Have you ever heard the saying “it takes a village to raise a child?” Well, where I live, most people do not know the name of their next door neighbor.
This isolation can cause loneliness, but it is more than that. Having a community is helping people do jobs they can’t, it’s lending tools, it’s teaching someone something their parents never taught them, and more.
Luckily, there is a solution that is becoming common in both co-housing and eco-villages around the world. They utilize common areas or community centers, as well as outdoor spaces(such as courtyards or rooftop gardens). While you still have your private home with your own kitchen, you also have these spaces which are open to everyone.
Here are some ideas you might see in these common spaces:
- Indoor play area. In some, the retired senior citizens who like to keep busy volunteer to watch children in these areas while parents are at work.
- Dining room big enough to fit every person who lives there and guests.
- Community Kitchen. People take turns cooking, or they have occasional dinners together.
- Private office spaces (for work-from-home workers who still want to be around people).
- Tiny libraries.
- Outdoor play area.
- Outdoor sitting spaces.
- Community gardens and/or a greenhouse.
More Ideas:
- Window awnings which utilize passive solar, so the sun is blocked in the summer but not the winter
- A central courtyard for passive cooling. Examples: Skywells (China), Tsubo-niwa (Japan). Thevenin @beehaw.org adds that a retractable cover of some kind might be important to protect from wind pressure.
- Better insulation for better temperature control, and sound proofing.
- Bird-safe windows
- Rainwater collection for watering plants (or, the more expensive option: for piping into toilets)
- White roofs for cooling in hot climates, dark roofs for warming in cold climates
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What else would improve apartment buildings?
They are a good choice for places with climates like Morocco. Passive cooling is the last thing you want in say Norway for most of the year.
That’s why you make it so that you can do passive cooling in summer but don’t do that in winter. There are quite a few solutions that essentially boil down to opening windows during the night while keeping people, water and insects out.
It’s often called night cooling or night flushing. See for example this company explaining it.
The problem with Moroccan houses in cooler climates, is that they are designed so all windows are shaded as much as possible. This is done by having small windows on the outside with permanent shading structures, while there are large windows and doors facing a courtyard. That courtyard is designed to be small, as to make sure that as little direct sunlight hits the windows as possible. At the same time the airflow is disgned to be relativly costant. by using the relativly cool massive walls as a heat sink.
For a place like Norway, you want pretty much the opposite. Massive windows on the outside facing the sun, as to provide more heat in winter. Places on the building with no direct sunlight, should not have windows, as to loose less heat.
You then use moveable structures, like opening windows, moveable shading and the likt to adapt to the less common weather like cold days in Morocco and hot days in Norway. But designing a building for the desert, does not make it a good choice on the artic circle.
That I agree with. The specifics of how they build are not suitable to places like Norway (or most of Europe for that matter). That does not mean one cannot look at the concepts and apply them such that it makes sense in the context though. Many buildings in for example the Netherlands (where I live) are mainly built for keeping the heat in nowadays and overheat in the summer. Especially housing stock built from the 80s through the 2000s have overheating problems with the changing climate. This is mainly due to lack of window shading and night ventilation options. And instead of seeing a move towards shading, you see a move towards airconditioning instead, which is generally not needed if you design a building properly.
I thought you were against implementing the concepts and did not expect you to interpret the suggestion literally (aka, to build Moroccan style homes in Norway).
How hot are the summers there? Down in Germany they can be unbearable, as airco simply wasn’t a thing here.
Even in the south in Oslo temperatures above 30C can happen, but are hardly common. So even with climate change, the climate would be about what Germany used to have.
Ya, Germany will be more like France, France like Spain, and I suppose Spain like Morocco?
I met a seasoned expert once at an expo l; he said it’ll all move up north and we cannot stop that. The real question for us is how can we slow it down to ensure its capacity to adapt isn’t overwhelmed, which would invariably increase the risk of an ecological collapse.