Jurriaan van Stigt column
The European Commission is working hard to get only one type of cable for all of our phones, so that we do not produce 11 thousand tonnes (!) of waste every year. It is a good example of thinking about what we need and what we actually produce unnecessarily or quickly discard. An essential aspect of sustainability is not making things we don't need.
What does that mean for construction? I don’t mean that we should no longer make beautiful or exciting designs, that is part of the fun and of what innovation means. But, in the debate about the one million extra homes in the Netherlands, I wonder: do we really need that many homes?
In 1980 we had 4.8 million houses and in forty years we built 60,000 more every year. Now we have well over 7 million homes. That is fifty per cent more houses, even though the number of inhabitants has not increased that much in that time. What has increased is the average surface area per dwelling: we now have an average of 65 square metres available per person. By way of comparison: in England and Germany this is over forty percent less. A recent study by Sprinco Urban Analytics concludes that without building more, but making better use of the existing stock, 3 million more inhabitants can be housed in the current stock. That's good, because according to the CBS, the number of households in the Netherlands will grow from seven to ten million by 2040. De Correspondent already devoted a good article to this topic this year.
This could also boost the sustainability of the current stock, reduce or even eliminate the need to build on green spaces and reduce housing costs - let's not forget that in Amsterdam, for example, these are now forty to fifty per cent of income.
So should we just stop building new houses? No, certainly not, but here is an appeal to all those who throw around the 'one million houses': you don't have to and it might just make the problems worse. The panic that is now being spread only serves the large construction companies who want to cash in on their investments in standard factory houses.