Edwin Heathcote refers to forementioned architect of Habitat ’67 and Sky Habitat, Moshe Safdie, as one of several ‘pod-fathers’ whose designs were equally organic and futuristic. Another was artist-architect Constant Figure 3.5 Bosco Verticale (Vertical Forest) apartments, Milan (Boeri Studio, Milan)
Source: Photographer Paolo Rosselli (Milan) and Boeri Studio
Nieuwenhuys, who made designs for an anti-capitalist city New Babylon (1959–1974, Amsterdam), where nomadic urbanites would play below stilted removable structures. Richard Rogers Lloyd’s Building in London (1972) features prefabricated smart micro-apartments with a porthole style window. Kisho Kurokawa used pods to construct beehives of minimalist worker-homes, the most famous of which is Nakagin Capsule Tower (1972) – prompting commercial capsule hotels.62
Indeed, in contemporary Tokyo, we find the most extreme examples of stacked ‘micro-apartment’ capsule rooms without windows or doors in capsule hotels. ‘The largest is 6½ feet deep by 5 feet wide,’ Kahn reported of one capsule hotel, ‘you can’t stand up inside.’ Initially aimed at late-night workers for an occasional short-night sleepover, some take up monthly rental in capsules where there is ‘barely enough room for an adult to lie down completely flat’. Reported, in the early 2010s, as sometimes costing US$600–700 per month, young unemployed to hard-working, hard-playing professionals find here ‘a shelf, perhaps a tiny television, and some poor lighting, and that’s your home-sweet home’.63
A range of contemporary architects have applied themselves to designing tiny pre-fab units, which might be hoisted into place on the top of existing urban buildings for owner-occupation or rental tenancies (Figure 3.6). In this vein, Architects Rintala Eggertson’s Boxhome in Oslo (Norway) created a prototype 19sq m two-storey timber and aluminium
‘urban cave’ – Figure 3.7 – most significantly for a quarter of the cost of a similarly sized urban apartment.64
Given that one working definition of a micro-apartment is ‘a self-contained unit smaller than 350ft2 [32.6m2] often found in either a mid- or high-rise, a new or a converted building’, it is not surprising that views on micro-apartments slot into the slum and tenement mould, particularly when they appear en masse, say in student accommo-dation. So, it might surprise that a 2014 study by the US Urban Land Institute (ULI) found that, especially in compact cities – NYC, Boston, Washington, San Francisco and Seattle – micro-apartments tend to have lower vacancy rates and higher rents per square foot compared with larger local apartments. This is mainly due to the attractiveness of their typically central location and considerably cheaper rent, around 20–30 per cent of local larger apartments. Furthermore, a small survey referred to by the ULI suggested that almost one-quarter of renters in other kinds of apartments were attracted to micro-apartment living as an option despite concerns with lack of storage space.65
Figure 3.6 Boxhome in Oslo, Norway (Rintala Eggertson Architects) Source: Photographer Ivan Brodey (Oslo, Norway)
Figure 3.7 Sketches of Boxhome (Rintala Eggertson Architects, Oslo) Source: Sami Rintala and Dagur Eggertson (architects) and John Roger Holte (artist)
The size of such apartments relies on commercial considerations, minimum size eligibility criterion for mortgage funds, and minimums set by local council regulations. Reducing minimum size rules often causes public controversy. In San Francisco and the District of Columbia that, of course, includes Washington DC, an apartment can be as small as 220sq ft (20.4sq m) while Dallas’s minimum is 500sq ft(46.5sq m). ULI research indicated that a micro-apartment often needed to be 300sq ft (27.8sq m) to accommodate regular furniture and appliances and to be compliant with government standards.66
When City of Melbourne planners considered raising minimum sizes for apartments in 2015, local architect Michael Roper – owner-occupier of a 24sq m apartment in the historic 1936 modernist inner suburban building ‘Cairo’ – suggested that rigid standards failed to take account of the diversity of individual buildings and amenities. His intervention in the policymaking debate proposed: ‘an effective peer-review process, whereby trained design professionals assess the quality and liveability of multi-residential developments on a case-by-case basis’. Roper had a 10sq m private garden amid other apartment gardens, access to a rooftop terrace, and copious surrounding public gardens. Inspired by London living, Best Overend designed this block of 28 ‘minimal’ one-bedroom and studio apartments with ‘maximum comfort’ in mind: a rooftop space for socialising, a communal dining room, two communal laundries, a shop (now defunct) and eight garages. Installing a foldout bed and internal curtain to divide and hide according to activities, Roper had found it perfectly adequate eighty years after Cairo was built.67
Such examples appear dotted round global cities. A shared garden, making maximum use of high ceilings, and a fold-away bed explain how a NYC owner-occupier couple made a 242sq ft(22.5sq m) apartment a comfortable home.68 Figure 3.8 shows how an architecture firm converted another NYC studio into a one-bedroom loft apartment by inserting a central wood station – with an internal kitchen, bathroom, storage and mezzanine bedroom above – to effectively divide the space into three components.69
Many micro-apartment dwellers are professional singles under 30 years of age. Adaptable and movable furniture, built-in storage, fold-down tables and beds, and mezzanine bed spaces where there are high ceilings can make micro-apartment living feasible. Generally, micro-apartment dwellers have access to numerous common facilities:
laundry, parking spaces and bike rack, gym, game room, storage and an
outdoor or roof space. Furthermore, the ULI study indicated a recent movement to create many small meeting and leisure spaces throughout US micro-apartment blocks and increasing permission to have pets.70
Following MPF Research data, in the decade between 2002–2003 and 2012–2013, US studio and one-bedroom apartments rose from 41 per cent to almost 51 per cent of total apartment completions, sig-nificantly accounting for a reduction in the total average apartment size as three-bedroom apartments increased in size! Still, small micro-apartments were a tiny proportion (3 per cent) of total 2012–2013 deliveries. While micro-apartment dwellers tended to move on quicker than tenants of other apartments, ULI researchers found that more than one-third of those surveyed had showed interest in purchasing one. Some have flexible floor plans, utility components and walls so adjacent micro-apartments can be rearranged and merged to make a larger apartment.71
‘Small spaces come in a myriad of styles, united only by size,’
concludes architect Bruce Hayden. By way of examples, architect Gary Chang’s 330sq ft (30.7sq m) ‘transformer’ apartment in Hong Kong and Figure 3.8 East Village Studio NYC (Jordan Parnass Digital Architecture) Source: Photographer Frank Oudeman (Brooklyn)
Christian Schallert’s 24sq m apartment in Barcelona show great inven-tiveness in making a tiny space multi-functional.72 Micro-apartments might make CBD infill easier. They certainly suit specific age groups and demographic types, but residents depend on access to common facilities and services within their block, and proximity to even greater amenity within a highly urban environment, where their overall environmental impact is a matter for speculation.
conclusion
Harvard Professor of Economics Edward Glaeser, who waves the flag of a contemporary version of the discredited trickle-down effect, iterates a popular forecast of expanding and unending urbanism while fellow US journalist David Owen, argues that we should all live like residents of Manhattan.73 However, Lewis Mumford’s conclusion was far more pessimistic. Based on experience of the half century before his The City in History was published in 1961 and heralding current deep-green analyses pointing to the apocalypse of unabated climate change, Mumford suggested that ‘metropolitan civilization contains within itself the explosive forces that will wipe out all traces of its existence’. In short:
Those who believe that there are no alternatives to the present prolif-eration of metropolitan tissue perhaps overlook too easily the historic outcome of such a concentration of urban power: they forget that this has repeatedly marked the last stage in the classic cycle of civilization, before its complete disruption and downfall.74
Indeed, forecasts of food and water shortages, mass migrations, climatic uncertainties and rises in ‘natural disasters’ in lieu of climate change all conspire to interrupt and frustrate the optimistic tone of Glaeser’s Triumph of the City. Even he remarks on the strange paradox that ‘in much of coastal America, home prices are dramatically higher than construction costs’.75 To add to the illogic between drivers of market preferences and hard reality, it is precisely coastal regions that are prone to the effects of global climate change, such as rises in sea levels, tsunamis and hurricanes.76 Here the economic and environmental dysfunctions of capitalist ‘progress’ clash. Furthermore, in his massive Millennium, Oxford scholar Felipe Fernández-Armesto forecasts that ‘cities will wither’ as people make use of networked technologies sited in smaller
village-like towns facilitating intimate face-to-face contact: ‘Today’s cities are in part the products of functions which technological progress is gradually eliminating.’77
While the apartment does not owe its existence to the megalopolis, many urban dwellers do live in apartments. Despite all the reforms and experiments with different models over the last two centuries, the apartment as a generic type retains its original sub-types, highlighted in poorly designed and windowless micro-apartments with few envi-ronmentally friendly features versus larger middle-class apartments and monstrous penthouses where over-consumption proliferates. Contra-dictions born of poverty and prosperity, sprawl and towers, commercial standardisation and innovations at the margins characterise all capitalist societies.
The rest of this book uses this point of flux – as capitalism unapolo-getically furthers its thrust deeper and wider than ever before, even as harbingers of post-capitalism spring up in all quarters to call for, and bear news of, relief – to explore new forms of living, which might be urban, peri-urban or rural, that include both detached and attached residences and, most significantly, address the environmental perils that challenge the future of every city on Earth today. A key concern is the potential for each of us individually and collectively to act as ‘sustainability citizens’, embedding the structures, systems and behaviour we need to make the places we live in socially just and environmentally sustainable.78 The next chapter, then, focuses on the area we seem to have most control over – our home as a nest, its interior design, functions and potential achievements in fostering and enabling sustainability.