Architects condemn 'shoe-box homes'

[Flying Dodo]

But that's an impossible thing. With restrictions on where you can build, making land per m[sup]2 [/sup]more expensive compared with the rest of Europe, coupled with high property prices anyway, makes any new house expensive. Therefore the only way to make it more affordable a bit less expensive, is to shrink the size of the house and any garden.

Of course a sustained fall in house prices would help that scenario, but brings other problems.

 

[Archie_tect]

Didn't I read somewhere that in this country at least there is no minimum space/volume requirements for dwelling houses?

Maybe it is that sur-la-continent there are minimum allowances so that's why new houses everywhere else in Europe are bigger.

Anyway what good does criticising small modern houses do?

You are architects .......design something bigger and better and, which is kind of important, affordable,

HCA have minimum space standards for 'affordable' grant funded rented and shared ownership housing, typically 56sqm for a 1B flat [few RSLs build them anymore though], 66sqm for a 2B bungalow or flat, 77sqm for 2B house, 93sqm for 3B house, 104 sqm for 4B house.... but private housing hasn't had minimum standards for many years, since Parker Morris standards were torn up. Have a look at the Gateshead flats that IKEA proposed but couldn't sell-too small!.

There's nothing to stop developers building larger houses, many do but then they are more expensive.

House prices have a fair way to fall yet though but supply isn't matching demand so prices are being kept higher than they should be.

 

[Archie_tect]

hhhmmmmm

loth as I am to defend developers (it's impossible to defend architects), I await with interest some insight or plan which is going to make good the shortage of dwellings in the southeast of England without covering every scrap of grass from Dungeness to Datchet if we are no longer to build dwellings that are small or high rise.

Byker Wall managed high density and was loved by residents until the 90s when anti-social behaviour louts moved in and spoilt it. There's something seriously wrong when public housing schemes in Germany, Denmark, Sweden , Norway, France and Spain, ie comparable to existing UK layouts and designs, are cared for and work well yet similar developments in UK are trashed by residents- some estates are feral. Leave you all to decide why.

 

[ASC1951]

Under the present cheap oil economy it is indeed more efficient to house people in cities.... Ignoring the fact that it can only be sustained so long as it is able to feed on resources outside of itself.

But that has always been the case, Gary, as long as we have had cities or even large towns i.e about 10,000 years. It's nothing to do with cheap oil.

 

[Canrider]

Byker Wall managed high density and was loved by residents until the 90s when anti-social behaviour louts moved in and spoilt it. There's something seriously wrong when public housing schemes in Germany, Denmark, Sweden , Norway, France and Spain, ie comparable to existing UK layouts and designs, are cared for and work well yet similar developments in UK are trashed by residents- some estates are feral. Leave you all to decide why.

dell is being slightly cheeky with his question, in that he's previously stated his opposition to current 'no higher than 6* storeys' attitudes held by the bulk of UK planning authorities.

Bring on the high-rises, I say. Every other country in the Anglosphere has managed to make them work right across the economic spectrum, from downtown Manhattan wealth-pads to The Projects, including everything in between.



*Or whatever it actually was. For '6' read 'much shorter than is sensible, reasonable and practicable'.

 

[Canrider]

But that has always been the case, Gary, as long as we have had cities or even large towns i.e about 10,000 years. It's nothing to do with cheap oil.

Erm, I think you'll find the majority of 'urban' sites were quite self-sufficient up until the late Middle Ages. The sticking point in my mind is bulk shipments of grain, which aren't feasible with early boat technologies except in limited and exceptional circumstances (Rome, Constantinople, Baghdad?). Road and cart technologies are possible, but were vastly less efficient (c. 20-30x more costly per mile in Roman times) for goods transport.

edit: I should say that 'resources outside itself' is a bit of a slippery term to use. 'resources outside its catchment' would be more useful, as this divides between, say, Mesopotamian city-states where the farming population probably walked out from the city to work every day, and modern cities where the transportation catchment is simply incapable of supporting the population of the city.

 

[Zoiders]

I am not sure you could describe the NYC projects as having "worked"

They fell foul of the same deprivations and worse.

 

[Canrider]

I am not sure you could describe the NYC projects as having "worked"

They fell foul of the same deprivations and worse.

A rhetorical flourish. The larger point was that living 10+ storeys up doesn't automatically mean you need keep a MAC10 under your pillow**, witness the skyline appearance of any non-UK Anglosphere city. That's not just the socially-deprived living in those tower blocks..



**Another rhetorical flourish.

 

[Zoiders]

A rhetorical flourish. The larger point was that living 10+ storeys up doesn't automatically mean you need keep a MAC10 under your pillow**, witness the skyline appearance of any non-UK Anglosphere city. That's not just the socially-deprived living in those tower blocks..



**Another rhetorical flourish.

Living in a place because you have the financial means to live there by choice is not the same as having to live there as it's all you can afford or are allocated.

It's not rhetoric it's hard fact.

The people who designed the Elephant & Castle flats thought much like you - one of them is rumoured to have killed her self when she actually saw the place in person more than a decade later.

Mixed social housing is hard enough to keep clean, maintained and policed at the best of times, make it high rise and it becomes a virtual prison for many.

 

[roadrash]

Shoebox? Sheer luxury. When I were I lad...

luxury .. we liv,d in ole int middle of road ,we ad andfull of cold gravel for us breakfast ,n werkd 26 owers a day int mill.

 

[Canrider]

What, exactly, is your point, Zoiders? People the world over live in high-rise apartments without falling prey to the criminal netherworld. In my experience, it's really only here in the UK that there is this mindless high-rise = gang violence equation that you're amply demonstrating to us here.

 

[Zoiders]

What, exactly, is your point, Zoiders? People the world over live in high-rise apartments without falling prey to the criminal netherworld. In my experience, it's really only here in the UK that there is this mindless high-rise = gang violence equation that you're amply demonstrating to us here.

Well you are talking bollocks then.

High density housing the world over is afflicted by it and especially high rise.

The soviet model blocks in Russia have become no go areas in many places and are ruled by violent nationalist gangs,the same applies to former East German high rises, high rise in France has been the setting for rioting on a scale to eclipse the London riots, South Africa has the same problem with multi storey high density housing as does Brazil and also parts of New Zealand. The New York projects have their own police departments that entirely fail to control crime as do some of the other eastern seaboard cities such as Baltimore, they are a token effort as the metropolitan police forces can not be bothered to fight a losing battle trying to restore order, on paper they are policed but in reality they are not.

If you dump people in high rise or high density housing it's a recipe for disaster unless you live in a country where civil order is enforced by paramilitary police forces and draconian laws, sure Singapore has excellent civil order and high rise housing on mass, but then the penalty for petty crime is public flogging. In Hong Kong which also has huge amounts of high density high rise housing it has been known for police stations often have machine gun positions in case of rioting.

Cities in the sky is a middle class dream and has only ever worked for the well off or those living in a country with a better standard of living across the board and less of an income gap.

 

[asterix]

I'd suggest that the common factor in those cases is poverty and lack of opportunity rather than the buildings.

"If you dump people in high rise or high density housing it's a recipe for disaster "

You (whoever 'you' might be) can only 'dump' people who have become dumpable.

 

[Canrider]

Precisely.

 

[ASC1951]

Erm, I think you'll find the majority of 'urban' sites were quite self-sufficient up until the late Middle Ages. The sticking point in my mind is bulk shipments of grain, which aren't feasible with early boat technologies except in limited and exceptional circumstances (Rome, Constantinople, Baghdad?). Road and cart technologies are possible, but were vastly less efficient (c. 20-30x more costly per mile in Roman times) for goods transport.

edit: I should say that 'resources outside itself' is a bit of a slippery term to use. 'resources outside its catchment' would be more useful, as this divides between, say, Mesopotamian city-states where the farming population probably walked out from the city to work every day, and modern cities where the transportation catchment is simply incapable of supporting the population of the city.

It depends what you mean by self-sufficient. To my mind, that means that all the inhabitants supplies have been brought in by those inhabitants, even if they have to walk or ride out to their fields/quarries/forests. If people in A are transporting essentials to city B, B isn't self sufficient.

I think you are wrong in your historic analysis. Cities in Europe and Africa have e.g. large granaries and other stores as far back as we have archaeological records and there were drove roads in Britain from Neolithic times. Certainly by 5000 - 7000 years ago there were established trade routes from as far away as the Crimea to Cornwall and bulk delivery of grain was normal over shorter distances because most early cities were on the coast or navigable rivers.

Anyway, my point was that Gary was suggesting that cities are only sustainable by cheap oil, whereas you and I would agree that historically that definitely isn't the case.