“Laid out in front of us is a landscape of contemporary housing. In the middle distance there is the memory of the Kelvin Flats, a huge 1960s housing development of deck-access housing based on the pattern of the seminal Park Hill housing. These projects were built in Sheffield’s heyday when it had the confidence to dream of new futures and when the Architectural Review devoted an entire issue to its pioneering architecture. Park Hill has just about clung on and is now Europe’s largest listed building, but the Kelvin Flats were demolished just thirty years after their completion. Opposite us, more 1960s housing has just been pulled down and is being replaced by eight storeys of student housing. These are designed down to very minimum and very specific standards; we watch as prefabricated bathroom units are hoisted up and clamped into place, closely spaced along the length, a long length, of corridors. [...] Rumour has it that elsewhere in the city student housing built two years ago is still half empty, and the owners in despair about what to do with it. In front of us more 1960s housing, this time in tower blocks that have recently been overclad at great expense, bringing the insulation standards up to contemporary expectations. Cowering under the tower blocks is a new development of semi-detached developer housing, fiddly little cavity-wall buildings with load-bearing internal partitions and pitched roofs stuffed full with timber trusses [...].” 1
EXPLORING COLLECTIVE PRODUCTION IN THE CONTEXT OF A DESIGN STUDIO LOOKING HOLISTICALLY AT HOUSING “What Now? The current economic crisis exposed the fragility of a social and affordable housing supply largely dependent, through Section 106, on private developers: lack of opportunities for high-margin profitable developments has meant a decline in the affordable housing provision. Critiques of the growth-based capitalist economic system are not new. […] With regards to housing, there is a very interesting emerging landscape made of cooperatives, co-housing schemes, mutual ownership schemes, user developed housing. […] All these initiatives have the potential to deliver housing that is decoupled from the logic of capitalist growth, no longer a commodity, but simply a place to live, in a society that is more equal and just. These housing models, however, are not substitutes for public housing provision: they can only complement it. Public provision of housing should be saved and safeguarded... Even in a cost cutting, shrinking, pure accounting logic, the social return on investment of a well functioning social housing system should make a convincing case for investing in its upkeep (if short-termism is put aside, that is). All attempts to unravel public housing should be seen as politics”. 2
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