City Villages: Desirable public housing for a greener future

We are currently facing several issues:

A housing crisis – housing in places which are desirable (ie: cities) is very short, and not much appears to be done to actually alleviate it.
A loneliness crisis – people have a harder and harder time connecting to others.
A climate crisis – resources are wasted on things like transportation (think long traffic jams in cars), with no real benefit for anyone.

I believe that we can perhaps not fully resolve, but help all three issues with an idea I call “City Villages”.

What is a City Village?

A City Village is a concept to combine the benefits of a city (everything is nearby) with the benefits of a village (you have a much easier time connecting with your neighbors).

In practice, this means some of the following features:

A City Village is designed with walkability, bikeability and public transportation in mind. Cars, as a rule, are banned. Exceptions may be made for people who really, really need cars on a daily basis (and not merely to commute to work).
A City Village is designed with communities in mind. This means that each City Village would feature so-called “third spaces” (spaces which are not home or work; playgrounds, parks, pubs, etc.) not just close to it, but within it. These third spaces facilitate the creation and maintenance of neighborly relations; they’re places you’d want to hang out in, and so would your neighbors. Having a green third space of some kind – and if it’s just a few benches under a tree – is likely something which should happen.
A City Village is designed with privacy in mind. Within each dwelling, it should be possible to be unaware of each other’s existence for all intents and purposes. Good sound insulation would be core here.
A City Village is designed democratically. The tenants living within get to decide what their little patch looks like in practice. This may include decisions like to increase rent to add certain facilities.
A City Village is designed with shared facilities in mind. Not every apartment needs its own laundry machine, or massive kitchen with cooking island. A shared laundry machine and cafeteria with the option for a private small kitchen might be preferable.
A City Village is designed sustainably and affordably. This is not the place to turn into a prestige project to attract billionaires. It’s a place for people to live and thrive.
A City Village is part of the municipality. That is to say, it’s public housing, rented out to tenants by the city. While the City Village can take care of most of its day-to-day needs democratically, it is subject to supervision by the municipality.

Comparison to existing concepts

While I don’t know if anyone has actively gone around to design city villages as I described above, there are some related concepts which are employed at scale.

College dorms

A college dorm acts like a City Village – Extra Cheap edition. Inside dorms, privacy and facilities are reduced to a minimum, meaning shared bedrooms, bathrooms and dining rooms (cafeterias). College dorms offer an excellent environment for forming new friendships: It’s typically impossible to live there without at least living with one more person in the room. It’s typically impossible to eat alone; you’ll generally always sit together with strangers around the table – strangers which eventually turn into friends.

Gated communities

A gated community acts like a City Village – Luxury edition. Gated communities are typically the place to be; they keep the poors out, they offer privacy and protection and usually third spaces en masse. If you live inside a gated community, there often are very few reasons to venture outside it.

Problems with dorms and gated communities

Dorms tend to be loud, lack privacy and tend to provide too few facilities. Sharing a room or a toilet is more efficient, sure, but it probably is one of the strongest reason for people to want to get their own flat eventually. In practice, a Minimum Viable Apartment needs to be defined, and I reckon it would include a private toilet, (micro)kitchen, a private bedroom and a TV-watching-room at least.

Gated communities meanwhile are needlessly classist, racist and overbudgeted. There is no need to class-separate within the neighborhood; all that’s needed is a reasonable neighborhood community to be created. Gated communities also are very much luxury and both unaffordable and unsustainable.

City Village example #1: The village block

A typical arrangement in many cities is the block, 4 sides of houses; often low-risers (say, 5 stories tall) with an inner court. At the moment, the inner court is often practically unusable as its filled with cars.

Using the City Villages concept, we could end up with the following situation:

As cars are banned, the inner court becomes a place to be used by people again. This notably includes a small soccer field for the kids, a few benches, and a tree. For various festivities, kids theater plays, stand-up comedy nights etc, the court also has a small stage.
In the basement are a couple laundry machines, drying racks and perhaps tumble driers. There also is a medium-sized workshop, supervised by the custodian, where people can repair some of their stuff and dads can build new chairs or whatever. Secure bike (and general) storage space is also available in other sections of the basement.
The ground floor contains various (outwards-facing) shops and commercial things, and also an inwards-facing cafeteria connected to one, where tenants can get a decent, healthy and cheap meal and a chat to their neighbors 3-4x a day. As a lot of the tenants are allowed to work from home, they have also elected to convert one of the commercial spaces into a co-working space which tenants get to use for free, while external people may use it for a fee.
On the higher floors are the actual apartments. As this apartment complex only has an ancient goods elevator, the apartments are designed such that the elderly, disabled and families are located towards the bottom, while university students, young couples and other people are placed towards the top. At the very top, under the roof, are the smallest and cheapest apartments, and if it weren’t for the fact that each apartment had its own toilet, you could’ve been mistaken in calling it a dorm.
Windows and walls to the outside are well insulated (both for heat and for sound), as are floors/ceilings.

Doesn’t this sound kinda nice?

City Village example #2: A New House

Another, also unfortunately typical example of a city house is just a random couple single family home surrounded by a bit of garden, with a garage of course. We can be more efficient than that.

Replace the old family house with another low-riser, trying to maximize the space. 5 stories might not be doable this time, but 3 probably should.
In the ground floor, we build the common room and big kitchen; a place for everyone to hang out. There might be enough room for another apartment, so it’s up to the community to decide whether it’s going to be one, or whether it’d be better suited as a co-working space.
In the floor above, we might get 2 apartments in with a micro-kitchen
In the top floor, we might squeeze 3 apartments in, though not with any kitchen.
On the roof, we can have a nice rooftop party area (and perhaps a place for table tennis? The community decides!)

This configuration would be decidedly more dorm-like than Example #1, but we do keep all of the core ideas intact. And this, too, sounds like an interesting place to live to me.

Anticipated counter arguments (and their counters)

Now, I’m neither an architect, housing expert nor a public policy planner, so if you’ve read the above thinking “yeah, but that sounds utopic and not practical”, then, sure! I’m open to hearing improvements on this subject. That said, I did think of some things myself:

Claim: This runs into the sort of “school board governance” issue where a few people get to decide the outcome of the many.
- Counter: I’d argue it’s better than the status quo for two reasons: 1. it’s easy to not care about what school exactly does as you’re not directly affected; only your kid is. So I expect higher participation here, given that it’s decisions like “are we gonna have coffee or tea for breakfast”. And 2. the status quo typically has a for-profit landlord as the ultimate decision maker. Any improvement in the democratic process here is desirable, and it should be noted that the democratic process doesn’t happen in a vaccum either – the municipality, state, and ultimately, nation would be able to set certain guidelines within the City Village board can act.
Claim: If the community decides to hate a person, they have virtually no recourse in the system you’ve set up.
- Counter: If your entire neighborhood hates you, then yes, that’s gonna suck, regardless of whether you ownership system. The slight saving grace here is that, with privacy being one of the core ideas of the City Village, you’d still be safe in your own apartment and would only need to interface occasionally with the others in the stairwell.
Claim: Wouldn’t the democratic nature of the community setting its own rent result potentially in below-sustainable rent? Or people being priced out of being to live there if a bunch of nonsense stuff is added?
- Counter: The municipality may set limits on both of those issues. If the house falls into disrepair, the municipality may force a higher rent to pay for the repairs. And if rich people decide to build their own little gated community with private helicopters and whatnot… then the question is why the hell they’re living in public housing to begin with, so a maximum budget for a City Village may also be a thing the municipality enforces.
Claim: This actually has the same bad side-effect that gated communities do, in that it increases the segregation of society.
- Counter: I’m not so sure about that one. In my eyes, offering flats designed for families (3+ rooms), elderly people (2 rooms, but more accessibility features) and students (1 room, tiny) in the same building is going to lead to a reasonably diverse community. Of course, what services each City Village opts into is going to inform potential applicants, so it’s not 100% ideal. I still see it as a major step forward from the largely anonymous and profit driven system which provides exactly 0% consideration to this idea (outside of “no poors allowed”).

Conclusion

City Villages would help us defeat the loneliness epidemic by creating spaces to meet in, City Villages would help us solve the climate crisis by reducing duplication and waste, and City Villages would help defeat the housing crisis. They bring an immediate level of democracy and community into our lives which has gone missing, especially in the cities, and they are designed for people instead of investors.

Sounds nice, really.