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the purpose of a system is what it does
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this post was submitted on 14 Aug 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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I mean, there’s no reason we can’t go the way of Japanese micro home in construction. Everything you need packed into an efficient little area you can still call home.
Hell… if I wasn’t married with kids and pets, I’d almost prefer that.
I wouldn't call the masses all living in tiny boxes so that the wealthy can add a few more zeroes to their bank accounts progress. Japan has a lack of available land that most places don't have. If people need to live in micro-homes to get by in places with plenty of space, then there's still a very serious unresolved issue.
You definitely don't need to (and shouldn't!) go as far as Japan, but even in places with abundant space like America or Australia, there are huge advantages to keeping homes relatively smaller in terms of land-area per-person. (Floor space can stay higher by: building multi-storey row houses, building apartments, reducing private lawn areas, etc.)
Keeping things less spread out is much, much more affordable. Fewer roads to maintain, fewer ks of electricity, sewerage, and Internet infrastructure, etc. It makes public transport run much more efficiently, which reduces the cost of operating it, which means you get more of it. This makes it a better service, which means people use it, which takes cars off the road, which makes congestion less of a problem, which makes getting around faster. Ditto the cost and usability of bike paths and nice pedestrian footpaths, which become more usable as a result of things being literally closer together, resulting in a store you might once have had to drive to get to being possible to walk to now. This in turn makes things more affordable for individuals, because they might not need to pay the huge prices associated with cars (buying the thing, maintenance, insurance, petrol) if they can get around by bike and public transport. Or at the very least, a family can drop down from 2 or 3 cars to just 1 being enough.
It makes housing more affordable, since instead of paying for 300 sq m of land per 100 sq m of floor space, you might now be paying 50 sq m or less of land per 100 sq m floor space. And because things a denser, your commute can drop from potentially over an hour to something reasonable like less than 30 minutes.
Oh, no argument here at all. I’m simply saying that a perfectly livable micro home could be the answer for those who would bitch about “I’m paying for my home and theirs is nicer” or similar.
Make a home that is adequate, but most would want to improve their lives and move out of.
Of course I’m more a supporter of UBI, which would likely solve this issue among many others if properly implemented. But that’s a different topic completely.
That sounds like a good proposition. Of course it doesn't matter what we think if we don't get loud about it in places that matter, like city hall meetings, letters to the city council members, shouting while standing on top of a milk crate with a bullhorn, and stuff like that.
I was just kidding about the milk crate.