The house of the future? A sun-filled, shape-shifting, shed-share paradise

What will homes be like 10 years from now? Judging by the winners of the Home of 2030 competition, sharing will be key.

Shared home-working spaces, communal garden sheds and houses built using apps—these are just some of the ideas in the winning proposals for the government’s Home of 2030 competition to develop prototype “homes fit for the future”,    1    the “best of British design”. The aim was to imagine what the best age-adaptable, energy-efficient, healthy homes might look like in 10 years’ time; but, according to the winning architects, most of the best ideas have been around for generations.

“You can’t get much more     2    and adaptable than the Georgian townhouse,” says Jennifer Beningfield of Openstudio, leader of one of the two winning teams announced today. “We’ve taken this very simple model and     3    it for the 21st century. Our idea was to create infinite choice and variation from something very simple.”

Her team’s scheme imagines a terraced (排房的) housing type made from two standard components, a base unit and a loft, joined with “connector” pieces, taking into account multiple configurations (布局) over time as family     4    change. Standing between the homes, the connectors would     5    stairs and a lift, as well as storage and shared workspace. One of the most important aspects since the pandemic, says Beningfield, is providing “space to work from home, without having your laptop on the kitchen table”. Each home would have its own private outdoor space, while they would all back on to large communal gardens, arranged in the     6    of a traditional London square.

Built off-site to demanding Passivhaus standards, with a twin wall timber frame, the homes would be     7    by generous 2.7m high ceilings and tall 2.5m windows and doors, massively increasing the amount of daylight brought into the rooms, compared with most new-build spec housing. Beningfield, who studied and worked in South Africa and the US, says that off-site construction is crucial, given the shocking build quality of so many new homes in the UK – which she fears will only get worse after Brexit, if much of the skilled     8    is forced to leave.

As is so often the case with blue-sky (纯理论的) ideas competitions, the ambitions of the Home of 2030 winning teams are     9    – and, in this case, completely buildable – but there is little evidence to suggest that either the government or the volume housebuilding sector has any intention of putting them into practice. For that, we must look to Sunderland in 2023, and hope that a(n)    10    union of other councils, communities and smaller-scale builders have the imagination to follow their lead.

The Mega-City Environment

Mega-cities suffer from a catalog of environmental ills. A World Health Organization(WHO)/United Nations Environment Program(UNEP)study found that seven of the cities-Mexico City, Beijing, Cairo, Jakarta, Los Angeles, Sao Paulo and Moscow-had three or more pollutants that    1     the WHO health protection guidelines. All 20 of the cities studied by WHO/UNEP had at least one major pollutant that went beyond    2     health limits.

According to the World Resources Institute, “Millions of children living in the world’s largest cities, particularly in developing countries, are    3     to life-threatening air pollution two to eight times above the maximum based on WHO guidelines. Indeed, more than 80 percent of all deaths in developing countries    4     to air pollution-induced lung infections are among children under five.” In the big Asian mega-cities such as New Delhi, Beijing and Jakarta, approximately 20 to 30 percent of all respiratory diseases    5     from air pollution.

Almost all of the mega-cities face major fresh water challenges. Johannesburg, South Africa, is forced to draw water from highlands 370 miles away. In Bangkok, saltwater is invading aquifers(地下蓄水层). Mexico City has a serious    6     problem because of excessive groundwater withdrawal.

More than a billion people, 20 percent of the world’s population, live without regular    7     to clean running water. While poor people are forced to pay high fees for private water, many cities squander their resources through leakages and illegal    8    . “With the population of cities expected to increase to five billion by 2025,” says Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the UNEP, “the urban demand for water is set to increase rapidly. This means that any solution to the water crisis is closely linked to the governance of cities.“

Mega-city residents, crowded into unsanitary slums, are also subject to serious disease outbreaks. Lima, Peru(with population estimated at 9.4 million by 2015)suffered a cholera outbreak in the late 1990s partly because, as the New York Times reported, ”rural people new to Lima...live in houses without running water and use the outhouses(屋外厕所)that    9     the hillsides above.“

It’s worth looking at some of these    10     mega-cities in detail, because daily life there is likely to be the pattern for a majority of the world’s population. Most are already experiencing severe environmental problems that will only be worsened by rapid population increases.

Recycling can be defined as the process of converting waste materials into new materials and objects. It can save material and help lower greenhouse gas emissions. The aim of recycling is to avoid     1     waste disposal. It contributes to the prevention of the waste of potentially useful materials and reduces the consumption of fresh raw materials, thereby reducing: energy usage, air pollution, and water pollution from     2    . This practice has been around throughout the history of mankind,     3     from the fourth century BC.

Recyclable materials include many kinds of glass, paper, and     4     metal, plastic, tires, and electronics. The composting(堆肥) or other reuse of biodegradable waste- such as food or garden waste- is also     5     as recycling.

Materials to be recycled are either brought to a collection center or picked up from the roadside, then     6     cleaned, and reprocessed into new materials for manufacturing.

In the strictest sense, recycling of a material would produce a fresh     7     of the same material- -for example, used office paper would be changed into new office paper. However, this is often     8     difficult or too expensive (compared with producing the same product from raw materials or other sources), so “recycling” of many products or materials involves their reuse in producing different materials instead. Another form of recycling is the rescue of certain materials from complex products, either due to their intrinsic（内在的） value or due to their dangerous nature.

Much of the difficulty in recycling comes from the fact that most products are not designed with recycling in mind. The concept of     9     design aims to solve this problem. Now scientists suggest that every product and all     10     they require should have a complete “closed-loop” cycle mapped out for each component- a way in which every component will either return to the natural ecosystem through biodegradation or be recycled indefinitely.