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 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