them for. So let’s stop beating them up for not doing something they’re not really equipped to do. Find people who are. Maybe you then go back to the house builders and say, we want these people to be involved, and we want you to build houses for them. This is really where the CLG would like this ‘self build’ interest to go – not exclusively – but they have said that we’d like to see how self organisers can engage with mainstream house builders so that they can develop a new range of services and products. The other thing I’m trying to add into that narrative really comes out of work I’ve was doing last year. I was a lead enabler at CABE on a project reviewing nearly 300 Kickstart Round 1 projects, and then I was on the Housing Design Awards panel, and there were 200 schemes there – so I’ve looked at nearly 500 schemes in a year… a pretty depressing experience. They’re all the same: the space outside and between the buildings is crap! With just a few, a very few honourable exceptions. The conclusion we came to was that most house builders simply don’t know what the space outside the buildings is for. What I’ve found over the when I’d been years is that, almost by looking for default, when I’d been looking for successful successful schemes, I’d been schemes, I’d been choosing, without consciously knowing choosing, without it, self-commissioned consciously housing, cooperatives, knowing it, selfCLTs, co-ownership, and co-housing projects. commissioned These were the ones housing, where residents did know what the space cooperatives, between the buildings CLTs, was for…they designed for it, and then they lived co-ownership, the experience of that and co-housing space and place…often magical in quality. projects So the big story is, if you want that kind of product it’s got to come from the right process. Absolutely. And if you want decent space around the building that people own, inhabit, use… then they must also be involved in its design, production and finally stewardship. People will say that can’t be done, not because it can’t but because they don’t know how to or just won’t change what they do now. At last year’s UK Co-housing Network Conference, I heard US cohousing architects Chuck Durrett and Kathryn McCamant. What they now find in the States is that because of the quality of placemaking
that comes out of cohousing – a developer, often a New Urbanist one will either look out for a cohousing group, or they get in touch with Chuck, when they’re looking for a partner for the site breaking first phase of a new 400 to 500 unit development. It reduces marketing risk, introduces cash flow, gives them a project of 30 to 40 homes to build efficiently all at once; and they don’t have to discount the first batch of sales! So you’re saying that there is this institutional shift in the market realising the advantage of allocating a portion of a project to self-provided housing? Yes... There was a scheme in North Denver where this happened in the first phase, and because people started inhabiting the public spaces straight away, the developer photographed it and used it as promotional material. So, you’ve got a living advert when people come and visit the site. But although the developer has copied many aspects of the layout in the later phases, nobody uses the space in the same way; they all migrate to the cohousing part! Which the cohousing people actually seem be quite happy about because it makes the whole place more sociable, and they’re the centre of the place. But again, it’s ironic, people think you can achieve something of quality and character by copying the look of it, but you can’t. That’s how most of our design codes work…they are about picture book styles rather than an understanding of how places are made, adapt and acquire character over time.
people think you can achieve something of quality and character by copying the look of it, but you can’t.
Going back to the issue of finance... What realistic pathways do you see for improving the financing situation? Even if there are support agencies who can turn around the political inertia. I think there are opportunities for particular people to take up the enabling role. There are one or two large housebuilders, and certainly quite a few smaller ones who want to do it, and have got a good track record, and are respected in the industry. The second thing is to develop relationships with bigger players. In the RSL world, people like Accord and Synergy are always held up as good enabling development partners. Equally, there are some situations where both a local authority and a major house builder want to do a selforganised housing scheme as an exemplar. It’s about creating a product they can pick up easily, in terms of somebody else locating and supporting the social organisation. There is a job to link groups to land and enabling development partners, negotiate a deal around sharing the risks that are unique to that project. There may be cases where the group will take the whole risk, and the house builders just build to order, and others where the developer takes more risk, especially on 76