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Let’s briefly talk about every millennial’s favourite topic: smashed avocados housing affordability.
My hometown of Melbourne has – depending on how you measure it – one of the world’s least affordable housing markets. For those who already benefit from the ‘housing-as-a-commodity’ model, the pandemic has been a surprising godsend. In the last twelve months alone, Australia’s median property price increased by about A$2,000 per week. Per week. House prices have gone beyond ludicrous and then some.
More and more people are looking at a lifetime of being at the whims of landlords. Sure, renting isn’t all bad – my family has never owned property and I had a happy, steady childhood – but in many countries, tenancy laws are as poor and inadequate as the quality of the buildings they apply to.
Here in Australia, most new apartment developments are built quickly and cheaply, designed to maximise first the developer’s, then the investor’s return. How those spaces will be used by their occupants is often a mere afterthought. I mean, what family wants to live in dark, poorly insulated boxes, connected by long, windowless corridors, in a building with as much community character as the lower deck of a crypto cruise ship?
It’s a real shame because medium-density developments are crucial for providing more affordable and more sustainable housing for our growing cities. Most of them just aren’t designed for people to live and thrive in.
Better alternatives are possible, and as you’d expect, Europe is leading the way. Baugruppen and co-housing projects put people’s needs first and can offer a remedy for our socially isolated existence. I recently came across 26 Aroha, a wonderfully transparent project that’s pushing the boundaries in New Zealand. Closer to home, Melbourne has two interesting models taking shape: Assemble, a rent-to-own scheme that gives residents the option to purchase a well-built apartment after a period of renting (and saving); and Nightingale*, a not-for-profit model that aims to build quality, community-focused, sustainable housing at cost.
None of these projects will magically fix the housing crisis, but they show that better medium-density living is possible, desirable, and economically and ecologically more sustainable. It’s a big change for a country where everyone’s ultimate goal is to own a quarter acre block with a detached house on it, the result of which is 60 kilometres of congested suburban sprawl.
Something I’m quite excited about: one of my favourite YouTube channels, Never Too Small, just launched a trailer for a new documentary series examining how we can better design small spaces so that our cities can be more sustainable, inclusive and enjoyable.
If you’ve come across similar housing projects in your country, I’d love to hear about them in the comments!
– Kai
*Disclosure: I’m a purchaser of a Nightingale apartment. It’s still in development, so ask me mid next year how it’s going. 😉
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Become a Friend of DD →
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You receive this email because you subscribed to Dense Discovery, a weekly newsletter at the intersection of technology, design, ethics and sustainability. Writing to you is Kai Brach, also the editor and publisher of Offscreen Magazine. Do you have a product or service to promote in DD? Sponsor an issue or book a classified.
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Video calls for design teams
Feeling exhausted after endless video meetings? Come Around. Our lightweight, unobtrusive video calls reduce fatigue, free up your screen, and are built for creative sessions where working together is the focus. It’s perfect for design sessions, brainstorms and ad-hoc syncs.
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Apps & Sites
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Raycast is Spotlight on steroids: besides standard features such as finding files, launching apps and being a smart clipboard tool, Raycast’s extensions offer commands to query and control third party services such as Jira, GitHub, G Suite, and many others.
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It works a bit like a Whatsapp group but looks more like Twitter: Bunches are private chat rooms that you can share with friends, colleagues or family members. You can also make it a paid-only Bunch by charging a monthly fee for access.
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An impressive database of almost 4000 consistently illustrated, lovely looking emojis that are free to use under Creative Commons.
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Draw ridgelines of any terrain
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From the creator of City Roads (see #154), this little script draws ridgelines for the elevation levels of any place on the planet. You can download the generated images as an SVG to create your own art.
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Worthy Five: Catalin Zorzini
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Five recommendations by mindfulness enthusiast and mobile app creator Catalin Zorzini
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A concept worth understanding:
Interbeing is a term coined by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh to point towards the interdependent nature of everything: “To be is to inter-be”, he says. And he is strongly encouraging us to train in experiencing it, rather than only understand it as a concept.
A video worth watching:
Charlie Kilman has been consistently creating extremely well-documented, thought-provoking and actionable short videos on the Our Changing Climate YT channel. How We End Consumerism is a recent episode, packed with facts and insights at only 11 minutes long!
A podcast worth listening to:
Christiana Figueres, the architect of the historic 2015 Paris Agreement and the equally #StubbornOptimist Tom Rivett-Carnac are on a constant crusade against both ignorance and despair in the face of the climate crisis, in one of the most enlightening podcasts: Outrage and Optimism.
A newsletter worth subscribing to:
My inbox tends to become quite predictable, so I’m always grateful to receive some surprising, awe-inspiring nuggets from rock-legend-turned-spiritual-thinker Nick Cave, through his Red Hand Files.
A book worth reading:
Philosopher Eugene Gendlin is one of the unsung heroes of modern somatic experiencing therapy. In the ’60s he studied extensively what made psychotherapy sessions either successful or unsuccessful and found out that the decisive factor is the ability of the client to focus inside himself on a very subtle and vague internal bodily awareness. His book Focusing is an absolute gem!
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Books & Accessories
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Connecting with people we don’t know
The book all of us need to read: “In our cities, we stand in silence at the pharmacy and in check-out lines at the grocery store, distracted by our phones, barely acknowledging one another, even as rates of loneliness skyrocket. Online, we retreat into ideological silos reinforced by algorithms designed to serve us only familiar ideas and like-minded users. In our politics, we are increasingly consumed by a fear of people we’ve never met. But what if strangers – so often blamed for our most pressing political, social, and personal problems – are actually the solution?”
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Raising avid readers
As a kids-loving non-parent, I’m more than happy to pass on this tip from a parenting friend: this best-selling, recently updated classic from 1982 has apparently helped millions of kids find their love for books and improve their language skills. “The Read-Aloud Handbook offers proven techniques and strategies for helping children of all backgrounds and abilities discover the pleasures of reading and setting them on the road to becoming lifelong readers.”
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Overheard on Twitter
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Don’t spend 6 minutes doing something by hand when you can spend 6 hours failing to automate it.
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Food for Thought
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Took me a while to get to it, but Debbie Chachra’s latest essay on how basic shared infrastructure provides baseline level agency and opportunity for individuals is a real treat. “Water treatment plants are a physical instantiation of the idea that politics are the structures we create when we are in a sustained relationship with other people. They’re more than just the technological systems. They’re also a connection to the expertise, labour, and care of all the people that make sure that the water is safe to drink, and a recognition by the city’s residents that they are connected to each other through the landscape and the human-made watershed of pipes that are laid on top of it (or buried beneath).”
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As someone who does a fair amount of eye-rolling at the fashion industry, this essay offered me a new perspective. The piece uses the tech elites’ supposed indifference to fashion to argue that it is a sign of tech platform’s broader contempt for the commons. “The individuals who represent Silicon Valley to the world – the CEOs of the largest tech companies as well as the rank-and-file employees – often appear to be decidedly anti-fashion in their personal aesthetics, as though it were all a superficial nuisance they would rather ignore or abolish altogether. ... Why waste time deciding which shirt to wear when there are ads and landing pages to A/B test? Downplaying one’s interest in fashion may appeal to those who want to signal that they are occupied with higher pursuits than personal vanity, such as ‘changing the world’.”
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I never heard of the idea of ‘lying flat’ before – an anti-busyness ‘movement’ that started in China and is founded on a simple realisation: Work has become intolerable. Rest is resistance. “Mr. Luo acknowledged the necessity of making a living, and @hollabekgrl didn’t say she never wanted to work at a job or hone a craft; she said she doesn’t want a ‘career’, a corporate-flavored word that conjures images of PowerPoints and power suits. While jobs are sustenance, careers are altars upon which all else is sacrificed.” (Possible soft paywall)
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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These fascinating images of the vast archives of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History were taken over a period of twenty years. “The Natural History museum’s collections are so large that despite the sprawling three levels of the building open to the public, less than one percent of them are on display at any given time.”
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Craig Mod’s latest book Kissa by Kissa probably won’t need much of an introduction, but here is one anyway: “Kissa by Kissa is a book about walking 1,000+km of the countryside of Japan along the ancient Nakasendō highway, the culture of toast (toast!), and mid-twentieth century Japanese cafés called kissaten.” After selling out twice (!), Craig just released the third edition and Friends of DD get to enjoy a $10 discount.
Become a Friend to access specials like this.
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I love how well the combination of colours, icons, and a mix of serif and sans-serif typefaces work in this great branding and digital campaign design for the Alfred Landecker Foundation.
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The little kick tails give Attila an unusual, distinct character: “An unlikely mash-up of German blackletter and early sans-serif font design, F37 Attila has its very own quirky personality.”
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Classifieds
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The Week in a GIF
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Reply or tweet at DD with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
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Did You Know?
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The shape of Pringles is called a hyperbolic paraboloid.
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In calculus, a hyperbolic paraboloid is a doubly-curved surface that resembles the shape of a saddle. This shape makes it easier to stack the chips and minimises the possibility of breaking during transport. Due to its saddle shape, there is no predictable way to break it up, which apparently increases that crunchy feeling.
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