HOUSING INNOVATION INDEX

Accelerating good practice by benchmarking best practice.

Of all the challenges facing modern cities and towns, the one that represents perhaps the largest ... opportunity, is probably housing.

Housing shortages, housing quality, the impact of housing and construction, volatility of house prices, and more, are all priorities in their own right, of course. But the potential for solutions in housing, at any meaningful scale, to also contribute to solution-finding in multiple other areas of concern is unique.

Solving housing for any given city can contribute to problem solving foundational issues like economic development and revitalization, climate change, social inclusion and health, material circularity, through longer-range issues like demographic transition, economic transformation, and even apparently standalone issues like food supply, biodiversity, and cultural protection. Housing is already deeply part of infrastructural development in the conventional areas of transport and energy.

Given this potential for housing solutions to drive opportunity in multiple other domains, it makes sense to want to track advances in housing innovation and development - with a view to understanding these contributions better, and distributing the understanding as best practices.

Accelerating housing innovation, and helping it anchor improvement across other priority areas, is the goal of the Housing Innovation Index. By exploring, sharing and ultimately benchmarking housing innovation across leading and emerging contributors, locally and internationally, quality housing can become one of the signifiers of shared and synergistic progress of the current era.

The Index seeks to do the three things:

• find and understand best practices
• share results and support engagement in best practice
• ultimately, benchmark best practice against well-defined criteria, even across different markets.

Where possible, spatial and visual tools will be used, and in the first instance, self-reporting surveys will be the way to generate baseline materials. Initial assessment intended to be indicative and instructive, not definitive.

As a starting point, eight dimensions are used to frame housing innovation, in particular with a view to both ongoing opportunities and needs and emerging potentials. Each of these dimensions can be unpacked in detail, with initial focus and criteria used to advance towards more quantitative benchmarking.

This article is an outline of the scope of the Index, as it develops survey data and benchmarking feedback. Each area of the Index will be presented in detail, with a more complete method and guidance target.

Initial value from the Index is helping

• pioneers of best practice communicate clearly their work, including learnings, and to transmit useful details in a structured way
• engaged parties interact with this content, with the best practice leaders themselves
• curious parties in the learning phase to explore options and make enquiries from trusted sources

and otherwise make related materials and partners available around this connection point.

Design Technology

Digital technology in the world today is already one of the defining features of the age, and AI is accelerating this.

But design and spatial technology, though mature, and associated emerging technologies in fabrication and visualization, are comparatively unexplored in terms of their potential. The technology aspect of housing innovation is central to its progress - but the existing and potential relevance can be better assessed and made navigable.

Design techologies relevant to housing innovation include:

• advances in CAD/BIM
• parametrics and procedural methods
• reality capture and spatial data 3D visualization
• digital twins for management/maintenance tools
• robotic fabrication
• modular industrialized construction
• verticalized design-build-operate

Circularity

The planet was in a material crisis already in the 1970s and while huge impacts have been made on efficiency in the use of materials, material consumption is rising globally - even while basic minimums of material wellbeing are not being met.

The circularity movement aims at ensuring material comfort and opportunity is available for all, while staying with planetary boundaries, by facilitating at nation and urban scale the ‘circular’ deployment of materials: material flows, including whole buildings and cities, being taken back into production for disassembly and up-cycling, rather than disposal. For housing, relevant practices include:

• materials selection and markets
• construction methods and training
• maintenance and disposal methods and systems
• re-use, refurbishment, recovery, disassembly methods
• optimized infrastructures and systems to enable circularity
• waste management and recovery, waste-fraction purity and upcycling

Climate Impact

The climate crisis is continuing and housing innovation can contribute to both dimensions of the problem: mitigation of climate emissions that drive climate change and adaptation to climate change as it happens.

Some of the ways in which housing innovation can help are:

• reduced embodied carbon of materials used, in particular steel, concrete and glass
• onsite reduction of energy consumption, and onsite or local-infrastructural energy solutions
• carbon sequestration as part of the building and lanscaping
• technical and comfort-readiness for changed climat

Spatial Technology

Housing and local infrastructure is a source of tremendous amounts of practical and valuable data, relating to behavior, energy use, consumption, travel, health and more.

Capturing this data, storing and permissioning its distribution, preserving value and privacy, is crucial in particular as this data becomes more granular and 3D in scope and capacity. This data and permissioning includes the rights to use the 3D likeness of specific places.

Innovation here includes:

• data capture storage and management
• data permissioning and value return
• 3D imaging and data usage
• 3D visualization and image licensing

Scientific Research

The use of housing as a source of data and as a development partner for scientific research is slowly developing, and accelerating through design and spatial technology.

Research areas that benefit from participation of housing and infrastructure in formal research include cognition and behavioral science, mental and physical health, elderly care and design research itself, transport, energy and more.

Scientific areas for innovation indexing in housing include:

• data modeling
• spatial analytics
• neuroscience and cognition of space
• social science of real and virtual space

Services & Program

Housing is no longer simply a place to sleep, eat, rest and get the mail. It’s a whole platform for services and experiences - some of which supplied by the real estate operator, some of which supplied by third parties and public bodies.

As such, the service integration and program innovation aspects of housing are some of the most potent and necessary in indexing housing innovation.

These can include:

• data, spatial and design optimizations
• new economic and business models
• new program formulas for work, retail, leisure, care, nature
• block and city-wide morphology experiments

Local Techniques

A lot of housing innovation is actually a revival of techniques that are not new, in particular techniques that use the skills and materials that are available in the local area.

Reduction in requirements for specialized materials and tools can reduce total travel and production burdens; make housing more available to people that already have access to relevant tools, materials and techniques; and help building longevity by enabling local repair and maintenance.

These include:

• local materials and techniques
• design and fabrication practices that are location-specific
• indigenous knowledge cover materials, techniques and practices
• traditional practices that are still relevant, even optimal

Governance Reform

A lot of housing is subject to stringent regulations, relating to zoning, attached services, design and construction. And many of these regulations are both out of date, and actively blocking of the kinds of innovation that that authorities that must implement them are also mandated to deliver.

Governance is not always included in reviews of innovation, but housing and infrastructure is starting to see developments in areas including:

• regulations and regulatory methods
• financing and financial partnership
• devolution of decision-making including community-based methods
• management frameworks, practices and tools.