Citizens Design Bureau’s Director, Katy Marks, on building meaningful, socially positive community.
5 min read
Katy Marks, Citizens Design Bureau
Few people would argue with the suggestion that Britain’s current housing model is in urgent need of a rethink. As emerging generations overwhelmingly lose hope of home ownership, and the definitions of ‘affordable housing’ grow ever more implausible, it’s clear that we must find alternative approaches.
Having been instrumental in establishing the now ubiquitous coworking model that has transformed workplace culture, our architecture practice, Citizens Design Bureau, is exploring ways to translate some of this thinking into the context of housing – by finding innovative ways of building affordable, creative communities.
In the early noughties, with a group of three friends and an evolving community of volunteers, I set up what was London’s first coworking space and the place that coined the term. At that time, there were numerous examples of small groups of artists, professionals and makers working out of the same space, but they were still individualised desks and workshops, within an open plan setup, needing lots of space for relatively few people. They were therefore stuck in out-of-town locations because city centre properties were too expensive. At the same time, there were emerging examples of corporate environments developing the practice of hot-desking – not having your own permanent desk, but effectively time-sharing at different points in the day or week, within the same company. The concept of coworking that we developed at The Hub brought these ideas together, densifying the use of space to create vibrant, commercially viable communities in city centre locations, with the added value of workshop, meeting, socialising facilities and collaboration opportunities that the concept encapsulated. Since then, under the name ImpactHub, it has grown into the largest network of non-profit coworking spaces in the world, and spawned a whole industry.
Today it seems glaringly obvious, but in 2005, when it first opened, there was initial reluctance to embrace the idea of completely different companies sharing a single space, without designated desks. That trepidation, however, didn’t last long and coworking took off. In the meantime, we learned a lot – not least because our own professional trajectories showed us that coworking spaces only seemed to work well for businesses at very early stages or at very small sizes, or for people who were more nomadic and had a basecamp elsewhere. It was difficult for larger groups to work effectively in a shared space. They needed more privacy, acoustic separation, storage and the likes in order to function.
Our design approach adapted to recognise that all small organisations experience a cycle of flux – growth, shrinkage and re-growth over several years – and that we needed to create workspace communities that provided a variety of spaces, within which emerging companies could circulate, while also providing social spaces. This approach led to the emergence of richer communities – at Hackney Downs Studios, for example, where there were workspaces of all sizes, encompassing offices, studios and workshops, as well as a café, shops, a gym; even a community theatre, veg box scheme and a weekend market.
Interestingly, the coworking model rapidly expanded into both commercial and non-profit permutations. The idea chimed with the zeitgeist, with young people in particular realising that ‘work’ as they understood it really wasn’t working at all and that the traditional 9–5 office environment didn’t reflect their personal or professional aspirations.
As we began to look at workspace models that could respond to the ebb and flow of emerging enterprise, we realised that, at the root, these ideas were fundamentally about how to foster different types of creative and sociable communities. In order to do that really well, we needed to go beyond looking at workspace business models and start to explore models of housing and how they impact on the emergence of creative communities, whilst responding to the issue of affordability.
Recently, MP Michael Gove talked about how the ‘leasehold’ model is essentially a hangover from feudal times, when land and property eventually defaulted to the ownership of the ‘lord of the manor’. There are numerous models that have emerged in recent years that go some way to responding to this. Shared ownership, for example, partially addressed the issue of affordability, but it is limited by the fact that the affordability is only available to the first owner. Once a buyer has managed to ‘staircase’ to 100% ownership, all subsequent owners pay full market rates.
Another is ‘coliving’, which has emerged as a fairly crude and, some might say, cynical translation of the ideas of coworking into living space. Individual studio units can be as small as 12 –15 sq m, with some shared facilities. The concept of community feels commodified in the coliving model and, again, it suits people at a very particular stage in life and so is characterised by transient, short-term resident groups, rather than an evolving community.
The emergence of community land trusts and co- housing schemes is a brilliant development, but they remain frustratingly fringe ideas, because there is little public funding to support this approach and minimal commercial incentive to attract private investment. The current government’s reluctance to commit to renewing the Community Housing Fund to support schemes like this is a huge problem and leads to voluntary groups often working on these, with barely any resources, over many years, in response to the lack of affordable land.
There is therefore a huge gap in the market for commercial developers to innovate by responding to a growing demographic of families and professionals who need affordable housing that also responds to the cycles of change and growth that so many households go through – as babies arrive, teenagers leave, grandparents come to stay, carers are required and home-working demands space. Our current housing stock, and the financing and operational models that support it, do not adequately address this.
At Citizens Design Bureau, we are currently developing a set of new housing models that are designed to enshrine affordability in perpetuity, while also embedding the capacity for individual households to swell and shrink in response to changing circumstances. This is an evolution of shared ownership, such that the share owned by the resident is not just a nebulous percentage of the whole, but a whole asset that can be bought and sold independently, and can also can be coupled or decoupled with adjacent additional space. The resident therefore pays for a small unit and owns it outright, but has the opportunity to live in a larger unit, on a rental basis, if they wish. This means that even a small family can own a flat at an affordable rate and expand their home as they need to, without huge capital expenditure or having to move house. Crucially, if and when they do want to sell up and move, they sell only the asset that they own and the rental portion defaults to the developer/housing association/community land trust so that the cycle of affordable access to flexible housing exists in perpetuity.
We believe that such models have the potential to foster vibrant communities, addressing the needs of a huge proportion of society, while still remaining viable and appealing to commercial developers.
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