3 ms·

Question: would it make more sense to have mobile housing? Not RV living or tiny homes or tent cities, but actual moveable homes and large plots. When plannin

Question: would it make more sense to have mobile housing? Not RV living or tiny homes or tent cities, but actual moveable homes and large plots. When planning new cities and townships, wouldn’t it be cheaper to rent out a 5k-10k sq ft plot and keep moving with the job. The idea tickles me especially because we started out as hunter gatherers and then nomadic tribes and pastoralists to urbanists. It will come a full circle. Homes as shells and land with infrastructure. Of course, this means other changes too with city designs and roads and public transport etc, but as a thought experiment..would it work? There may not be as many jobs in the future with automation, but we would still community spaces and living spaces. So cities can’t be designed with transit and commute in mind.

mindslight 7y ago
Every time I see some architectural experiment talking about "shipping containers" yet destroying the main quality that makes them shipping containers, I weep. Having said that, the problem with more "agile" housing is that lower cost inevitably gets taken over by the low end of the market. A large part of "having a house" appears to be the conspicuous consumption itself - imposing your presence on the surrounding area, subjecting yourself to a lot of property taxes, and being "part of the community". This makes sense if you flip from analyzing in terms of optimizing cost and think in terms of monkeysphere dominance. It's similar to why large companies are happy to hire as many unproductive seat warmers as they can regardless of the cost - the true measure of power is the army they command. FWIW the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles has a good exhibit on mobile homes, back when mobile homes were new and hadn't yet been associated with poverty living. The idea certainly wasn't just a hack to skirt zoning regulations! But yes it is interesting to think about how the regulatory landscape would change if topology could be easily reconfigured. One of the ideas of seasteading is that you could lower a section and float it under the others to move it out to a different group.

mindslight 7y ago

Every time I see some architectural experiment talking about "shipping containers" yet destroying the main quality that makes them shipping containers, I weep. Having said that, the problem with more "agile" housing is that lower cost inevitably gets taken over by the low end of the market. A large part of "having a house" appears to be the conspicuous consumption itself - imposing your presence on the surrounding area, subjecting yourself to a lot of property taxes, and being "part of the community". This makes sense if you flip from analyzing in terms of optimizing cost and think in terms of monkeysphere dominance. It's similar to why large companies are happy to hire as many unproductive seat warmers as they can regardless of the cost - the true measure of power is the army they command. FWIW the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles has a good exhibit on mobile homes, back when mobile homes were new and hadn't yet been associated with poverty living. The idea certainly wasn't just a hack to skirt zoning regulations! But yes it is interesting to think about how the regulatory landscape would change if topology could be easily reconfigured. One of the ideas of seasteading is that you could lower a section and float it under the others to move it out to a different group.