Housing Reimagined: Making the Homes We Need Within Planetary Boundaries

WeCanMake and Homes That Don’t Cost The Earth invite you:

Housing Reimagined – Making the Homes We Need within Planetary Boundaries

Home is the first infrastructure of everyday life: home is shelter, safety, and stability. Yet for a growing number of people, this infrastructure is crumbling, out of reach, or missing all together.

To solve the housing crisis, the UK Government has pledged to create 1.5 million new homes in the life of this parliament. This bold pledge needs to be matched with an even bolder rethink of where, what, how, and for whom these homes are built. Quality, ownership, tenure, materials, and long-term affordability all matter – not just quantity and speed.

Without thinking beyond “number of units delivered”, there is an acute risk that housing will continue to fail those people and communities most in need; all while reinforcing wealth and spatial inequalities and jeopardising any hope of the UK meeting its legally binding climate commitments to become Net Zero by 2050.

Another way is possible. Another way is urgently needed.

Join community activists, designers, and policy-makers who are exploring, co-designing, and making new ways to create decent and affordable homes that don’t cost the earth - and in the process are re-imagining our relationship with land, materials, and each other:

• LAND – unlocking urban infill sites to add homes exactly where they are needed most in existing neighbourhoods, creating an alternative to greenfield sprawl and carbon-hungry high-rise towers.
• MATERIALS – reconnecting how we design, source, and build our homes with our local material context and culture using homegrown biomaterials and re-use materials.
• PEOPLE – putting the powers and resources to make good homes in community hands through localising production and community stewardship.

---

The event will include a panel discussion and audience participation, with:

• Indy Johar, Dark Matter Labs
• Melissa Mean, WeCanMake
• Cllr. Barry Parsons, Bristol City Council
• Dave Lomax, Waugh Thistleton Architects
• Angelique Retief (chair), Black South West Network

WeCanMake is part of a growing movement of diverse people and communities across the UK and beyond, all working to create the kinds of homes and social infrastructure needed to enable everyone to thrive. Community-led and cooperative housing models have the potential to play a much bigger role in mainstream housing delivery than they currently do. Everyone is warmly welcome to explore how we can together make the shift our housing system needs to better the needs of people and planet.

The event marks the launch of a new report: MultiMax: affordable homes within planetary boundaries. The report shares a new homegrown timber kit-of-parts system designed for low-rise apartment blocks, developed by WeCanMake in partnership with Waugh Thistleton Architects. The MultiMax system meets the operational energy targets set by the UK Net Zero Carbon Buildings Standard, and can also be tailored to meet Passivhaus standards

MultiMax is intended as an open-source resource for communities, councils, and not-for-profit developers to create the low-carbon high-quality homes they need by unlocking urban infill sites. MultiMax has been designed and tested with three real-world sites in South Bristol, all for community-led affordable homes. The sites were secured through Bristol City Council’s innovative Community-Led Housing Land Disposal Policy.

Please stick around for a drink in the Watershed bar after the discussion. You are also warmly welcome to join WeCanMake at our neighbourhood meet up on Thursday 19th June to see our neighbourhood factory in action and get hands on with digital fabrication kit and locally sourced biomaterials. More info can be found here.

---

WeCanMake is a community land trust and neighbourhood test space in south Bristol, imagining and making new ways to make homes that build social infrastructure, community wealth, and a just transition. Www.wecanmake.org

Waugh Thistleton Architects are a globally-recognised leader in low-carbon design and a pioneer in the innovative use of mass timber. https://waughthistleton.com/