Collective dwellings

This paper presents evidence that the sustainable dwelling involves the collective use of spaces and services at home. By exploring the possibility of sharing spaces and services and establishing a common use, we will save space and energy, increase the economic efficiency of dwellings, and gain new forms of socialization between users. In order to find these new forms of socialization that satisfy both users and environmental demands, we need to question the separation between private and common use. In this process we must guarantee individual privacy and comfort and probably divide users according to similar interests and profiles. With this model each person contributes his or her lifestyle to a sustainable society. Instead of having a society in which each home uses all the necessary services and spaces individually, acting as an isolated bubble and resulting in an inefficient consumption of resources, we should have a society in which homes and buildings are designed as a system of individual and shared spaces and services with intelligent resource consumption. This new sustainable society is only possible through new design proposals for the dwellings people live in. This is clearly the responsibility of architects. In the history of architecture several types of collective dwellings offer important and useful examples for the design of future proposals. These models have mostly responded to social needs and political visions, whereas today’s society demands an environmental purpose. 1. CHANGES IN DWELLINGS Although dwellings are a conservative reflection of society because they are normally not open to changes, our ways of living do adapt. The dwelling goes side by side with social transformations, reflecting in its organization the users’ social realities. Homes therefore respond to social demands. The evolution of habits is not reflected so much in the type of activities carried out at home, which remain almost the same. The major difference in today’s homes is the change of the type of relations inside dwellings, which is reflected in how these activities take place. Generalizing, we can say that activities that were once collective have now become individual. In the last few years there has been a reduction in the occupation of dwellings and an increase in single people’s homes, resulting in the demand for greater privacy. New lifestyles also have real effects at home. Internet has allowed people to work from home and people claim that this results in better comfort. There is a major ecological awareness, which starts at home, and a decreasing dedication to domestic tasks. (Paricio, 2000) 1.1 Population changes and their repercussions It is not only the activities taking place at home that have changed. The users have also changed, so the offer of dwellings must adapt to this new reality. Analyzing the evolution of Spain’s population, we found a falling number of inhabitants per home, from 3.2 in 1991 to 2.9 in 2001. (INE, 2001) In the same time period Spain has doubled the number of single-person households (Fig. 1). Figure 1: Variation in the census of the number of inhabitants per home between 1991 and 2001. Source: INE. This change affects two social groups: young people between the ages of 25-34 and elderly people aged over 65 (Fig. 2). These two groups suffer from a lack of available dwellings on the property market. Young people cannot afford an apartment and the elderly have special needs that cannot be satisfied in normal dwellings. In these two cases the solutions are residences for students and the elderly, or the social housing offered by the authorities. Residences are associated with a lifestyle that many people do not identify with. With low pay in their first years of work, young people cannot afford a flat by themselves, so they normally decide to rent a room or share an apartment with other people. With the increase in life expectancy, after retirement older people need to live in a community but are still too independent to live in nursing homes. Figure 2: Single-person homes by age groups and gender in the 2001 census. Source: INE. The decrease in the average family size and the increase in building and land prices have resulted in the saturation of cities and the reduction in the floor area of flats. The smaller flats offered by the market are not efficient. They have higher energy consumption than large ones, in both construction and use. (Pagès et al. 2008)The inefficiency of a flat does not increase in direct proportion to its size. A smaller flat requires a proportionally larger area to supply the same services, but also consumes more energy for heating. However, the most important fact is that energy consumption per person is higher in small flats than in large ones. The solution for this lies in the design of dwellings. The performance of small dwellings improves when some spaces and services are common with other homes.