We Can Make: Civic Innovation in Housing Melissa Mean Craig White Eleanor Lasota
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How plots could be developed We Can Make: civic innovation in housing Melissa Mean Craig White Eleanor Lasota The housing system in the UK is in crisis. We urgently need new ways to create the affordable homes people and communities need. We Can Make has created a participative "test space" in Knowle West, Bristol to explore new citizen-led ways to meet housing need. This report shares the journey and results of that experiment and how We Can Make will deliver new affordable homes at the point of need. 3 "Home. It’s like flesh and stones mixed together." 4 "Home. It’s like flesh and stones mixed together." 5 6 8 9 10 11 I Introduction 12 Home is the first infrastructure of everyday life. Home is shelter, safety, and stability. Yet almost 100 years on from David Lloyd George’s promise of "homes fit for heroes" and the 1919 Addison Act which ushered in Britain’s first mass wave of council homes, people’s ability to access a secure and affordable home is more challenging for more people than ever before. The pernicious ability of housing need to spill over into every part of a person’s life- affecting relationships, work, education, and physical and mental health- makes even starker the inadequacy of our collective response. Our conventional strategies to access housing are reductively competitive. They either require people to divert ever more of their wages and savings to getting on a property ladder where there bottom rungs are missing, or compel people to prove how weak and incapable they are in order to win eligibility for austerity rationed social housing. Instead of relying on speculative developers or last resort state provision, we desperately need new ways in which people and communities can better meet their own housing needs- a fundamental need for disruptive innovation. We Can Make has sought to create a test space to explore new – citizen-led- approaches to creating more affordable homes at point of need. Much more than designing homes as products, We Can Make has focused on re-imagining the wider enabling legal, financial, and policy framework so that citizens, using their own assets and know-how, can become the developer themselves. From re-thinking what a development site is, to flat-pack homes, to community bonds, everything has been up for grabs. At its heart, We Can Make is an experiment in civic innovation. Working with the residents and community of Knowle West in South Bristol as a ‘living lab’, partners Knowle West Media Centre and White Design have brought together local people, artists, architects, policy-makers, academics and industry professionals to collaborate between and far beyond traditional professional silos. We Can Make has not only dreamt and re-imagined a different kind of housing future, but also begun to prototype that future in practical and scalable ways. This has included building a "Made in Knowle West" home that is beautiful, sustainable and affordable. Knowle West- its needs, assets and knowhow- are the foundation of We Can Make. However, the aim is to create a citizen-led system and set of tools for delivering affordable housing at point of need which can be replicated in other neighbourhoods and cities. This report shares the story so far and is an invitation for further collaboration as the project develops. 13 II A broken system 14 The UK housing crisis 400,000 The UK housing crisis To meet our changing and growing needs, the UK has to build at least 250,000 new homes every year. Our current housing systems alone are dramatically failing to do this. 300,000 . To meet our changing needs, the UK needs to build at least Required 250,000 250,000 homes a year. Our current housing supply-system Local councils is dominated by large speculative developers and they are 200,000 dramatically failing to build enough homes. Of the homes HAs that are built almost half are built by just ten large 100,000 companies, and a quarter by just three firms. The result is Private developers a housing-supply chain that is structured by the primacy 1 of developer profits and a web of harmful impacts. 0 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2010 2015 Annual housing completions by sector, UK Data DCLG Homes are the most Social care UNAFFORDABLE and looking they have ever been Enabling people after our to shape their Creating growing The average home is Bristol now neighbourhood sustainable elderly costs 8.2 times average annual ways of population earning, compared to 3.6 times 2 living earning in 1997. Growing local jobs and manufacturing A paralysed planning system where too often the only script offered to local communities is that of the perpetual NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) NIMBY as they attempt to resist low quality placeless developments. III a new hope the citizen sector 16 There is a growing interest in the citizen sector to help diversify housing supply. Despite enabling legislation at national level, however, the take-up so far has been slow. Self-build and custom build account for just 7% of new homes delivered each year in the UK, compared to 80% in Austria and 60% in France.3 A significant degree of the inertia is caused by the deliberately veiled nature of the development process. Access to land, technical knowhow, and financial resources continue to be controlled by professional interests and have disproportionate costs and barriers to entry. This systemised opaqueness and uncertainty means many individuals and communities don’t know what tools they need, can’t afford them anyway, and ultimately don’t have the faith that they can achieve the outcome they want: a safe, secure and affordable home. 17 THE DIY HOUSING MAZE LAND: most citizen-led schemes range from 1-10 homes, a size that is just too small and carries too high transaction costs for most council site allocation and land disposal processes to bother with. At the same time the longterm social and economic impact of citizen-led housing struggles to make its added value count in a highest-sale-price-wins market. The result is that communities are often left with the most difficult sites, which commercial developers have rejected, or are overly dependent on increasingly stretched local authorities as a route to get land at a discounted price. FINANCE: at each stage of the development process risk and uncertainty accumulates from a lack of pre-planning development finance, to the high cost of social investment, to a lack of capital reserves to accommodate construction cost overruns. The high transaction costs of sticking together small pots of multiple funds, each with different strings attached, also creates substantial drag on community-led projects. TECHNICAL KNOWHOW: from planning permission to finding contractors, the process of making homes is dominated by costly professionals. Not all individuals and communities have equal or sufficient resources to access this professional knowhow. NO REPEATS: Most citizent-led projects remain non-replicable and the experience gained- often through years of hard graft- by individual residents stays stuck to specific sites with few people wishing to repeat the experience. The result is high per-project overhead costs in terms of both time and money as each new amateur has to learn and master the process from scratch. The isolation of individual projects also means the citizen-led asset base - which might be able to fund the next project - fails to grow. 18 start here u TECHNICAL KNOWHOW: from planning permission to finding contractors, the process of making homes is dominated by costly professionals. Not all individuals and communities have equal or sufficient resources to access this professional knowhow. 19 IV Knowle West: a radical past 20 radical past One hundred years ago, Knowle West was the future of housing when it was founded as a new estate based on the Garden City principles of Ebenezer Howard. Knowle West could yet prove to be the future of housing again. The starting point for a citizen-centred approach to housing supply must be a better understanding of needs and resources at the super-local level. Over six months We Can Make worked with Knowle West in Bristol as a participatory test-space to explore what might be possible. Working with residents, artists, architects, academics and others, we mapped the day-to-day struggles many people face in meeting their housing needs. The co-design process also revealed the diverse knowhow and rich resources that citizens and the community hold and with which it is possible to begin to rethink how, where and by whom our homes are made. Knowle West is a working-class estate on the Southern edge of Bristol. Dubbed "the five thousand island forest" by the construction workers who built it, Knowle West offers 5,000 homes atop a hill surrounded by green space. The estate was part of a radical programme of house building by Bristol City Council which began in the 1920s, and was itself part of a nationwide wave of constructing council homes in the interwar period. This was spurred by the effects of the Great War, which increased the wish to house people to a level that could not be met4 by private builders alone. 21 The promise Ebenezer Howard’s * Garden City Movement was, and still is, a viable form in urban planning. It proposed the idea of building new towns set in the countryside, which could allow people access to nature and the health benefits that green spaces provide.5 In Knowle West this was interpreted to mean good quality * homes set in generous gardens.