The house of the future? A sun-filled, shape-shifting, shed-share paradise

What will homes be like 10 years from now? Judging by the winners of the Home of 2030 competition, sharing will be key.

Shared home-working spaces, communal garden sheds and houses built using apps—these are just some of the ideas in the winning proposals for the government’s Home of 2030 competition to develop prototype “homes fit for the future”,【小题1】the “best of British design”. The aim was to imagine what the best age-adaptable, energy-efficient, healthy homes might look like in 10 years’ time; but, according to the winning architects, most of the best ideas have been around for generations.

“You can’t get much more 【小题2】and adaptable than the Georgian townhouse,” says Jennifer Beningfield of Openstudio, leader of one of the two winning teams announced today. “We’ve taken this very simple model and 【小题3】it for the 21st century. Our idea was to create infinite choice and variation from something very simple.”

Her team’s scheme imagines a terraced (排房的) housing type made from two standard components, a base unit and a loft, joined with “connector” pieces, taking into account multiple configurations (布局) over time as family 【小题4】change. Standing between the homes, the connectors would 【小题5】stairs and a lift, as well as storage and shared workspace. One of the most important aspects since the pandemic, says Beningfield, is providing “space to work from home, without having your laptop on the kitchen table”. Each home would have its own private outdoor space, while they would all back on to large communal gardens, arranged in the 【小题6】of a traditional London square.

Built off-site to demanding Passivhaus standards, with a twin wall timber frame, the homes would be 【小题7】by generous 2.7m high ceilings and tall 2.5m windows and doors, massively increasing the amount of daylight brought into the rooms, compared with most new-build spec housing. Beningfield, who studied and worked in South Africa and the US, says that off-site construction is crucial, given the shocking build quality of so many new homes in the UK – which she fears will only get worse after Brexit, if much of the skilled 【小题8】is forced to leave.

As is so often the case with blue-sky (纯理论的) ideas competitions, the ambitions of the Home of 2030 winning teams are 【小题9】– and, in this case, completely buildable – but there is little evidence to suggest that either the government or the volume housebuilding sector has any intention of putting them into practice. For that, we must look to Sunderland in 2023, and hope that a(n)【小题10】union of other councils, communities and smaller-scale builders have the imagination to follow their lead.

E-Scooters

Over the past two years, electric scooters have become ever-present in many of Europe and America’s biggest cities. Britain is the last major western European country to hold out against the 【小题1】 . E-scooters are not allowed on public roads, though people do ride them on cycle 【小题2】 and pavements . But where they are permitted, the number of e-scooter sharing companies soars 【小题3】 . To their 【小题4】 , e-scooters are revolutionary: the “iPhone Of urban transport”. To their critics, they are dangerous, anti-social and very annoying.

As with a dock less(无桩) bike, scooters are fitted with GPS trackers and wireless 【小题5】 . Customers download an app and scan a QR code on the scooter to unlock it. They are then 【小题6】 a small amount. Bird, which launched its e-scooter in Santa Monica, California in September 2017 charges $l plus 15 cents per minute, on average, in the US-to travel where they want to go, at a maximum speed of around 15mph. At night, the scooters are rounded up, charged and returned to popularity.

E-Scooters have the potential to solve some of the worlds biggest transport problems. Most cities are already dangerously polluted and heavily congested, and it is simply not an option to put more cars and taxis on the streets. Scooters are efficient; one kilowatt hour of energy carries a car 【小题7】 by petrol less than a mile, and an e-scooter 80 miles.

Scooters are clean, cheap, and they require little new infrastructure. For a country like car- 【小题8】 America, they could genuinely transform an 【小题9】 60% of US journeys under six miles. Even in European cities, which 【小题10】 have good public transport systems, they are very useful for travelling the“final mile”. According to Bird, 40% of taxi-riding journeys in London are under two miles, so e-scooters could help take a lot of cars off the streets.

There are many【小题1】 about what the future will be like, but no one really knows for sure. We do know that there will be many new 【小题2】in technology, though. These new advances will make thousands of new products【小题3】 that no one has yet even thought about. With this, however, there is a 【小题4】new problem which we do not have now: the gap between the technologically rich and the technologically poor. Not everyone may have the money to【小题5】 new technology into their lives, and some people living in【小题6】 areas may not have access to 【小题7】new technology. In light of such【小题8】, many people are already working hard to make new technology cheaper and easier to buy so that everyone might benefit from it.