The Proposal

Conscious City for Gen. Y.

Proposal

Introduction

Three separate issues I want to address:

• Space is inefficiently distributed and utilised, therefore expensive.

• We are using resources at a rate which cannot continue.

• We are a generation which values experience more than material possessions which we own.

This is of course a generalisation but nonetheless a shift which is relevant. All you need to do is look at your facebook newsfeed where your friends have 'checked in'  to Heathrow with three of their friends and they're 'felling excited' about it. 

Anecdote

This summer I moved to Barcelona for two months to experience the city which I studied last year. While I was there I became aware that to do this...my friend was renting my room from me in oxford which I have rented for three years, to enable me to rent a room from someone has was renting it from someone else, so they could rent elsewhere. Additionally while I was there my temporary housemate was renting her room to other people at the weekends.

We were exchanging the spaces which we were entitled to occupy at any given time.

Essentially what we were doing was collaboratively consuming space.

This has huge potential

If you could flexibly locate where you live according to your current life requirements, you could inhabit endless locations, neighbourhoods, travel less, commute less, use less resources, meet new people, discover new places and EXPERIENCE MORE.

But it also has implications

To flexibly and regularly relocate ourselves...

the use of buildings needs to be more flexible (we need to work out which the uses of buildings which can't change)

we need to have less stuff,

we need to think about physical things we own which could be digitised (e.g. books to kindle)

but we need to simplify our lives so we can pick it up and move it somewhere else as easily as if we were going  to the shops and by doing so work out what it is which we own that is important to us.

But really to make this possible, we need to share and to adopt a shared economy.

Essentially to collaboratively consume space, we need to move away from hyper consumption towards collaborative consumption. We need to believe that access (to what we need) gives us equal security to ownership (of what we need)

For example, that saucepan which you have in your kitchen at the moment, maybe you only have access to that saucepan at the time and location when you need it and other people can use it inbetween.

But how can we share such personal or minute details of our lives on such a large scale?

The internet is currently enabling the shared economy and collaboratively consume services and commodities.

Think

zip car,

airbnb,

boris bikes...

The key things the internet provides within the shared economy is

security - you know who's lending and borrowing, selling and buying

and we have real time information in a world which has never been more connected.

why can't we collaboratively consume space?

Data

is  being collated on our location and on what we are doing. Whether we like it or not. The apps which we use on our phone, our gps is all generating data.

This data could be harnessed and processed in such as way that we could match people with spaces in buildings in real time.

so by harnessing data and using the internet we can create and live in, a real time responsive environment.

We can create a conscious city where space and resources are distributed and used efficiently. where we EXPERIENCE MORE.

Architecture....where now?

Access over ownership fundamentally changes how we define and live our lives, current concept is to design a conceptual city based on a shared economy of space and commodities. Blur the boundaries which we are accustomed to in our current society.