spaces where people will go and spend their time between home (‘first’ space) and work (‘second’ space) to interact and exchange ideas, build their relationships and have a good time. Breaking the shuttle between home and work, they help to strengthen the community’s social vitality, and are environments Oldenburg hopes would genuinely promote social equity, and represent ‘the grassroots of democracy’.

Vefresh’s cultural policy ‘addresses the fact that there are hardly any services available for inhabitants and employees in the area on this side of the railway ring road’. So to invigorate the emerging neighbourhood during the summer seasons partners have hosted street food/culinary festivals where various cafes and restaurants have been invited to present their signature dishes and drinks to the wider public at more affordable prices than usual. Many of these events have included musicians, DJs and performers as well as provided events for children, depending on their theme.

VEF/Vefresh innovation district, Riga, Latvia. Spatial concept by Eter.

On 4 May 2018 – as part of the country-wide 100-year celebration of Latvian independence – Vefresh was able to get the municipality to agree to close down street intersections to all traffic in order to host a large, day long festival for the local community of inhabitants and employees. Workshops, talks and lectures hosted by companies along with sports activities and a large stage with performers in the evening underlined the exciting cultural transformation of the area. These events need to be not only short-lived ‘meanwhile uses’, but enable local people to test out new business ideas, as well as maintain their value as a social catalyst.

How is Celmins making sure the creative decision-making for Vefresh is genuinely participatory? ‘We are trying to involve our community and employees via polls and hands-on workshops, where people are invited to suggest interventions they would like to see in the area. ‘Whether we are able to pull these off at the state or municipal level remains to be seen’, he admits. ‘I believe this bottom-up approach is almost universal now, yet it does not guarantee results overnight’, he cautions, and tells me that ‘tenants at JT are not required or asked to pay towards infrastructure, improvements or cultural programming in the area’.

He’s also realistic about the speed at which contemporary homes can be built to cater for more Latvians returning home to Riga and an expanding base of international workers. Across the wider city, most inhabitants live in housing blocks, some from Soviet times when mass housing was built in Riga through the industrialisation programme. ‘I don’t believe that there will be any drastic changes to this any time soon, as it is simply impossible to create alternative housing options at a quick pace’.

Moreover, ‘there is a very strong and ongoing trend for people to move away from the city to the suburbs and commute back to the city’ once their pay rises. So ‘at Vefresh – and perhaps, the city at large – we are working at several levels at once. How do we make urban living appealing by nurturing a vision of having a flat or house in the city, rather than in the suburbs?’. Secondly, ‘how do we create the best possible quality of life (for people from) various walks of life, not just limited to ICT professionals, who tend to have a decent income anyway’.

Jauna Teika has just opened a second co-working building called Teikums 2 to accommodate the increase in demand. Celmins says more co-working spaces are opening up around Riga. Is there enough of a market for them? ‘How sustainable this model of the gig-economy is – which fuels co-working – remains to be seen. But I believe we are not going back to conventional 9-5 and cubicles either’, he adds.

What role is the public sector playing in this significant project? ‘Since most of the infrastructure, including transport, is owned and run by the city municipality and the Latvian state, it is inevitable that we have to work with public partners’, says Celmins. Currently the team is testing out a ‘micro mobility’ point in the VEF quarter, which will include bike, car and scooter rentals, charging stations for e-mobility as well as bike stands, and, possibly, a navigation map for real time assessment that should help people to choose the best option for public transport among many.

‘If this prototype – tested out by our own employees, inhabitants and guests alike – turns out successfully, these station points will be replicated and adapted for other parts of the city as well’, he says. ‘We plan to readjust the transport stops, too, and align them with transport schedules as well as ‘last mile’ solutions and integrate the railroad into the city fabric, but this is more like a 5 year plan rather than current reality’.

So if strategic planning in Riga is shifting towards embracing some more bottom-up tendencies, what newer mechanisms enable city residents to play an active role? Celmins was one of the speakers in May 2019 at the latest MadCity ‘international happening of urban planning’ was staged, a two-day long event founded three years ago by urban designer Neils Balgalis. He calls it a ‘sparkling and favourful event for urban developers, bankers, bikers, artists and IT guys’. The biggest number of participants – 350 – came to Mad City this year, from 15 different countries came this year: urban planning experts and practitioners, city officials, politicians, business people, tech specialists, NGO representatives and local inhabitants.

The Mad City hackathon route, Riga Knowledge Mile, left bank of Riga, Latvia, May 2019. © Mad City.

Planning-related people represented more than 75% of the participants at this year’s Mad City. ‘Participants discussed the concept of micromobility for Riga, not as some distant dream but as a realistic aim and a thing to work on’, explains Balgalis. The subject was the Pardaugava area on the left bank of Riga. Home to Latvia’s leading universities, the National Library and the Railway History Museum and several office complexes, and on the other side of the city from Vefresh, it is gradually gaining recognition in Latvia and around the world as the ‘Riga Knowledge Mile’ (RKM).

‘The Knowledge Mile is a place where ideas are made, where the entrepreneur meets science, the student meets their employer, science meets reality and ideas are made into products’, he explains. ‘Experience show that ease of everyday movement and encounter is a major contributor to innovation’. Over 700 million euros will be invested over the next seven years here, building on 800 million euros through public and private sector investments over the last five years. Consequently n order to make full use of Riga’s potential for innovation, he maintains, which results from ‘this concentration of universities and businesses, an efficient mobility infrastructure combining rail, public transport, road transport, pedestrians, cyclists, electric scooters, boats and so on, are needed’.

Mad City 2019, Riga, Latvia.

The public transport backbone will be a railway station built on the Rail Baltic line allowing people to reach Riga International Airport easy, and provide rail connections to the rest of Latvia is its public transport backbone. Anticipating 40,000 students and more than 20,000 people working at the Knowledge Mile, Balgalis is keen to explore how this boost in public transport accessibility can best coexist with an expansion in micromobility, shared mobility services and infrastructure, mobility as-a-service as well as urban connections by water via the River Daugava.

Mad City is a catalyst for faster development of ideas and places. It brought together ten international teams including representatives of all the Knowledge Mile stakeholder bodies, as well as local people from two different neighbourhoods and urban planning experts. Both students and teachers from five different universities were among those working on the ambition to help to shape solutions for the Knowledge Mile as an emerging cultural place, a ‘collaboration creator, new idea generator and opportunity revealer’, Balgalis explains. Mad City’s creative programming and format – ‘basically, it’s a game anyone can register for, irrespective of their job or walk of life – rose to the occasion over two long days, ending with a big group hug before the block party on the final evening.

How can innovation districts like Vefresh and the left bank in Riga, and others internationally, locate, create and distribute their knowledge, Balgalis wanted to know? What are the ‘relationships between infrastructures, networks and the city’s systems and what are their impacts on social structures?’. The biggest challenge for the Knowledge Mile ‘will be cooperation among the universities and attracting companies to Pardaugava – there are few businesses in the area right now’, one that is close to the city centre but not easily accessible, feels Celmins, who shared ideas on day one on the challenges and potentials of the area to absorb the ‘Knowledge Mile’ as well as the future Rail Baltic infrastructure being planned for Riga.

On top of the challenge of drawing businesses to set up at the Knowledge Mile, another pressing issue is to create a decent rental housing and public service infrastructure for local and foreign students which would include bike lanes, bike stands, pedestrian walkways and diversified, active public spaces with cafes, bars and cultural institutions’. At the moment, he says, ‘the area is rather busy during the day, but becomes rather deserted during the night, similar to (the) realities at Vefresh’.

Mad City is clearly of high value as a genuinely public meeting about visions for future quality of life of districts like these, as well as a lot of fun. The hackathon – a challenging, sprint-like design event compressed into 24 hours in order to creatively solve a problem on day two, is preceded by lectures, discussions and speed dating so people can get to know each other and form groups the day before. Local players with an interest in the Daugava left bank, including the three universities, developers and other companies, came together to form the hackathon teams.

Participants in the hackathon at Mad City, May 2019, trundle shopping trolleys along a testing terrain to their designated hackathon workspace in the Riga Knowledge Mile, Mad City, 2019, Riga, Latvia.

The players were given three specific tasks: within six hours, come up with ‘realistic solutions’ – programming, design, IT and funding ideas – for better connections for pedestrians, cyclists and micro-mobility solutions in the Knowledge Mile; the programming of regular ferry connections across the Daugava River in the city; and developing the concept, ’20 minutes from any office, apartment or auditorium to the airport. They focused on formulating specific actions (including assessing the existing interconnectivity of the RKM spaces), projects and recommendations to improve the urban environment the Knowledge Mile as it comes into being over the next decade.

Mad City hackathon participants convey their thoughts from boats on the Daugava River in Riga, Latvia, May 2019.

Taking part in Mad City is an immersive experience. Firstly, participants they were taken to the event venue by boat over the Daugava River, given the opportunity to try out electric scooters on arrival, and trundle shopping trolleys along a testing terrain to their designated hackathon workspace. This intense hacking culminated in all the newborn ideas and the process being published on the respective team’s Instagram account, eliciting questions across social media.

Mad City 2019, Riga, Latvia.

Speakers were hoisted up and down to the stage in construction lifts to give their ‘sales pitch’.at the three-way idea play-off between shortlisted teams on the floating venue, NOASS, watched by all participants present and online viewers, all of whom get to vote on the winners. An international jury, stakeholders, participants and online audience (taking part in the vote) got to decide on the distribution of the Mad City prize money pot. A swift awards ceremony followed before the event segued into convivial block party mode.

Mad City 2019, Riga, Latvia.

How does Balgalis ensure that the proposals for strengthening the RKM has conjured up at Mad City 2019 don’t lie on shelves after the party is over? Straight away they summarise the vision and proposals for immediate, ‘quick win’ smaller scale improvements over the first two years. Estimated at a cost of 2.5 milion euros, these will ‘provide a good basis for mutual cooperation between (the) universities, businesses, Riga municipality and public authorities. He underlines that the proposals ‘reflect the common interest of all partners in the development of the area’.

To improve public transport, a new NW-SE route needs to be created, to connect the Knowledge Mile, and public transport lanes on Dzirciema Street, as well as on the Vansu and Akmens Bridge, and guarantee a high priority for public transport in the future. This goes hand-in-hand with improving access to the existing Tornakalns railway station through fast and efficient connections and more active use of passenger trains.

Constructing pedestrian bridges across the Klivleina Ditch and the Zunda Canal 9at the end of Durbes Street) enables comfortable walking and cycling routes between universities, businesses and the Tornakalns rail station. Creating a fully-fledged micromobility connection brings about easy movement between all stakeholders in the NW-SE area. A public dock for small watercraft on the right bank of the Daugava River at the 11^thNovembra Embankment, National Library and Vansu Bridge helps activate the area for water transport.

Mad City is an immersive experience, Riga, Latvia, May 2019.

‘Mad City is an urban planning competition that welcomes everyone’s participation because it is simultaneously a motivation-driven game, a collaboration creator and a learning process’, says Balgalis. Mad City 2019’s attendance figures also make it now the ‘biggest urban planning party in the Baltics, he adds. Just three years it too short a life for Mad City to have a profound impact, he feels, but already ‘we see some things happening’.

He sees in Riga a ‘shift in planning and city development mentality, away from a few megaprojects to many small activities’ – ‘soft’, community events and activities. Greater emphasis is also being placed on intensifying Riga’s urban core as opposed to creating new development territories. And the planning community has come to accept sustainable and smart mobility concepts, and the need to prioritise public transport and shared micromobility over private cars.

Mad City’s verve in busting out of tired old planning as a dull and exclusive discipline tied up in silo thinking, to embrace the wider public, has ignited the admiration of the design professions. A month after the 2019 event Mad City won a ‘Silver Pineapple’ award for Processes at the Latvian Architecture Award of 2019. ‘Ideas can be more influential than buildings, so it is important to have a platform to spread ideas. Today’s cities have modern problems, and this event proves that speaking, discussing and acting are still the most effective way to destroy the bubble in which society lives’, the jury citation explained.

Celmins agrees that Mad City is ‘a great addition to the planning landscape of Riga’. For him the event ‘fills a discursive gap in urban planning and allows the local community to meet and hear some good speakers from abroad’. He also appreciates the hackathon with its ‘activists, planners and inhabitants working side by side’, pointing out that this year’s event also gave the local community the benefit of satellite events engaging a major discussion about the whereabouts of Riga’s new concert hall.

‘Mad’ in the event’s title refers to the way city life is often imagined, but Celmins prefers the intensely interactive and performative ‘mad’ side of the event. He acknowledges that it can appear to some ‘as if urban planners are merely venting once a year, and as such some of the matters discussed can be seen as sensationalist or fringe, which, most of the time, they aren’t at all. Mad City has both micro- and macro-level urban discussions on the bill, so you could be hearing about or discussing scooters as ‘last mile’ solutions, and then switch focus to a talk on the future of the city.

This kind of swift step change in focus often comes with the territory at urbanism events globally. Packed with ideas, soundbites and golden networking opportunities they mostly are. But the gratifying difference with Mad City is that you step away from conference halls into the city itself with ample opportunity to burn up a lot more energy keeping up with Balgalis’s interactive, multi-location programming.

Celmins feels that, irrespective of which part of Riga as a city you focus on today, in preparing for its future as a liveable, desirable city, ‘we need to focus on creating rich public infrastructures, including parks, squares, pedestrian street level activation and decent affordable housing opportunities, so that people would be excited to reconsider the city for living, not just working, consuming or transit’.

Mad City 2018, tackled a basic issue: Money and the City.

As the largest city in the Baltic States by population at more than 1 million residents it is hard to evaluate Riga’s future without considering the impact of Rail Baltica, the massive greenfield rail infrastructure project starting construction in 2020/21, that will create a total length of 870km of new tracks across the Baltics. It will enable Riga city centre to be upgraded, and make a Riga airport city possible, as well as having a transformative effect on the States’ secondary cities.

Rail Baltica also aims to improve the integration of the States into the EU, connecting a ‘missing link’ and delivering a new industrial and economic ecosystem and artery for trade. Kaspars Briskens at Rail Baltica sees it as a symbolic return of the States to Europe. Without Rail Baltica’s unification of north and south, there is a heavy reliance on east-west freight flow across the States, and very limited passenger movement between them, hence its national and regional priority. It will be funded equally by the three, with up to 85% by the EU, founded on the basis of shared infrastructure as a way to do away with nationalisms.

Rail Baltica will be fully electrified to avoid emissions, and the line will not interfere with the Natura 2000 protected and other environmentally sensitive protected locations. Hopes are pinned on its role as a powerful catalyst for sustainable economic growth, enabling a new corridor and transnational regional integration, evidenced by the success of the Oresund fixed link infrastructure between Sweden and Denmark.

How the Rail Baltica infrastructure will be incorporated into the existing city fabric – crossings, trains and stops and its implications Celmins flagged up as part of his Mad City talk. It’s no surprise to hear that Balgalis has chosen for the May 2020 Mad City event to continue the thread of this theme, Riga railway station and the city – ‘the change brought to the central station’s surrounding area by the Rail Baltica project and opportunities to create humane urban environments of the 21^stcentury’.

With Mad City Balgalis is tapping into a growing community appetite and ‘madness’ for change and bubble-bursting. But keeping it real, and mad in the best sense of interactive and passionate Celmins also appreciates. Mad in the making, and mad for the prospect that Riga’s future city interventions are actually made by everyone.

These burning questions are on many people’s minds because they need action and far more attention. They drive the theme of the Oslo Architecture Triennale (OAT) 2019 – entitled ‘Enough: the Architecture of Degrowth’ – which took place in Oslo from 26 September-24 November. Through their Triennale programme of exhibitions, sound installations, theatre, performance, roundtables and workshops, the OAT 2019 curatorial team, British architect and writer Maria Smith; Canadian architect and educator Matthew Dalziel; British critic Phineas Harper; and Norwegian urban researcher and artist Cecilie Sachs Olsen, is challenging the supremacy of economic growth as the basis of contemporary societies and investigating alternatives.

The OAT 2019 curatorial team (l-r): Phineas Harper, Matthew Dalziel, Cecilie Sachs Olsen and Maria Smith. © OAT.

The event aims to uphold OAT’s commitment to engaging and inspiring debate about the future roles of architecture and urbanism between professionals, business communities, decision makers and the public across borders, social layers, sectors and professions, locally, across the Nordic regionally and internationally. In 2018 OAT staged a series of events testing ideas and formats, 2018, ahead of the 2019 Triennale. Together with the art collective zURBS OAT invited participants to go on a performative audio walk at Arendalsuka, the biggest political gathering in the country held annually in mid-August in Arendal, a town on Norway’s southeastern coast since 2012, billed by Visit Norway as ‘where politics meets the man in the street’. People chose to play on their headphones one of three different urban future channels based on degrowth, unlimited economic growth or authoritarian growth as they sashayed through the streets.

Overgrowth – one of the OAT 2019 events in the lead up to the festival opening in early 2019. Phineas Harper and Nikolaus Hirsch along with special guests Ingerid Helsing Almaas, Helena Mattsson, Edgar Pieterse and Marianne Skjulhaug in a series of presentations and conversations around the challenge of growth-based cities and bold alternatives for the architecture of a new economy. © OAT/Istvan Viraq.

OAT’s major exhibition is The Library, staged at the National Museum, a project celebrating the value of sharing, de-commodification, and democratisation of goods and ideas at the heart of a degrowth community. A ‘library of futures’ of over 65 exhibits, it includes drawings, models, materials, artefacts and devices by local and international practitioners presented in four sections, the subjective, the objective, the systemic and the collective.

Dugnad Days community workshop at Sletteløkka, Oslo, May 2019, choosing priority activities for the ‘grendehus’, with suggestions added to giant keys.

One of the exhibits, Dugnad Days, shows how a series of local community workshops which began in April can, through participatory placemaking, advance a collective, bespoke process of building resilience and the social sustainability of Sletteløkka, a suburb of Oslo. Dugnad Days is coopting the longstanding Norwegian dugnad tradition of co-production and co-creation with citizens – practices fostering human and environmental wellbeing. With support from Bydel Bjerke, the local borough council, one of the main funding partners of Dugnad Days and through a process of dugnad-inspired workshops with members of the local community to create a versatile ‘grendehus’ – a community centre on a ten year lease – from a disused kindergarten building – the aim is to facilitate a process of direct democracy at Sletteløkka impacting community wellbeing and self-determination. Each of the six dugnads spread over six months culminates with food, drink and music masterminded by participants, as a sociable and relaxing complement to the painstaking collective work of reprogramming, designing and renovating the building, incrementally forging their own asset and legacy.

Alexander Eriksson Furunes, a Norwegian architect and participatory design specialist; Lucy Bullivant, a British place strategist, curator and author – and founder and creative director of Urbanista.org; Mattias Josefsson, architect and teacher at AHO (Oslo School of Architecture) & BAS (Bergen Architecture School) and Maria Årthun, a recent architecture graduate of AHO and co-founder of Makers’ Hub, are the team responsible for Dugnad Days, with architect Sudarshan Khadka, artist and graphic designer Gabriela Forjaz and Maria Cau Levy, architect and graphic designer (members of the Brazilian art/architecture collective Goma Oficina, São Paulo), sound artist Caroline Jinde and performance artist Tuoman Laitinen.

Dugnad Days community workshop at Sletteløkka, Oslo, May 2019, choosing priority activities for the ‘grendehus’, with suggestions added to giant keys.

The project started in April with Furunes, Josefsson and Årthun running a number of idedugnad (ideas) workshops in Sletteløkka. At these, community members have been brainstorming and summarising the activities they want to prioritise for their ‘grendehus’ (community centre). Their discussion revolved around how these activities could be managed, and what each one needed in the way of elements, resources and plans. Then responsibility for each one was assigned to a key person or people, from within the group. A reporter from the local newspaper in Sletteløkka joined the second workshop and gave the project a good write up.

With two workshops under their belt, the local residents taking part used the opportunity to set up their own Velforenging (residents’ association) of Sletteløkka. The community members first had the idea of creating a community ‘grendehus’ in their neighbourhood 8 years ago, and identified a building formerly used as a kindergarten and a grocery store, dating from the late 1950s, the same era as the rest of the area. Bydel Bjerke has always been very enthusiastic about community placemaking here, and is renting the south facing spaces, 250m2 in size, for ten years, and everyone has the ambition to build something of value for the community there in perpetuity. So the Dugnad Days project serves as a ‘warm up’ for that longer term, more permanent solution.

Empowered by their formal status and with clarity on everything they want to achieve to make the community centre happen, they then move on to byggedugnad (construction) workshops to bring the resulting overall spatial and artefact designs into being. Bullivant, who co-curated the Dugnad Days project, is creating a storytelling thread about the project on Urbanista.org. On show to the public in OAT’s Library exhibition from 26 September for the Dugnad Days project are visuals documenting what everyone did at the workshops and, to help visitors implement their own dugnad for a local project of theirs, as part of an illustrated booklet about dugnad-inspired participatory processes. A short documentary film has been made by Aurora Brekke about Sletteløkka, the lives of community members and the role of the new community centre, also screened in the community section of The Library exhibition.

Dugnad Days fits in well with degrowth, the theme of Enough. Degrowth is not a term you hear or read about in the media, but it is a valuable concept, signifying a necessary shift in perspective and priorities for living away from the world’s GDP growth paradigm. As we know, GDP growth is driven by logics of progress and development, the privatisation and the austerity policies of the institutions of the free market and the knock-on damage to social bonds.

Dugnad Days community workshop at Sletteløkka, Oslo, May 2019, choosing priority activities for the ‘grendehus’, with suggestions added to giant keys.

The second Dugnad Days community workshop was featured in Sletteløkka’s local newspaper, May 2019. The local residents took this opportunity to establish the first Velforening (residents’ association) of Sletteløkka.

Sociologist Marco Deriu defines degrowth as the refoundation of ‘a democratic freedom and of new civil rights’ which ‘should be affirmed against a more and more pervasive economic tyranny’. To meet ‘ecological, social and anthropological challenges’ this course of action – while acknowledging the limits of resources – entails ‘the invention of new deliberative arenas’, he wrote in his article ‘Democracies with a future: degrowth and the democratic tradition’ (Elsevier, 2012).

How can the idea of degrowth be genuinely instrumental in opening up alternative architectural practices? The OAT 2019 curatorial team sees many different ways to overcome what they call ‘deeply ingrained perceptions of tomorrow’s possibilities’. They hope through this year’s OAT event to foster a  ‘architecture of alternatives’ degrowth movement, based on ‘new measures of human and environmental wellbeing’ and a genuinely equitable sharing of resources.

Dugnad Days is one of a host of fascinating sounding projects that make up OAT 2019 – which has already tested the water with events anticipating its curatorial programme over the last year. It epitomizes how through focussing their own work and values in their local community, drawing on a rich tradition reinvented for today’s and tomorrow’s challenges, citizens can foster a degrowth approach to sustainable futures. Characterised by cultural richness and social justice, it is one they can and will continue to build together on their own terms. The stakes are far too high for that not to happen.