*Huh. There's something to that.
So why not live in the empty factories, then... Hey wait, I see that done every day
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Housing originally emerged with the introduction of wage labor. Today, such forms and conditions of labor are rapidly disappearing, yet as a concept, housing has yet to change. Housing is still both thought of and implemented as the serial construction of isolated units, occasionally supplemented with a common room for the community and amenities like playgrounds, saunas or swimming pools.
This fainthearted mirroring of the demand for collective spaces that the public no longer is able to provide creates deliberately exclusive islands of community detached from one another within a neighborhood. While units still comply with a bourgeois idea of living, society has become radically re-organized, with an increasing percentage of households inhabited by single occupants.
Industry’s only reaction, it seems, is to urgently put forward the question of affordability and ask for creative solutions to dramatically shrink units all the while fitting all of the traditional functions and giving them the sense that they are not in fact so small.
While altering pre-existing units or conventional typologies are indeed possible, housing is a passive infrastructure that no longer mirrors reality, not to mention that today’s logic of housing production is detached from the actual needs of urban societies. I argue that in order to conceptualize it in such a way that it mirrors and can accommodate contemporary society’s dynamic in a meaningful way, it is necessary to call housing into question as the space for reproduction vis-à-vis production....
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Cities throughout Europe have been experiencing market pressure to rezone former industrial estates for housing; it is literally eating up land that was both formerly and projectively dedicated to material and immaterial production. City administration’s like in Vienna or Brussels are responding by introducing new zoning frameworks that blend housing with more traditional types of spaces for production.
The problem is that nobody, and certainly not the developers, know what labor, what production will look like or be in the future European city....
(...)
