Redefining Dwelling for the Anthropocene

Abstract

Between 1970 and 2015, the average size of newly constructed homes in the United States, increased by 79%, from a size of 1,500 to 2,687 square feet. This shift has redefined our conception of the family unit and inherently, it has also redefined their habitation needs. With an estimated third of households in the United States, spending more than 30% of their income on housing, it is time for housing design to move in a different direction. It is the time for a housing revolution, designed to reassess the real habitational needs of the user to provide a better quality of life designed for the needs of the next decade. The future of dwelling requires homes that can coexist and live in symbiosis with their environment, develop mechanisms for human interaction and socialization, help the household financially by making the dwelling more self-sufficient and use technology and space planning to resize the space needed for dwelling in search for a typology designed for the purpose of right-sizing human inhabitation. These housing typologies will need to be versatile and adaptable, to accommodate the needs of all types of family unites and the transformations they suffer as they evolve in their spaces for living. In this paper, I will showcase work done to develop a live/work/farm inhabitation typology in search for proposals to start defining the future of dwelling.



Author Information
Camilo Cerro, American University of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates

Paper Information
Conference: ECSEE2019
Stream: Social Sustainability and Sustainable Living

This paper is part of the ECSEE2019 Conference Proceedings (View)
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Posted by James Alexander Gordon