A vision of sustainable housing for all of humanity

Architect Vishaan Chakrabarti wants us to start thinking about how we'll house all these people -- and how new construction can fight climate change rather than make it worse.

In this visionary TED talk, Chakrabarti proposes a "Goldilocks" solution to sustainable housing that exists in the sweet spot between single-family homes and towering skyscrapers.

''So we have a paradox. How do we house all of these people, how do we build urban carbon-negative housing in a means that's technologically attainable and broadly affordable -- and do that today? Because I'm tired of talking about 2050.''

https://www.ted.com/talks/vishaan_chakrabarti_a_vision_of_sustainable_housing_for_all_of_humanity

''I believe that the answer is hiding in plain sight, that there is what I call a “Goldilocks” scale that sits between the scale of housing and towers: two- to three-story housing that should actually look very familiar to most of you, because we built the most beloved parts of our cities with it. The row houses of Boston, the hutong districts of Beijing, most of the fabric of Edinburgh. What we now build in this scale are largely cheap suburban townhomes. They're banal, they're not sustainable, they're not walkable, they're certainly not beautiful. But could they provide a hint of a framework for a human-scale way of solving this problem that is great for both the climate and our societies.''

''This Goldilocks framework hits the sweet spot between the number of people it can house and the amount of roof area we need to provide them and their communities [with] power. It can be built out of simple local materials, like wood or brick, both of which have relatively low embodied energy and could be built by local workers. And the solar panels up above could be supplemented with state-of-the-art battery systems that level out solar supply and user demand. Similarly, we can have electric, state-of-the-art air conditioning and heating systems -- this exists today. They can create thermal storage. What that means is it can produce ice or hot water off-peak, for use on-peak. This housing could compost food scraps and solid waste, and turn it into usable soils or protein for animal feed. And I think, most importantly, this kind of housing could provide affordable, communal, equitable housing for communities in dire need of it. And I work with a lot of these communities, and I know how much demand there is for this out there.''

''Speaking of communities ... I want to emphasize that this is not a one-size-fits-all solution. This is a framework. It's a template. We can work with communities to make this housing appealing, visually and socially, make it socially and racially mixed, integrated into the lives of existing communities. And when it's built into our cities, what it means is that it's dense enough to support mass transit, like light-rail, express busses, bikes. There are networks that plug into jobs, schools, parks and other daily destinations in our cities. This housing is compact enough that it leaves room for lots of trees and ground cover. That means that we can lower stormwater impacts; we can reduce the heat island effect; we can lower the demand for air conditioning. And for every family that lives in an apartment like this, it's one less house destroying farms and forests.''

''Our collaborating engineers at Thornton Tomasetti have assured us that this is the lowest-carbon-footprint-per-person means of habitation, while also providing a sustainable use of land on our planet.''

So why not here in Montréal?