DIY Urbanism: Self-Build in cities
Self-build opportunities in the UK tend to be limited to individuals working on marginal and suburban sites. Here we want to explore what the barriers are and the potential is for large scale self-build in an urban setting and how creating a better framework could enable ’self-procured’ housing .
The self-build market is a valuable but often overlooked provider of housing in the UK. Self-build and self-procured projects in the UK currently make up approximately 10% – 12% of new housing, which means that the output of the self-procurement sector is larger than the output of the largest single UK volume house builder.
However this is piffling compared with say Germany, where the self-procured sector can take up as much as 55% of the total new housing market and France were it hovers at around the 45% mark. Of course we believe that the market in the UK for self-build, co-operative, catalogue/kit and self-procured housing is so much greater then at present.
A survey by Norwich and Peterborough Building Society revealed that 70% of Homeowners considered the idea of building their own homes. Homeowners- that is just the people on the housing ladder, never mind about people who rent or god forbid don’t have a permanent home right now. Nearly 100,000 homeless households are living in temporary accommodation right now. This figure is the highest on record and has more than doubled since 1997.
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation anticipates that the self-procured sector could reach 20,000 units per annum.
One of the problems for this sector is that of density, most kits are essentially suburban in outlook, plot costs for individuals in city settings are often prohibitively expensive. Our wonderful “timbery Scandinavian world” gets a bit complex in terms of fire spread when we get closer then 1m to the party boundary.
This boundary is we believe a key to pull individual family self-builders into town, as with barrier rails on stairs in the circulation spaces of large sports venues, (four people use a 3m wide stair with a barrier rail in the center, as opposed to two people without), the party wall as we all know acts as a cleavage – i.e. a separation or a bring together.
The Party-wall project, developed by mæ Architects aims to enable the self procurement of housing by providing the infrastructure that can help deliver self-build housing at a density required in PPS3 and achieve economies of scale through the efficient use of land.
Basically it’s a system of serviced plots and, as it’s name suggests, Party walls. First of all footings are installed below for a load bearing façade and party walls. All services connections are brought to the plot and capped off at screed level. The party walls are structurally and acoustically separated, if next door takes a year to complete their house and you have finished in three months you do not want to be bothered on Saturday morning by their power tools etc. The walls provide all the structure for a project, which is designed to accommodate simple sawn timber joist floor decks. The parameters for detailed design such as materials could be agreed across the whole self-build neighbourhood with the Local Authority and could be subject to an agreed set of design codes to give some certainty of outcome, if it was felt that was a priority.
So we know who these potential self-builders are, they would seem to be most of us, but why do people want to self-build in the first place? There may be cost benefits, (this is often why most people say that they embark upon this route of procurement), however because self build sector is so small in this country, and because the sites are often single plot or with only a few units, there may not be the economies of scale which any volume house builder can pass on, even with their 10 – 15% profit margin.
Co-operative self-build housing schemes offer benefits in terms of establishing social capital early on in the development of a project; it offers educational benefits, evidenced through a number of enabled self-build training programs run by Housing Associations such as Mosaic Housing Association. Groups help with cost saving issues. The enabled group approach to self-procured housing provision offers the potential to create, (that most Blairite concept), a truly sustainable community.
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