#speculative development

[abhorrenttheorizer]

you guys wanna see a sky kid embryo?

no?

too bad lol xd

[abhorrenttheorizer]

I lied.

They are not babies.

Just very young children.

[abhorrenttheorizer]

I've forgotten how tedious animating is ;;

[terriblelinuxwallpaper]

Idea for a red, two-story, eclectic concrete fiberboard building with a gable roof

Imonio

[samuelbrowninfo]

“What’s exceptional about our housing market isn’t that there is so little selfbuild, but that there is so much speculative development.But can the reason for this be placed on our open access planning regime? Have we cooked up a system that not only gives us pokey homes with little or no garden but also makes us mostly very anti-development. This in turn makes release of land for housebuilding very contentious, which results in very expensive building land which, in turn, means even pokier homes with even smaller gardens? Have we, in other words, created a monster of a vicious circle which protects the countryside but does very little for our new housing stock or the people that aspire to live in it?”

“We could yet change course and encourage selfbuild, but it would have to be at the expense of the major housebuilders and that’s a message which I don’t think the government, for all its genuine enthusiasm for selfbuild, has really taken on board. We can have lots of selfbuild, like Germany, or lots of spec. build, as we do now, but we can’t have both. Planning policies either have to discriminate in favour of the little guys (be they local or not), or they leave a vacuum to be filled by big money.”

Read more from Mark Brinkley by clicking through the post title…

MCCB Actions:

Code blogpost for barriers and opportunities - and powerful soundbytes for film. Interesting proposition for proactive role at local authority UDP level to enable self-build in UK by providing serviced plots, rather than current reactive planning model relying simply on approval/refusal of speculative proposition.

Build our network: Contact Markus Kuhn and Cambridge University Selfbuild group; and other post commentors. Possible delegates to workshop? What do we pitch the workshop as? Is it a networking event? Is it a symposium? Is it an informal session like the Wick Sessions?