this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2024
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Solarpunk Urbanism
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A community to discuss solarpunk and other new and alternative urbanisms that seek to break away from our currently ecologically destructive urbanisms.
- Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City — In brief, the right to the city is the right to the production of a city. The labor of a worker is the source of most of the value of a commodity that is expropriated by the owner. The worker, therefore, has a right to benefit from that value denied to them. In the same way, the urban citizen produces and reproduces the city through their own daily actions. However, the the city is expropriated from the urbanite by the rich and the state. The right to the city is therefore the right to appropriate the city by and for those who make and remake it.
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Ok, I watched 3 minutes in and stopped ... so basically the reason is "Oh no ... my profits!"
Seems to completely miss the point ... which is that this is about reshaping the city ... a necessarily bigger task.
Also, I've said it many times ... but this whole office -> residential thing just highlights the robustness issue that the pandemic highlighted. That all of these office buildings are optimised for fitting in as many desk workers as possible and not anything else, to the point that they are problematic and illegal for someone to just live in them, is a huge problem. That the conversion would cost so much money is a design problem, surely, a mistake that someone has to now pay for (sorry landlords!).
The lesson being that there's probably a decent middle ground ... a "generic humane building design" that can work decently well as a residential or working or mixed property ... something that isn't as "efficient" but instead amenable to the flexible needs of a variety of people doing a variety of things.
I kind of figured. The big ask is what needs to be saved exactly? Oh, real estate profits. Lol
Yea, they seem to be some sort of investor influencer ... which is hilarious because I think they all look like this: middle aged white guy, slighly casual in dress and demeanor, maybe slightly sporty or "fit" too, "just doing the basic math" ... basically targeting people's money anxiety without any real insights on the bigger landscape of things.
@ohlaph @[email protected] I watched it, so you don't have to.
Okay, so he's mostly talking here about older, 1980s or 1990s suburban office park buildings, rather than CBD office towers.
Think large floor plates, large open air car parks, one set of toilets and kitchens per floor.
They were basically designed for one purpose, as @[email protected] pointed out, and that's to cram in as many desks as possible. People were, of course, expected to drive to work.
From a property investor's standpoint, it would cost more to buy these buildings and then retrofit them then you would get back by selling or leasing them as apartments.
And even if you did spend the money to renovate (including completely redoing the plumbing and HVAC systems), you'd still be left with crummy apartments with windows that don't open and bedrooms with no windows.
He argues the best option is to tear it down and start over.
To be fair, he does raise some good points. I can see how a large floorplate would be difficult to subdivide into apartments where every living room and bedroom has a window.
And I don't think anyone would argue that suburban office parks aren't hideous places.
My thoughts as follows:
I mean, I can't imagine too many commercial property owners and banks would complain too much right now about a government stepping in and buying up older office buildings.
And even if it doesn't make commercial sense to retrofit them, it might make social and public policy sense to convert them into public housing, while at the same time avoiding having disused or abandoned office blocks laying around.
That means, in many cases, having buildings that support different uses on different floors (so shops or restaurants on the ground floor, offices or community spaces on the lower floors, apartments above).
More importantly, we need buildings that are designed from the outset to be able to be used for different purposes over time.
I don't think a generic building that is suitable for all purposes is possible though. Inevitably the needs of a housing unit and an office are fundamentally different, going all he way down to the plumbing. It wouldn't make sense to build an office building with enough plumbing to easily become an apartment, or vice versa, because taking a down-the-middle approach could just as easily lead to a building that serves no useful purpose at all. It's not "just" about the money. He goes into the plumbing issue in particular in great depth. I highly recommend watching the whole video
@ssorbom @maegul Since the 1960s, we typically haven't designed buildings that are usable for a range of purposes. But I'm not sure that's necessarily the same thing as we couldn't, if we wanted to.
Typically, at least in the US and Commonwealth countries, since about the 1960s we've tended to have single-use zoning codes, that are highly prescriptive around what uses are acceptable on a given piece of land.
So you end up with entirely residential suburbs, and shopping centres or strips, and office parks.
If you look at most of the rest of the world, and even older buildings in the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, you often find different uses taking place on different floors. So shops and restaurants on the ground floor, with flats and offices above.
And with many older buildings, the use has changed over time.
Since the 1960s or so, there's been a few assumptions that have tended to inform how buildings and cities are designed:
The first is that buildings and cities should be designed around cars.
Second, that form follows function. (You'll hear this phrase a lot with modernist architecture.)
Third, that buildings are essentially disposable.
Fourth, that they should generally be built as cheaply as possible.
And fifth, zoning codes prescribe what uses are allowed in a building, and how it should be designed.
There's no reason why building codes couldn't mandate that new structures shouldn't have floorplates that could be used for both offices and residential, or enough piping and conduit to support both uses.
Or enough windows and natural light to make it a comfortable place to be, no matter how it's used.
Yes, the upfront costs of buildings would be higher if we did. But the trade-off is that it's not a full tear-down-and-rebuild if you want to reuse the building for a different purpose in the future.
And here's why we should, in the words of the World Green Buildings Council
"Buildings are currently responsible for 39% of global energy related carbon emissions: 28% from operational emissions, from energy needed to heat, cool and power them, and the remaining 11% from materials and construction."
https://worldgbc.org/advancing-net-zero/embodied-carbon/