I'm currently writing a series on designing my own home and contrasting it with some soul-crushing new construction around here. It's very obvious that the places cherished and loved in New Hampshire were the villages built slowly, and the places least loved are the ones flash formed overnight by contractors trying to max out $$. Building on site is not very expensive but I'm not sure that making it cheaper is fixing any of the major problems with housing. It would just give more life to planning for lifeless sprawl.
If anything, we need ways to build more beautiful houses better or cheaper, in smaller, odd and non-level lots. Not assembly line houses.
But, yes, most houses around me have so many flaws that it seems problematic to count them as assets. Christopher Alexander has a lengthy calculation on this in 'The Nature of Order.'
They don't have to be identical copies at all, in the computer age.
I live in a newish housing estate in a relatively affluent area of the UK, where every single house has the same cladding, the same colour of roof, the same colour of doors, the same colour and style of windows, the same small patch of grass out the front, and each house is separated by less than 2m.
Walking around the place feels... wrong, hollow, eerie somehow. And yet, many people seem to love this homogeneous kind of place.
Thing is, as you point out, it doesn't have to be this way - it's local planning regulations and NIMBY neighbours that are the problem. Why does every house need to look almost identical? Why do I need permission to paint my front door a different colour?
It's not prefabrication that prevents diversity - it's policy.
Also, the vast majority of the cost of a half million dollar home is the land.
But it doesn't conform to regulations and/or everyone that has a veto in the planning and permit process.
There is no technology that fixes people problems. I would say Skynet from Terminator was onto something but still failed :)
I'm looking to design my own home and very much agree with what you have to say. I'd be interested in hearing more of your thoughts.
Compared to building the same stuff in a factory, it is.
TL;DR: Buildings and neighborhoods should be designed in situ by the people living there.
The PL volumes are earlier and seminal (both SimCity and the concept of "Patterns" in programming are two examples) while the more mature Nature of Order is nearly mystic.
I'm convinced that if we could combine the ideas of Pattern Language with applied ecology we could create a new form of civilization so beautiful our ancestors would consider it Heaven on Earth.
Eastern block panel building settlements were built from per-fabricated segments mass produced in a factory. Then assembled on site from these segments by cranes rolling on rails.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panel%C3%A1k
You can actually tell quite easily in many cases where the crane rails were & that their most efficient location was the factor, not stuff like ergonomy or aesthetics.
The end result was indeed a lot of housing capacity built at record time. On the other hand the quality of the flats was often disputable and the new high density neighborhoods often lacked basic public amenities, at least initially.
In a more modern context there are also issues with lack of parking space (no one expected so many cars back then) and lack of thermal isolation (usually fixed by replacing the windows by modern ones & isolating the sides).
>hyper-efficient "fog" showers. ( Legend has it that the project was spiked because it would put too many electricians and carpenters and so on out of business. )
Modern Japanese showers are pretty much like that. Japanese toilets are also much much more water efficient than what you can see here in Europe, not to mention mostly including bidets and other civilized living amenities still mostly considered extraodrinary around here.
It isn't just parking spaces, the neighborhood was designed with walking in mind. Many streets had shops at the bottom floor, and I could do all my errands on foot.
My elderly grandparents still live there. In a small radius around their building is a grocery store, medical clinic and a bus stop. They could live independently for a long time after they lost the ability to drive.
When the wall fell it became a free-for-all overnight, all that security went out the window and not much was done to replace it. A couple of people got obscenely rich and plenty of people dropped well below the poverty line. It is that which powers the rise of assholes like Orban: the people that yearn for the bad situation they were in before because at least they knew just how bad it was.
The truth tends to be that:
* It wouldn't be so easy, even if we did the right thing.
* Doing the right thing is actually the hard part.
* What you think is the right thing isn't actually the right thing.
Most systems in place today are there for a reason. Organizations that do the wrong thing tend not to survive for a very long time.
Personally, I want to see more organizations devoted to solving problems and boldly becoming obsolete. The predominant reward models do not really seem to reward that.
(Recent semi-related anecdote: see recent nytimes article about what happened to the project devoted towards designing and stockpiling inexpensive ventilators that came into existence after doing a risk analysis around SARS.)
Also most of the time right thing is not "right thing" for everyone because there will be always group of people who think totally opposite is the right thing to do.
Add his Ultra-High Voltage World Electric grid to your list.
> The curious task of economics is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.
(https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Fatal_Conceit#Ch._5:_The_F...)
We can invent those things, sure, but we can't necessarily anticipate all problems with them. For example, a city with 10 million sq. ft. (according to Google, about 0.36 sq. mile) of open space would be very cramped compared to New York, which has Central Park (1.3 sq miles). A virus like COVID-19 in a more dense location than NY could be far worse. Or to take another example, plastic bags are certainly one way to capture waste, but there was a movement to produce fewer plastic bags.
We really don't have all the answers - we have people who think they have all the answers, and we have some other people that understand that the questions are hard.
Some of the world's most severe and urgent problems are caused by (western?) society's emphasis on individualism -- or maybe that's a bit unfair, arguably it is fairly human for humans to be short-sighted and selfish much of the time. E.g. global warming is a huge problem, but global warming is just a symptom of the underlying problems of overpopulation and overconsumption. I don't really believe we can fix those two underlying problems by continuing to operate within the same individualist market-driven philosophy.
E.g. most people want a comfortable place to live, children, opportunities for their children, a way to make a living, cheap food, cheap luxuries, cheap travel, medical care when they are sick. Governments, researchers and business strive to provide these -- but arguably most of these activities are harmful where they encourage consumption or discourage population reduction.
With a market-driven individualist approach we (as the collective human endeavour) just keep doing what we are already doing a bit more efficiently or a bit faster, which doesn't address the problem of what we individually demand -- which the market & research moves to supply -- is bad for the collective in the long run.
I think there's a clearer version of an argument along these lines in one of Yuval Noah Harari's books (although he may not have the same outlook or conclusion that I do).
Individualism has been the crux of human progress - Individuals voluntarily and radically change their behavior when convinced. The job is to convince them.
I know some people argue this, but I think this argument misses the point, particularly when it is made rhetorically and not spelled out in detail. I don't think if GDP is coupled to resource usage or not is relevant when we're talking about physical / ecological limits. GDP doesn't measure anything physical, so it isn't a particularly helpful thing to add into the discussion.
What precisely could we mean by GDP decoupling from resource usage?
Suppose the statement "GDP has now decoupled from resource usage" is defined like so: Let g(t) denote GDP and r(t) denote resource usage at some time t. Then by "GDP has decoupled from resource usage" perhaps we mean that the fraction g(t) / r(t) will becomes arbitrarily large (monotonically in t, say) as t increases.
That sounds superficially positive, but then consider, from an environmental perspective, the GDP g(t) quantity is irrelevant -- it measures economic activity in units of human accounting conventions, it doesn't measure any physical quantity about our world --- we need to be able to enforce upper bounds on r(t), resource usage, for key resources, where we express r(t) in terms of physical and environmental limits.
To cherry-pick a working definition of resource consumption, r(t), for a key environmental bottleneck resource, we could approximate r(t) as "consumption of remaining free storage capacity for CO_2-e in the atmosphere to have a 2/3rds chance of limiting global warming to at most +3 degrees C, in gigatons of CO_2-e". That's measurable, has real physical meaning, is a critical factor in the future of our environment, our society & our physical economy, and is still being consumed with no real sign of us all slowing down.
If you look at the trend of CO_2 emissions attributed to the US and Europe, I acknowledge there is a slight downward trend over the past few decades:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
If we want to pick at the details I might argue that the graph attributes CO_2 emissions to countries like China for polluting economic activity required to produce cheap goods that are consumed in wealthy countries that industrialised earlier, so arguably this way of attributing CO_2 emissions against countries doesn't even fairly account for which countries are capturing the value associated with producing the pollution. You might argue that the manufacturers of exported goods captured a lot of the value, and imported a lot of stuff from other countries to help bootstrap their industry, so my argument that western countries likely are more responsible for CO_2 pollution in recent years than this graph suggests isn't entirely one-sided.
But, leaving that all those blame games aside, the slight declines observed in some countries CO_2 emissions is nowhere near fast enough compared to the remaining capacity left in the our shared global greenhouse-gas-atmospheric-sink definition of remaining resources r(t) . If you squint and look at the trends over a 50 year span for a country like the US, it doesn't look like greenhouse gas emissions have becoming arbitrary small, at a very crude approximation it looks more like that they're constant! US emissions now are similar to what they were in 1970. They need to go negative!
And the alignment has to be deeper in our society. A good example would be all the money spent trying to find a cure for baldness. Imagine if the funds were directed elsewhere if there weren't so many people willing to spend money curing baldness.
But does changing our values mean the people who are caring about not going bald turn their resources elsewhere. Or should we look into why these people care so much. Is it that hair, and especially natural hair, plays such a large role in attractiveness that we need to change? Maybe what we need to change is not the desire of people to be more attractive, but what society deems as attractive.
This gets even harder and more outlandish when you consider people with what even more deviant values. How much would it cost to end slavery?
Both of the currently approved drugs for baldness -- finasteride and minoxidil -- were originally designed for other purposes: BPH and ulcers respectively. The actual research effort spent to find a "cure for baldness" is not that large. Plus, androgenetic alopecia is a likely symptom of prediabetes[1,2]; to that end, "high consumption of fresh vegetables" has been found to reduce the risk by more than half[3] and so research on baldness is not necessarily about hair loss per se.
1: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5073072/
2: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6340244/
3: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00403-017-1799-z
Does this seem valid? I paused for a moment but only recall the concept, lacking any example off hand.
https://factoryos.com/press/housing-development-erected-in-w...
> The Dymaxion House was completed in 1930 after two years of development, and redesigned in 1945. Buckminster Fuller wanted to mass-produce a bathroom and a house.
A composting toilet is probably overall a much better solution. (And a bidet.)
edit: I found this linked from the Dymaxion House article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packaging_toilet
I'm not being snarky, I mean it. Bucky Fuller calculated that we could solve most of the world's problems for about $25B (this was in the 70's, so adjust for inflation and whatnot).
He was thinking big: houses built in factories (like cars) and delivered to the site by helicopter. You could roll out a whole neighborhood in a week or two. They had waterless toilets that captures BMs in little plastic bags, hyper-efficient "fog" showers. ( Legend has it that the project was spiked because it would put too many electricians and carpenters and so on out of business. )
Or see his Old Man River's City project ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Man_River%27s_City_project https://solutions.synearth.net/2002/11/24/ ) A city in a single building with ten million square feet of enclosed open space. Add some applied ecology ("Permaculture") and you've got an arcology ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcology ).
We have pretty much all the answers, the problem is to align our power with our values.