What a strange question to begin with: Is my home performing?
I think a serious question everyone needs to ask themselves, underpinned by Covid-19. Over half of the world’s population are living in urban settings and we have learnt by now how to spend most of our time at home. To not only live at home. To work from home. To pursue our interests at home. To arrange our social life from or in our home.
So the ultimate question in our high-performance-measurement-world is: How’s your home doing on a scale from 1-10?
Most of the Western world are urban creatures. Over 80% of Northern Americans live in cities while Europe presents an equally staggering 75% of urbanites.
The majority of us city slickers call a flat their home. We live in dwellings we either could get hold of in crowded cities or we have carefully selected where and how we are living because we could afford it. Or anything in between. Truth is though that most people have no concept of what they should be expecting from their home. And how could they? Most of us just made a pragmatic choice, short of sophisticated offerings, not even hoping for homes tailored to our needs. And to make it even more complex, in a lot of cases we are not even aware of our real needs. This is what I’d like to drill down into a bit further: What do we need if it comes to our homes? What are our requirements? And is it really that fundamental to know what we need if the choice is often not ours?
Over centuries, buildings have been sensitive sounding boards to trends within society
The history of our dwellings is connected to our social history. Our flats and houses tell the story of those who planned, designed, built or destroyed them as well as of residents who proudly, happily, defiantly or even involuntarily lived in them. Over centuries, residential and commercial buildings have not only marked the social status quo but have been sensitive sounding boards to changes and trends within society. What and how we build, how and with whom we live in those built structures tells the tale of our social fabric.
For most of last millennium’s Europe, housing was a strictly social class defining set up, a separation between the haves and have-nots, the ones representing the labour force and the ones feeding off this labour force.
Medieval have-nots lived mostly in a crammed one room housing space, often with a dozen of people, the idea of ownership of a property wasn’t really a theme there. Family members and an extended circle of relatives and friends were passing through. The notion of individualism, the possibility or even the right to be alone was simply non-existent. Neither did the medieval majority of people want to be on their own. Being in a wider community meant safety, it was shelter and protection from harsh environmental conditions and other people’s hostile intentions. Being a part in a bigger people puzzle meant pragmatic solidarity and by and large a higher chance of survival.
Well-to-do landowners in early modern Europe though were less concerned with immediate survival, they pursued a longer-term strategy. This upper class built representative mansions to show off their riches and to further their way even higher into social prestige and ultimately more wealth to sustain their businesses and families. Yet something else is noteworthy. By building multiple-rooms mansions daily life got more structured for those wealthy home owners: Entertainment spaces for hosting guests, reception rooms for business partners, bedrooms and sitting rooms for the inner family circle, kitchen and dining rooms to demarcate space for preparing and devouring food.
The bourgeoisie set the trend of promoting family as the new centre of social life
Physical separation of spaces in a home to support different daily routines allowed a more efficient “work” flow and also meant one had the luxury to be on one’s own. A glimpse of individualism born by economic and social imbalance, and a harbinger of profound societal changes to come. The industrialisation age sweeping across Europe, North America and Japan wasn’t only the transition to streamlined manufacturing processes. Industrialisation introduced further shades of grey into the social pattern: Working class, middle class, nouveau-rich, aristocracy.
The option of social mobility was born, albeit made possible through inhuman working conditions for labourers in the new shiny temples of manufacturing progress. The newly formed “social sandwich” between the rich and the poor, the bourgeoisie, set the trend of promoting family as the new centre of social life.
This ever-growing Middle class was the new social trendsetter within industrialised nations. By the 1950s, the concept of the “Nuclear Family” was born. Nuclear not as in atomic warfare but based on the word “nucleus” expressing the core, the centre of something. The Nuclear Family delineates a married couple with one or more dependent kids as the basic social unit, like a societal currency setting the benchmark for well-being.
Infatuation with ourselves formed the Western world’s path to hyper-individualism
The last decades changing our social texture in Europe yet again were marked by the emphasis on the individuum.
Social mobility in our time has hit its ever time high: Meritocracy and opportunity are perceived as more valuable than inherited social status clinging; women have started demanding their rightful place in society; and automatisation technology has replaced repetitive human labour and has consequently provided an unseen amount of leisure time throughout social classes in the Western world.
The chance of mastering our own destiny away from class conceit or impermeable social barriers has been paving the road for our modern social journey. Released from pragmatic survival-driven and overcrowded community life, we have enthusiastically embraced the suddenly gained luxury of aloneness. This infatuation with ourselves and one’s individual power base has formed the Western world’s path to hyper-individualism.
If we now look at the practically lived flipside of this social development, one is rather surprised to see a certain mismatch of the speed in which societal changes happen and how slowly we as society have adjusted our daily life, or if we formulate it a bit wider, our consequent life designs. Let me give you an example:
More than 100 years ago the Second Industrial Revolution in Europe had ended. Yet, we are still sticking to routines and success factors derived from machine manufacturing processes to guide important parts of our life design. Even though we have moved by now into what we call the “Information and Knowledge Age”, industrialisation was apparently such a deep running societal trauma that we are continuing to adhere to practices which were brought upon us by this automatisation promoting feast which was dictated by machines: For erstwhile peasants, who once used to rise with the sun, nine to five work and shift labour were introduced in order to maximise efficiency of machine output. Industrialisation required workers to use machinery under strictly regimented supervision of the employer. Three meals a day were designed for the human operator to optimise her*his support for machine processing accuracy. Places for life and work were separated, sometimes connected with excessive commuting, to keep poisonous factory pollution away from a healthy family home.
Our still prevailing Western world’s obsession with efficiency, consumption and luxury goods to show off our new social standing is still a relic of this colossal industrialised change which has catapulted Europe, North America and Japan to economic superpowers dominating the 20th century.
Covid-19 has made the maladjustment of our living concepts visible in such a short time that it is only reminiscent of a drug-infused altered state of mass consciousness
The re-organisation of human life seems to adopt only slowly once an apparently successful evolutionary solution was introduced. The rigid framework delivering this solution, in order to ensure such success is repeatable, seems then perversely to be the obstacle to react to this success and adjust the set up once more – as every solution’s success will ultimately change the relevance of the original problem and create new issues.
The same is true for our life designs and living concepts: 70 years after the Nuclear Family has taken centre stage, we still promote their ideas in our home set up. Most floor plans in residential urban buildings still follow requirements of the 1950s nuclear family unit as the golden standard with master bedroom for the parents, a room for the older child, a smaller bedroom for the baby and a rather tiny kitchen. This kitchen was mostly separated from the lounge or dining area. While women were cooking and preparing the meal, this room configuration ensured that the rest of the family could relax and the husband wouldn’t be bothered by cooking smells. On another note, did you ever realise that our kitchen furniture is standardised for solely women cooking the meal? Any 1.85m tall man only remotely interested in cooking will attest to the uncomfortable clumsiness of using a standard 90cm high cooker or sink unit.
And this backwardness is the simple reason why most of us city creatures live nowadays in hyper functional floorplans. Functional as in geared towards conventional family life.
In this day and age of our Western world, there’s something out of whack with the quality of our living spaces
Looking back into wo*mankind’s history, one could argue that societal structures define the very quality and attributes of our living spaces. And I feel that in this day and age of our Western world, there’s something out of whack with this said quality. There’s currently a mismatch between our society “texture” and our living spaces set-up. Let me explain what I mean with that:
Society texture is how I define the composition and consequently the needs of individuals or groups forming society – hence a cross section of us all. And this society texture has dramatically changed during the last decades. We have moved from the Nuclear family set up of the 1950s to a far more individualised living. The significant change being that most of the Western world’s inhabitants strive more and more to live alone, mostly without children.
One-person households were rare a century ago and remained fairly steady through the 19th century, typically below 10%. Single people were even regarded as a societal problem back then. No one really knew what to do with them. This is the reason why in the 19th century boarding houses in New York were so successful. Private landlords providing food and lodging for paying guests provided a way of channelling single people into a defined accommodation space where an unwanted but employment-wise needed minority could exist. A minority of single people which would have in those days been ostracised from society.
Individuals are the new social benchmark
Today, single-person households account for nearly half of all households in the Western world.
Historian Keith Snell investigates in his article “The rise of living alone and loneliness in history” the share of single-person households across different places and times in Europe, North America and Japan. The current prevalence of one-person households is unprecedented historically, Keith says. Most extreme example is Stockholm where 60% of households consist of one person. And that was in 2017.
If the single person (or let’s say rather the individualised person) will be soon the majority in developed countries’ cities, that means that individuals are the new social benchmark in the making.
So, how do we react as society to this new individual-driven paradigm and how do we consequently adapt our living spaces?
Real Estate Developers mostly copy and paste floor plans for decades without any innovation or consideration for the tenant
To answer that question, let’s look for a second into the underlying commodity of our homes and consequent well-being: Real Estate Development.
Unlike other industries where customer requirements and customer centric product development has been the bible of doing business, the current gods of life space design (read: Real Estate Developers) mostly copy and paste floor plans for decades without any innovation or consideration for the client, in this case the tenant or occupier.
Why should they? Real estate is for most players a profitable business requiring vast amounts of capital and is dominated by a few. Innovation pressure from inside is unlikely and disruption from outsiders not a low hanging fruit.
Real estate developers have so far built for banks so the financing flows and banks have built for their balance sheets to diversify their portfolio and to accumulate debt as asset class. Looping this abstract and well-oiled workflow successfully back to the requirements of the occupier, seems of little or no concern at all.
Why is a bedroom so centric that it is even the name giver and main criteria of a dwelling?
Here’s my question to you: Why do we think that only because people are “singles”, meaning not married, maybe widowed or divorced, or not in a steady relationship with a partner, or a single parent with a child, that they want to live alone?
So far it seems, most people have just followed a simple civil-status-equals-accommodation-choice strategy. The single person in the 1-bedroom flat or sometimes flat share, the single parent in the one- or two- bedroom flat, the childless two partners in the two- or three-bedroom flat.
All of those traditional one-, two- and three-bedroom place developments are piling up in our cities and I am asking myself: Which audience were they built for and which demographic group are they serving? And why is a bedroom so centric that it is even the name giver and main criteria of a dwelling?
As when it comes to real estate, we revert to supply scenarios known in feudal or communist systems: Privileged city dwellers aside, most people need to take what’s on offer and bend themselves so their requirements fit in a socially outdated brick and mortar offering. We seem to have forgotten that a dwelling serves the human purpose aka how humans want to use the space.
Let me give you yet another example: Three independent people wanting to share a flat because they don’t want to live on their own or genuinely like each other’s company, an intentional community as they are called. Well, too bad for them, as most of London’s affordable council flats for example only serve the purpose of the traditional family of the 1950s as occupying standard: Master bedroom for the parents, a middle-sized bedroom for the oldest child and a small bedroom for the baby or guest. That then leaves space for a tiny kitchen and a modestly sized living room. A recipe for disaster for an intentional community who would rather need more prominently featured living and community spaces.
This situation is also the reason why so many individualised urbanites rather choose a one-bedroom flat. Human beings crave for connection. Yet, in the current urban housing availability most single people are stuck between a rock and a hard place to choose either inadequately provided communal spaces in a bigger apartment or solitude often bordering loneliness without any community in a one- or two-bedroom place.
Loneliness is just another word for not being stimulated enough by other human beings in the age of hyper-individualism
Being around others is a human need. It means diving in a parallel thought world. Our deepest evolutionary pattern is imitating others. Anthropology has made it evident that we are copy cats! Success in our evolution history was often just the result of slight twists in our mimicked behaviour of others. If you will, human beings are for most of their life unconsciously acting plagiarists of each other’s ideas. How unsettling. And we all thought we are so unique. Ouch!
Most animals entertain “social grooming” to ensure a cohesive group dynamic protecting the community and their offspring. They pick fleas of each other’s back. Human beings did the same for quite a while, yet evolution has given us a mighty tool: Language.
Talking to others minimises our pain, sets our own issues into context and relativises stuff we deem unsurmountable. Our ability to speak with each other is an efficient and progressive replacement for otherwise time-consuming physical social grooming.
And that is why we still need each other. We learn from each other and that means that being around other people is valuable to us. In my opinion, loneliness is just another word for not being stimulated enough by other human beings in the age of hyper-individualism in the Western world.
We are beyond the point to just go to a pub and socialise to overcome loneliness
University of Oxford based anthropologist Robin Dunbar says “Loneliness is a health threat in the Western world, and … encouraging people to get out and socialise over a few beers or a bottle of wine at the village pub may be a good place to start.” I don’t want to discredit this thought as Robin tells in his article a witty and unorthodox tale of alcohol as endorphin-triggering facilitator of relationships and trust.
Having spent most of my character forming years after work in various London City watering holes, I am an socialise-over-a-few-beers-well-make-it-several-bottles-of-wine-then expert and I tend to disagree.
We are beyond the point in the Western world to just go to a pub and socialise to overcome loneliness amongst individualised people. In my opinion, pub socialising isn’t radical enough and its impact will not be meaningful to set us on a fruitful path of establishing genuine connection.
If we don’t know how, where and with whom we prefer to spend our days and nights with, then we won’t be able to translate that into the set-up of our homes
A radical concept I like was voiced in a podcast I listened to recently. Hotel Matze suggested in their 2 November 2020 podcast to not only think about floorplans but to integrate the whole urban landscape into our home set-up planning so we could extend our personal realm to public spaces for people to connect. They suggested to have vast museums and unused public spaces as legit meeting points while smaller flats or reduced spaces in tiny houses would be the private space to retreat. This concept would help to achieve affordability for smaller private spaces and overcome isolation while respecting the right of the individual to be alone and enabling the possibility to connect with others.
This is a great urban planning idea. Yet, I feel an important factor is missing here: If the new social requirement of our Knowledge Age society is facilitation and stimulation of human connection, then systematic living solutions are needed to empower people in an individualised society with the “right” and equip them with the ”permission” to socialise. We need to facilitate natural meeting places, and to rather “allow” people to hang out with each other without awkwardness or shame of being on their own – by not negating but being self-confirmed individuals.
We have embraced all of the technological progress there is, but as society we haven’t thought about what changing social structures are meaning for our standing to each other as individuals. If we don’t know how, where and with whom we prefer to spend our days and nights with, then we won’t be able to translate that into the set-up of our homes, let alone more appropriate floor plans. Truth to be told, it’s a chicken and egg situation: What exactly are our requirements so innovation can help to fulfil them?
The new ways of living together are not defined any longer by the old-school community understanding: You don’t live together in a village any more. This was a random thing of the old days where you were just thrown together by fate and birth. In our current mobile society, we choose. We have options. And community suddenly becomes a matter of choice. Community is nowadays personal and voluntary, based on common interests, beliefs, affection – rather than just enforced unwilling proximity or simple logistical needs.
Having said this, this is also where the trouble is surfacing: Choice is freedom, yet it can also be a burden, namely an obligation to research, to ascertain and to be clear what you desire. One is suddenly responsible for her*his choices, no one else to blame any more.
It almost feels we need new impulses for our “life staging”, beginning at the often-quoted user experience, thinking in life phases’ purposes and consequent usage patterns rather than bedrooms.
We need to define forms of commitment beyond blood relationship to ensure authenticity in an intentional community
Life staging and adapted community options for our Western society will be trial and error, let alone the fact that traditional family life will be undergoing a major revamp, too. It is clear to me that different community life choices cannot be a stolid copy and paste of the “nuclear family” set up nor the replica of a romanticised extended tribal family life.
There will be behavioural “echos” we are already used to from our families’ or friends’ background and there will be traditional values we might want to transfer or sustain. Yet, what we need to work on is a newly defined form of commitment beyond blood relationship to ensure authenticity in an intentional community.
Some now might fear emotional shortcomings or not enough social “glue” between the alternative community members. And true, the new social texture will look and feel different to the conventional family rhythm most of us have been brought up with. So how can we profit from individualism without suffering from unwanted aloneness as individuals?
New life plans will be centred around alternative “belonging patterns”
One answer is the widening of our understanding of life designs for the Western world’s population, hand-in-hand with commercial offerings for an individualised society. To disdain or even suggesting to eradicate traditional family life is not the point here. What I think is important is that we reflect on additional concepts and create equally accepted societal options people can choose from if they do not want to follow the traditional family community path.
I believe we need to centre our new thinking around alternative “belonging patterns” which will be key to avoid some people of all age groups slipping silently into loneliness and serious mental health issues based on a lack of purpose and belonging.
Some alternative “belonging pattern” concepts away from the traditional family glue have started to evolve in the last decades. Offerings within those intentional communities are still niche developments and haven’t been gentrified yet.
Some of those communities anchor themselves around a new spirituality in search of different higher beings either within yourself or from the outside. Some promote ecological awareness and zoom in on our connection with nature. Others incorporate polyamorous relationships and experiment with untraditional sex and love lives.
Differently shaped living spaces are a result of such experiments with alternative belonging patterns: There are Co-Living houses, sometimes even whole villages or vast rural spaces where unrelated people have formed and organised their own interpretation of intentional communities. There is the Co-Living movement, most prominently featured in cities where professional landlords provide more or less curated living spaces serving the needs of urban millennials. Then there is the Co-Working trend and the Covid-19 fuelled work-from-anywhere philosophy where remote work and entrepreneurial aspirations are the basis of common interest, forming a unifying centre piece of looking at life and ultimately defining living space requirements.
In the very end, mental health issues are not only an individual tragedy but a barrier of the Western world to compete with global players
Individualism is the hard-fought luxury of aloneness as result of the Western World’s painful industrialisation progress. Unwanted aloneness within individualism is the reason to call for profound changes in our dated life designs.
And let me go further: I am even arguing that the context and meaning of those blatant imbalances are much wider and more serious than floorplan organisation or life designs might suggest. Unwanted aloneness can lead to isolation and isolation is often the reason for mental health issues. Yet, a stable mental framework is required to see eye-to-eye not only in our daily individual lives, but equally on a global level with economic and potentially mentally stronger players.
In the very end, unsolved and not addressed mental health issues are not only an individual tragedy but a barrier of the Western world to compete with emerging players of up-and-coming countries.
Communities with purposefully driven albeit individualised members are a long-term performance element of any modern society
The society who is managing to fabricate a new societal glue for its individualised members and who is consequently tackling mental health issues offering solutions to conquer loneliness and isolation, this society will gain a competitive edge over other societies who aren’t addressing this massive elephant in the room.
I am convinced that functioning communities with purposefully driven albeit individualised members are a long-term performance element which is vital for any modern society.
My question to you
This is the question I am leaving you with for now: If you close your eyes in an honest-to-yourself-moment without fear of getting judged: What’s your vision? How and with whom do you want to live? How and from where do you want to work?
The attentive reader will have noticed that our question to begin with needs to be re-formulated and should read as: “How are we ourselves performing as experimental life designers in setting up our home and life environment to our very own requirements?”
On a scale from 1-10, what’s your score?
Leave a Reply