Housing – work in progress | Brussels Blog

Housing – work in progress

Introduction

This is a summary of a series of posts on housing from my site dontlooknow.org . When I have the energy and time I will rework these posts.

Personal remaining carbon budget: 64 tonnes CO2e

There is an important consideration that should be a precursor to this series: A representative remaining carbon budget. My judgement is that if humans emit more than 64 tonnes of greenhouse gasses each – measured as carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), horrid things will happen.

This is a moral judgement informed by science as explained here. and estimated in #1 of Topics for Enhanced Town Planning.

This post is as an index to previous work and may be of more interest to me than others. The heading of each “Part” is a link to the original article.

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Part 1: embodied carbon and climate

• UK greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are not falling much.
  • Ignore BEIS
  • Believe DEFRA
• The GHG emissions in building a new house are 80+ tonnes CO2e – a very large part of our personal remaining carbon budget.

Part 2: Food and the remaining carbon budget

• Current diets and food production are a large part of our remaining carbon budget.
• Livestock causes very large GHG emissions.

Part 3: Carbon budgets and transport

• The UK government departments’ BEIS and DEFRA count GHG emissions differently.
• BEIS does not count emissions from imports, sea and air travel.
• Air travel causes very large emissions of GHGs.
• Cars cause very large emissions of GHGs.
• Manufacturing cars causes large GHG emissions.
• Making electric cars causes more.
• Air freight causes GHG emissions that are (by weight):
  • 6.8 times worse than road.
  • 57 times worse than sea.
  • 68 times worse than rail.

Part 4: We are not short of land

• Very little land is built on:
  • More than half of the land area is farmland (fields, orchards etc).
  • Just over a third is natural (moors, heathland, natural grassland etc).
  • Under 6% is built on (roads, buildings, airports, quarries etc).
  • Green urban is 2.5% (parks, gardens, golf courses, sports pitches etc).
• The London region is 10+ times denser than other UK regions.
• There is plenty of room for housing but a shortage of planning permission.
• NIMBYs and the countryside lobby restrict planning permissions.
• Affluent homeowners benefit from planning restrictions but the poor pay higher rents.
• Cheap housing could crash the banks.

Part 5: Construction and prefabrication

• Construction is a fraction of the cost of a house.
• Modern prefabs can be cheap with low carbon emissions
• Old fashioned prefabs:
  • People liked prefabs.
  • Multistorey mass housing failed.
  • The planners didn’t notice.
  • They will get it wrong again.
•  A target construction cost for starter homes could be £30,000

Housing – part 6: Pollution in the countryside

We pollute  the countryside:

• Soil fertility is falling rapidly
• Insects are disappearing
• Nitrate pollution from
  • Farms
  • Golf courses
• Housing can be less polluting than farming
• Better forms of food production are possible

Part 7: Pollution in towns

• In the old days coal pollution killed
• Now traffic pollution kills
• Buses could be better
• Traffic pollution also kills the oceans

Part 8: Density and disease

• Cities generate economic growth through networks of proximity
• Population density is not a simple driver of disease
• There are public health solutions
• There is a antibiotics resistance crisis
• A struggle to keep vaccines up-to-date
• Watch out for bio-terrorism

Part 9: Greenbelts

• City parks very, very good. Green belts OK
• Green belts are cherished by the countryside lobby
• Greenbelts increase house prices
• It’s the view
• Greenbelts policy is a ‘Green Noose’
• Greening the greenbelt
• We should use more labour in food production

Part 10: A reprise

• A review of parts 1 to 9

Part 11: No cars in the city

• Mass car ownership cannot be sustainable or fair
  • Exceeding a personal remaining carbon budgets is immoral
  • Personal carbon budget is 100 tonnes CO2e per person
  • Motorists exceed this budget with emissions from tmotoring
• Cars have taken over large areas of towns and cities
• The spatial dominence of cars
  • confines pedestrians
  • prevents informal social contacts
  • stops children playing
• EC study says car free cities cost two to five times more

Part 12: Friends, neighbours & architectural determinism

• Brutalist housing disasters
• Architectural determinism
• Oscar Newman and Defensible Space
• A Pleasant Victorian Terraced Street
  • Newman said design something 5% better
• Leon Festinger and friendship patterns
• Edward T Hall and personal space
• Who wants friends and neighbours?
  • Some depend on neighbours
  • Some aren’t bothered about neighbours
  • Eileen Gray’s house hid her from neighbours
  • Some want to avoid ‘Neighbours from hell’
• Designing for neighbourliness and security
  

Part 13: No more high buildings

• Embodied carbon in high buildings
• So what about tall wooden buildings?
• Height means complications
• A house is a machine for living in
  • Bespoke and limited design effort
• A plane is a machine for flying in
  • Repeatable with very large design effort
• Demolish existing tower blocks?
• Building densely needn’t mean building tall
• High buildings: higher energy use

Part 14: Look, Learn And Improve

• Computer algorithms to synthesise architectural form
• Archigram expanded minds
• Too theoretical, too glossy

Part 15: Five planning policies

• Defensible space
• Mixed income housing
• Tower blocks and roads
• Christopher Alexander’s A city is not a tree
  • Alexander on Abercrombie
• Traffic trend planning

Part 16: Cheap, neighbourly and doesn’t screw the world up

• Issue 1. No high buildings
• Issue 2. No cars in housing
• Issue 3: Restrictive planning and greenbelts
• Issue 4. Prefabrication and conventional housing
• Issue 5: Food production and local employment
• Estates of car-free, wooden prefabs with integrated market gardens
• A new Ministry of Works … & starter homes for £20,000

Part 17: New economies for new estates

• Car-free estates of prefabs 
• Improve on old prefab design with modern crossply timber
• Add market gardens.
• Environmental Capacity Rent
• Parameters for evaluating settlements
  • Number of residents
  • Density of settlement
  • Local cost of living
  • % of residents employed locally
  • % of food produced locally
  • % of goods bought from local retailers
  • % of goods made by local residents
  • Social class of the residents.
  • Weekly travel distances.
  • Energy and water use
  • Carbon footprints of residents
  • Protection of ecosystems
  • Happiness of residents
  • A measure of neighbourliness
• Labour costs, degrowth and the Robot Revolution
• Creating a market

Part 18: A NEW Ministry of Works

• Changing complex systems: An example.
  • Don’tchange it all at once and screw it up
• Why a New Ministry Ministry of Works?
• MOW should take some the responsibilities of other departments
  • In restricted geographical locations
• Department of Transport: Alternative personal transport
• Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
  • Adaptation to global warming
  • Agriculture
  • Air quality
  • Biodiversity
  • Flooding
  • Food
  • Forestry
  • Noise
  • Rural development
  • Sustainable development
  • Waste management
  • Water management
• Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government
  • Building regulations
  • Community cohesion
  • Decentralisation
  • Fire services and community resilience
  • Housing
  • Planning
  • Race equality
• Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy
  • Business regulation and support
  • Climate change policy in the United Kingdom
    Company law
  • Competition
  • Corporate governance
  • Energy
  • Employment relations
  • Innovation
  • Intellectual property
  • Regional and local economic development
  • Trade
• Local authorities
• Transparency and publications
• Postscript: Export opportunities

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