Build your own house via the Internet

Technology is helping to make housing more affordable and better suited to become a reality.

WikiHouse, an open source building system which aims to give people the digital tools to create cheap homes, is a research project, although it is beginning to see its first pilots in New Zealand, Europe and South Yorkshire.

Alastair Parvin, the brain behind WikiHouse believes that digital technology could transform the way people design and build their homes and hopes that his project can do for buildings what Uber and AirBnB have done for the taxi and hotel industries respectively.

"There is something fundamentally wrong with our housing economy, our dependence on a few large development companies to buy the land, beat their way through local community resistance and build rows of poor quality, unsustainable mass housing that fewer and fewer of us can afford," said Mr Parvin.

"Every major urban economy now faces a huge housing challenge. It's not just about building enough homes but also about breaking our dependence on fossil fuels and debt."

To draw up plans for their new home, users will visit the WikiHouse website (still under construction) and input some basic measurements such as the width and height, which algorithms will interpret and use to predict how much the project will cost and even how many screws it will need.

The components for the house will not be manufactured in centralised factories but by a distributed network of small businesses and community spaces where people get together to create things (maker-spaces).

"These micro-factories will be collectively one big factory rather like AirBnB is a huge hotel," said Mr Parvin.

Possible kits include studios micro houses and town houses.

Much of the material is deliberately low-tech - timber frames that can be put together, said Mr Parvin "using tools one can buy in B&Q".
Of course what WikiHouse does not provide is the land to build on, but that too could be changing as cities increasingly run out of space.

DemoDev - a project set up specifically to find space for affordable housing - recently conducted a study using open data from the UK's second biggest city Birmingham.

It found that the local authority had 14 hectares of land distributed around the urban centre, albeit in tiny little plots.

The UK government seems to be acknowledging that self-build projects are an important part of the housing future and has committed to doubling the size of the self and custom-built housing sector which currently accounts for under 10% of the housing supply.

After the video of CityHome went on YouTube, the team were inundated with enquiries from developers and, six months ago, created a start-up to build the furniture commercially.

Its designs are currently being piloted in existing apartments in Boston and feedback has been "largely positive", said Mr Larson.

The start-up is also in talks with around 20 developers about building such apartments from scratch.

Prof Larson believes that the concept can be extended to create smarter homes.


SOURCE: BBC News