Section FRead the text on urban housing and answer the following questions. 1. Melbourne - and indeed, all of Australia - will experience massive growth over the next decades – but where will these people live? And perhaps more importantly, how will they live? A TEDx talk by Jeremy McLeod, founder and director of Breathe Architecture, explores these questions. The answer is certainly not more suburban sprawl, but it’s also not necessarily high-density high rise. Unlike New South Wales, Victoria doesn’t have strict controls on minimum design quality in apartments – and in Melbourne the overheated property market has led to the construction of some truly terrible high-rise housing.2. So what might be an alternative to some of the poor quality, environmentally destructive, socially alienating and prohibitively expensive housing on the market today? McLeod describes how, back in 2007, he and a group of five architect colleagues got together to address exactly this question. They proposed The Commons: a medium-density housing development which would set out to meet a “triple bottom line” purpose: achieving social, environmental and financial sustainability. While that development was a success in design terms, it failed to be financially sustainable.3. It was at this point that McLeod and his collaborators made their revolutionary move, and came up with what they call the Nightingale Model (a financial paradigm). This shift is the real genius here: moving beyond an architectural model to a financial one, redesigning the funding process before designing any building. The Nightingale Model works on the principle of paring back construction costs (the lack of car parking has been controversial, but if you don’t have a car, and you do have a train, a tram, and a bike path outside your door, then it seems like a no-brainer). 4. It then goes further – by connecting directly with potential owner-occupiers it cuts out the marketing budget, relinquishing the need for an expensive display suite, or real estate agents. These savings are passed on to buyers. But any big construction project still needs financiers, and Nightingale 1.0 has twenty five of them, in addition to the future homeowners themselves, and the architects in the collective. But these are small investors, and their profits are capped at 15%. The cap removes any incentive to increase profit by squeezing quality, and there’s also a limit on how much apartments will be able to be sold for – for twenty years they can only be sold for the average price rise in the suburb on top of their purchase price. The point is that this is not an investment property which can be flipped to turn a swift buck.5. The Nightingale model is scalable and replicable: it is not specific to a particular site or design, and can be rolled out across every city in Australia (or even the world!). Sure enough, there are already three projects at various stages of development – Nightingale 1.0, in Brunswick, has achieved council approval and begun site works, while another project in Fairfield is well advanced, and a third is in planning stages.6. There has been so much interest from potential buyers in Nightingale 1.0 (reportedly 800 people on a waitlist for 44 apartments) that they had to be selected by ballot. Other property developers in Melbourne are reportedly flabbergasted at the project’s popularity in spite of its having broken all the rules about what people (supposedly) want in apartments.7. So, what do we make of all this? The Nightingale model is in fact quite close to a housing collective – a model with a long (and still active) history in Australian cities. But Nightingale goes beyond the post-hippie gaggle of friends that makes up many housing collectives, to a scale that is much larger, and much more ambitious. It’s no coincidence many collectives are packed with architects – who invariably believe that there are other values more important than money, and that architecture is more than a branch of real estate.8. That said, it’s not common for architects to initiate a project from scratch. As the critic Reyner Banham once wrote, architects spend their professional lives standing ready to be “propositioned” by a client: “[They] depend upon someone coming forward with the proposition in one hand and the money bag in the other.” The Nightingale team have set out to avoid this compromise by sticking to low-cost principles and finding ways to fund their projects, keeping the owner-occupier and the architect at the centre of the process. Questions 23 – 24 . What do the underlined words in the text refer to? Write ONE WORD from the text to compete the sentences. 23. ‘them’ in paragraph 4
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